How do Latin Americans look

Originally posted by Jams     Lets not exaggerate the darkness of the Brits. Anything is relative,but there are plenty blonde Brits, by your standard of blond.

Originally posted by SerHumano   Pinguin doesn't refer to the abilitty to tan that many white people can have, but the natural skin tone of a blonde/fair haired  person from northern europe is 99% of times lighter than of a black/darkbrown haired brown eyed southern euro or non european which is often at least olive.  So we can't call white someone who isn't as simple as that.

Originally posted by Carcharodon   This is a computer generated vision of how average North American people would maybe look in the future.   A larger image of this Time cover (The New Face of America Nov 18 1993) can be seen here:   http://www.coverbrowser.com/covers/time/74#i3696

A extra picture of authentic Caribs of Dominica. please open the picture

Edited by pinguin - 17-May-2009 at 19:08

Several items;  First, a couple of posts back, Mixcoatl posted this: "You do like Puerto Ricans? Then obviously they all have taíno blood running through their veins and their customs are authentically Amerindian."  I assume it was addressed to Pinguino, and I assume was a rhetorical question. Nevertheless, I should like to address it:

One of the characteristics of Puertorrican nationalism is the view that Puertorricans are a hybrid people, descended from Tainos, Spaniards, and African slaves. As a theoretical concept, it is as useful as "nos ancestres, les gaulois was to the development of French nationalism in the late 19th Century. The original concept dates back to a 19th Century romantic epic poem by Eugenio Maria de Hostos entitled "la Peregrinacion de Bayoan", which appealed to the belief that all Puertorricans were descended from Tainos. This reinforced de Hostos' vision of an "Antillean union" comprising Puerto RIco the Dominical Republic, and Cuba. De Hostos remains a giant on the list of "fathers of the nation", and later, the idea that Blacks also contributed to the Puertorrican mix also gained wide acceptance, particularly after the rise of Pedro Albizu Campos, a mulatto from Ponce who became in giant in the Nationalist Party in the 1930s. Actual Nationalist Party membership was always miniscule, but its ideas struck a strong chord among the majority of the islands intellectual class.  And thus the vision of Puertorricans as a unique blend of three races entered the island's subconscious, to the point that it was taught in the public schools.

It is not an erroneous idea per se, but as with all such constructs, it is overly simplistic. How pervasive it is was demonstrated a few years ago when a team from the University of Puerto Rico sought to take a genetic sampling of specific islands areas to discover the amount of "Taino" blood in the gene pool. The specific areas selected was a mountainous region between Yauco, Mayaguez, and Lares, two of which retained the name "La Indiera de ..." in the local geography. Persons selected were chosen based upon physical characteristics held to be generally common to native Americans. Of the entire carefully screened pool, only 6% showed a gene common to native Americans. In other words, the majority of persons who looked "Indian" were not.

Within days, on Island talk shows, and blog sites, those who favored a strong indigenous element within the Puertorrican genetic base were grandly proclaiming that "more than 30% of all Puertorricans had Taino blood." It got to the point that the authors of the study came out to emphasize that they had said no such thing. Little matter.

