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Originally posted by Doc
Thanks for that information! I didn't know anything about that "castas" system. Correct me if I'm wrong, but it sounds like the terms in both cultures stem from racist backgrounds, but the difference is that the US trashed it and did away with the word, while your culture threw away all of the negative ideology behind the word and kept it as a word to just describe people (like Black or White).[/CENTER]
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You're right about that. In Mexico (I don't about other Latin American countries), those words existed to describe a system that had racist backgrounds. However, in Mexico, race is nowadays a very vague word. It's not used within our society. When people talk about it, we talk about issues abroad, like those in the US for example. In Mexico, we're all Mexicans. There's no such thing as African-Mexican, Asian-Mexican, white Mexican, etc. You'll find those terms on the web but mainly in English articles. Some words stuck around like "mulato/mulata", but now they're used to describe exotic people or exotic skin. It's not used in normal conversations because, as I said, we never talk about race. You will find mulato(a) in Spanish literature to describe someone's skin, and it's usually used describing beauty. Don't get it twisted though, there's a lot of racism in Mexico. Not from our governments explicitly trying to classify us and marginalize us, but there's a lot of internalized racism. Most people in power are of lighter skin, the high class is predominantly white, and the poor ones are mostly "morenos" or indigenous people. The middle-class is all over the place.
