FAFO

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donbosco said:
The social/racial hierarchy established by Spanish colonization still has legs today but it is a big region and in my experience the race part is especially varied from country to country and even within nations. All kinds of historical factors come into play in that figuring...were the indigenous people in a particular place wiped out or kept alive to work? What were the initial contact years like? Has the country seen lengthy progressive periods when civil rights were advanced or has it been a hard elitist clamp down from the get-go? And so on and so on...

This chart does a cursory job in helping one to imagine the colonial beginnings and their legacy...but again, it hardly demonstrates the profound complexity of even the early colonial racial classifications that remain extant in many ways today.

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The fact that during the late colonial period it was possible to actually purchase "certificates of whiteness," [Limpieza de sangre] infused many places with a deeper class-based (i.e., wealth) element to the hierarchy. I think this is one of the more confusing factors looking in from the outside and in particular when viewing the divisions between Latin Americans and their descendants who have moved to the USA.

Like I wrote above...the waters are super complicated.

And then you throw in religion and you've got flat-out mud.
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I knew you would be the one to shed more light on the subject... my wife is also knowledgeable on the issue too. She said perhaps it's more of a caste system issue - or "Classism" more-so than Racism. Or maybe it's a combination of both classism and racism. And it does vary from country to country according to her. (She lived in Panama, Honduras and Mexico and has traveled to almost all countries in Central and South America as well as Mexico and "the islands".)

All I know is my wife's friend from Cuba (looks like he came straight from Madrid, and looks nothing like Cuban baseball player Aroldis Chapman, for example) told her, with a condescending sneer on his face: "Nancy, you speak Spanish just like a Mexican!" The racist/classism undertone in his voice was not lost on anyone.

The chart you shared is consistent with what I've thought all along in terms of hierarchy, and who looks down on whom.

It seems as if; you look like someone from Argentina (Messi) you're considered to be at the top of that chart. If you look like you are a native, indigenous Guatemalan you're at the bottom. If you look like Roberto Clemente, you're somewhere in between.
 
duluoz said:
The worst representatives are the loudest and are aggressively persecuting non-believers and “nonconformists.” So they dominate the conversation, clearly. That’s not our choice, it was forced on us.

If the better representatives of these religions would rise up against those clowns, then we could have the more pleasant and idyllic exchanges you’re alluding to. Where are their voices? Why aren’t they winning followers over to a more tolerant worldview? Because until then, those conversations you’re referring to don’t amount to much, unfortunately. It’s rearranging deck chairs on the titanic.
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You can usually find these voices within the Episcopal Church (for one example)... but the very nature of those who try to walk the earth in a "Christ-like" manner are going to be the "meek and mild" sort. Kind of like how the carpenter from Nazareth did, turning the other cheek and all of that. If you expect Mother Teresa to get up in Marjorie T-Green's face, you'll be disappointed.

What you want to see is the guy who turned the tables over on the money changers... but as it is - that sort of reaction just isn't found in many of the meek and mild followers.

Those other loud voices we hear coming from MAGA church-goers seem to win out versus the more Christ-like folks.
 
Old Poli Sci texts once deemed Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile broadly as the Neo-Europes of Spanish Latin America while Guatemala, Peru, Ecuador, Bolivia, and Paraguay as Neo-Indigenous. Neo-Mestizo nations tend to be Mexico (though they have been slotted into the Neo-Indigenous category on occasion), Colombia, Costa Rica, Honduras, El Salvador, and Panama. The Neo-Africa nations are mostly in the Caribbean (where so many millions and millions of enslaved Africans were taken). Some countries of course have regions that would fit other categories...even down to provinces or cities.
 
TarSpiel said:
I really don't know. I think in earlier religions, like Hinduism and early Judaism and Greek religion, the afterlife was just a shadowy place (Yam, Sheol, Hades) that everyone went to regardless if you were good or bad. I think early indigenous traditions had a sort of view of an underworld or afterlife too, especially the Australian aborigines. But none of those had a "hell" as a counterpart, they weren't attached to morals or beliefs.

The attachment to morals or beliefs came during the Axial age (500 BC), when Hinduism, Buddhism, Judaism, Zoroastrian and Greek traditions all began to conceive of *two* afterlives, one of the good guys and one for the bad guys. And of course both Christainity and Islam, since they came later, inherited that view.