The first flaw I saw in the study was it's simplistic assumption that any Indian chromozomes were automatically "Taino". There was never a people in the Caribbean who called themselves "Taino". Rather niTaino was a word for one of the four classes of persons who constituted their ethnic group. The others were Priests, Chiefs, and Slaves. The word was applied to the people as a whole by later Spaniards. Those who studied Puertorrican history (a minority on the island) would note that by the 1540s, the "Tainos" no longer existed on the island, which was underpopulated to the point that the governor declared it a capital offense for any military age male attempt to leave the island to emigrate to Peru.  Yet "Indians" show up on the census as late as the late 1700s. Therefore Tainos must have survived. Perhaps. But Puerto Rico was also the recipient of native American slaves. The Spanish in Mexico shipped Indian slaves to Cuba, Hispaniola, and Puerto Rico for labor. Generally, these were prisoners taken in varying rebellions against the crown, or who had committed some other serious offense. The nacsent Americans also shipped out the prisoners from King Phillips War to the "Spanish Indies". Unsurprisingly, there is even a family from Yabucoa whose last name is "Moctezuma". So, the fact that there is some "Indian" genetic base in Puerto Rico hardly constitutes evidence that the "Tainos" survived. Moreover, during the Latin American wars of independence, many refugees from modern day Colombia, Veneuela, Mexico, and Peru were allowed to resettle in Puerto Rico and Cuba. Indeed, the town of Lajas, in southwest Puerto Rico, was largely settled by such families from Venezuela. Many of these families were Mestizo, and thus brought an even larger slice of the native American gene pool in with them. They arrived early in the century that Puerto Rico was to see its population grow exponentially. The Carlist Wars in Spain sent waves of Spanish immigrants into the Caribbean. The French Wars sent a wave of Corsicans across the Atlantic. Then, with Italy's wars of reunification, further waves arrived. At one time, it was claimed that fully one third of all Puertorrican names are Italian in origin. Possibly true, but the real question is did its original owner enter Puerto Rico as a Spanish soldier (southern Italy was for a long time governed by the Hapsburgs, i.e., Carlos V, Felipe II, etc.), as an Italian sailor in the service of Spain, as an Italian immigrant, or as a Corsican? My point here is that "Spaniard - Black - Taina" vision of Puerto Rico's ethnic mix is overly simplistic and seriously flawed. It's most obvious proof? Not a single Puertorrican Historian can even translate the word "Boriquen" into Spanish. We know it as the name of the Island. We even know that the Carib word for Puerto Rico was "Obao Moin", or "Island of Blood". But no one ever recorded what Boriquen meant in Spanish. That, of course, has not stopped the Islands pseudo-historians from inventing fanciful translations and putting them in their web sites. Not has it prevented the particularly imaginative from creating Taino theme parks, with various mystic new age religious ceremonies allegedly handed down orally from generation to generation in their family. But, hey at least we did get "Turey el Taino" in the sunday comic strips.

For what it's worth.

Originally posted by pinguin   With respect to the Tainos, at least in Cuba there is written references to the extinction by intermarriage there. So, the idea that Tainos become extinct should be revised, particularly when genetics shows high level of Amerinian genetics not only in Puerto Rico, but also in Cuba and Dominican Republic. Besides, how many natives wives and children accompanied the conquistadors to Mexico? Archeological evidence show there were many.

Pebbles, The earliest wave of Cuban immigrants to arrive in the United States were fleeing the Ten Years War, related to Spanish suppression of the Cuban war for Independence. Many of those went to New York. I believe Tampa's "Ybor City" was founded when the second wave arrived in the 1890s. Castro's revolution would have produced the third wave. Of course, Cuban immigration to the U.S. was not limited to these "waves". Desi Arnaz, just to cite an example, was already well established in the U.S. when Fidel came to power. 

Pinguino, How does 6% of a very small population base, selected for their physical appearance to Indians, living high in the mountains in what was historically an "Indian" area, justify your assertion that "genetics shows high level of Amerinian genetics not only in Puerto Rico, but also in Cuba and Dominican Republic."?

Where is this study?  Would you please provide a link? (If I missed it, I apologize)

And again, when you check the history, while there may be a respectable percentage of Amerindian genes among the Puertorrican population at large, it is erroneous to presume that it is "Taino". Given Puerto Rico's history, those genes stand a higher chance of having their origin in Mexico, Yucatan, northern South America, or New England.

Any relations



TO:





Would you like to be my nieghbor!!!

Well, that's very interesting. However, it is nothing new. It is simply the history of Lstin America, and we knew it even before the DNA analysis were in fashion. It is simply obvious that in a culture like ours, mainly Hispanic in language, religion, customs, traditions, etc. (the male part of culture, if you wish), you find so many femenine arts of indigenous origin. Our love for Amerindian textiles, and Amerindian recipees, is easy to explain when you realize most Latinos have an Amerindian woman in theirs family trees.