The general area gets such unity as it possesses from the Latin and Roman Catholic aspect of its culture as contrasted with the Protestant, Anglo-Saxon culture of America north of the Mexican border. This Latin civilization was originally Spanish (in Brazil Portuguese), but since the era of the revolutions which threw off the Spanish yoke, the Spanish influence has become more and more negligible, and locally has been somewhat supplanted by the French, and, to a small extent, by the Italian influence.
Latin America was never colonized at all in the sense that North America was colonized. English settlers with their families came to the New World to found homes, but the early history of Latin America was that of a series of plundering and proselyting expeditions, and such of the adventurers as tarried were usually men without families who had no desire to stay a day longer than was necessary to acquire a fortune and return to Europe. Add to these the military forces who came under compulsion, and the missionaries, administrators, and concessionaires of all kinds and one has the bulk of the early European immigration.
Under these circumstances the number of women who came with their husbands was naturally small, and most of the Europeans took Indian wives, frequently several of them, thus laying the basis for the half-breed population of the present day. In Paraguay, for instance, some of the colonial rulers are said to have had fifty or a hundred native concubines. If every descendant of these matings carries the Spanish name but has married mainly with Indian stock in the ten or fifteen generations since, it is easy to understand that present-day families may bear the names of hidalgos, of whose genetic traits they have virtually none.
The number of European immigrants was never large. During the sixteenth century, a period of active exploitation, the entire movement from Spain to America is thought to have represented only about 1000 or 1500 persons a year. With a high death rate, and the disposition on their part to return as soon as possible, there was no opportunity for the Spaniard to establish the basis of a civilization built upon his own race.
By 1553 foundling half-breeds numbered thousands in Spanish America and the viceroy Mendoza was obliged to establish an orphan school for them. Even at the end of the eighteenth century, when Humboldt visited Mexico City, he remarked that of the European-born Spaniards there, not one-tenth were women. The proportion of women must certainly have been still smaller in the provincial towns and on the frontiers.
So far as the present population goes back to the early days of Spanish dominion, it may be said to be Spanish by name and Indian by blood. The families, which in many Spanish American countries have social prestige because of descent from the conquerors and rulers of the Colonial Period, must therefore attach all importance to the family name, and little or none to the many other lines of descent which have entered into the composition of their present generation.
Honorable exception should be made in almost every one of the Spanish American republics of a small group of Whites that has consistently maintained its racial integrity and upheld intelligent ideals of racial progress, under most difficult conditions. In many of the countries, too, there are groups of far-seeing intellectuals who are working for the adoption of wise immigration policies, presenting sound and constructive measures of eugenic reform, and striving to awaken their fellow countrymen to the fact that a nation's capital is, in the last analysis, biological, and that permanent and satisfactory progress is possible only to a people with a healthy family life.
In many of the Latin American countries the Whites, or those who pass as such (for they have, in most cases, a large proportion of Indian blood) form an oligarchy or ruling caste occupying the higher positions in the political and ecclesiastical worlds. They also constitute the land-owning and professional classes, while commerce and industry are largely in the hands of foreigners or their descendants. In many cases these foreign immigrants marry into the best native families, and thus their children become a part of the ruling caste.
Mexico. The restriction of European immigration into the United States under the National Origins Quota cutting off what had been the principal source of unskilled labor had an unexpected and undesirable effect in encouraging immigration from nearby countries of the Western Hemisphere, which were not under the quota, and particularly from Mexico. Industries accustomed to depend upon cheap, ignorant, and docile workers from Mediterranean or Alpine countries turned to the illiterate Indians on the South as a ready substitute. The stream of arrivals across the border, more illegal than legal, soon brought into the United States more than a million Mexicans. Only the unexpected depression beginning in 1929 stemmed this tide and apparently prevented Mexico from reconquering peacefully, by an immigrant invasion, the territory it had lost by the decision of war in 1848.