But I don't think there's any intrinsic connection between belief in a Creator and hope for an afterlife. Lots of Jews throughout history have not believed in an afterlife, and yet they still worship the Creator.
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My understanding is that many (most ? ) Jews believe in an after life ( olam ha-ba ) but that good deeds in the here and now are what is most important.

And although Hindus don't believe in an after life per se but rather a continuous life ( samsara ) they join the other major religions that reject the notion that non-existence is what follows death.

As always, I learn a bit more from your posts. Thank you, kind sir :)
 
Centerpiece said:
The folks descended from Spain directly feel they are superior. Any indigenous peoples who were conquered by Spain, or any African peoples who were enslaved and brought to Spain-dominated territories are definitely looked down upon by the "Euro-Hispanics".
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These days, my classes are very racially, religiously, and ideologically diverse. (And since I teach at a community college, they're small, and classroom is the main focus of my job). We're really having 2nd generation conversations about a bunch of stuff nowadays, and racism is one of the biggies.

LIstening to hispanic Mexicans talk about how they always grew up hating Central Americans (and vice versa), sparks a Punjabi to talk about colorism in India against the Dravidians of Tamil Nadu, which leads a black kid to talk about failing the paper bag test. It's crazy, and very interesting. We can also start talking about the vicious hatred English and German whites had against Irish and Italian ones. It's a super interesting conversation, and none of the kids really get upset by it, realizing that all these tendencies and experiences, good ones and bad ones, exist in all of us, as part of the basic fabric of the human experience.
 
heelinhell said:
My understanding is that many (most ? ) Jews believe in an after life ( olam ha-ba ) but that good deeds in the here and now are what is most important.
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I think that's probably true, but I don't remember ever hearing that it was any kind of requirement for group membership.
 
My first experience with divisions among Latinos was when I moved to in California, and workers in our distribution center were divided into Mexicans and Salvadorans who hated each other. They simply couldn’t or wouldn’t work with each other. They had sort of self-selected so the Mexicans worked in shipping and picking orders while the Salvadorans had congregated in packaging. There was a Nicaraguan woman in customer service who strongly felt she was above both of them.
 
farce© said:
My first experience with divisions among Latinos was when I moved to in California, and workers in our distribution center were divided into Mexicans and Salvadorans who hated each other. They simply couldn’t or wouldn’t work with each other. They had sort of self-selected so the Mexicans worked in shipping and picking orders while the Salvadorans had congregated in packaging. There was a Nicaraguan woman in customer service who strongly felt she was above both of them.
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About 20 years ago I participated in a study of a chicken processing plant in North Carolina that employed almost solely Guatemalans...but the management knew enough to hire Mexicans to be the managers and Puerto Ricans to manage the Mexicans (partially because those from the PR were perfectly bilingual and could, in turn, most easily communicate with the English-Only speaking higher ups). I also noted during that study that in the local soccer league (and this was 20 years ago when most were new to the US) tended to be divided up by nationality or even former hometown. Lots of the rivalries and conflict tended to surface in those contests on Saturday and Sunday but also old animosities were brought back up.

I remember even longer ago...say, the late 1980s, in Chapel Hill. I was tending bar around town in those days and was known as a guy who could speak Spanish (or at least in those days I thought that I could -- thankfully it has improved since). A CH Policeman that I knew came by where I worked to ask me some questions about a fight that had broken out in, of all places, La Terraza, one night when a Latin American music band had played. The bartenders there said that all seemed fine and the all of a sudden all hell broke loose...I asked around among some of the dishwashers that I knew (many from Mexico and Central America) and was told that some guys had entered the bar and soon realized that some of their old enemies -- from their youth back home -- were there. So the fight didn't really break out "all of a sudden" but had actually started years before.
 
TarSpiel said:
I think that's probably true, but I don't remember ever hearing that it was any kind of requirement for group membership.
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The apostle Paul used the division between the Pharisees (who believed in resurrection) and the Sadducees (who did not) to advantage when brought before the Sanhedrin for inquisition. Like Christianity, Judaism is not homogenous.
 
heelinhell said:
My understanding is that many (most ? ) Jews believe in an after life ( olam ha-ba ) but that good deeds in the here and now are what is most important.
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In my experience, Reform Jews resemble mainline Protestants to the extent that both groups subscribe to a muted post-millenialism: the messiah arrives only after we work to make a suitable world for him. This post-millenialism is muted because Reform Jews and the 27 remaining mainline Protestants don't spend a whole lot of time thinking about messianism. The idea has been thoroughly secularized into the basic maxim to do good.
 
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