I never understood this. From what I was taught in history class, masses of native north & south americans died because of European diseases. And for each latin american country, of course there are large african and native descents, but from what I read each country has a massive part of Spanish heritage.
Nowadays, how many humans live between El Paso and Ushuaia? More than half a billion? Yet Spain is only a country of 40m people. How is this possible?
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Keep in mind the Spanish didn’t walk in, guns blazing, and killing everything that moved. Yes, masses of natives died. But the Spanish SOP was to integrate themselves at the top of the existing hierarchies and incorporate them into the Spanish empire, religion and customs that way. In doing so, they’ve mixed with the surviving natives. It’s the Bourbon reforms (EDIT: forgot this) that pushed the local aristocracies away, and only to a point. Tupac Amaru, for instance, was a noble of Inca heritage.
And even then, as others said, the population of Spanish America isn’t really big anyway.
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In the early 16th century both Spain and Portugal send up to the American continents tons of imprisoned men and some free men, in order to estabilish relations with the Native people and thus act as guides and translators for the official, bigger expeditions that were to come. Steel tools and weapons made by Europeans were vastly superior to native tools in hardness and durability. Thus, these early European men were quickly accepted in most tribes and had tons of wives as long as they could supply the tribe with more of these steel tools. It didn’t take long until each tribe had significant amount of mixed race people.
When the 17th century came, most of the European expeditions were short on women and thus many of the men that weren’t part of high nobility either had Native women as wives, making a second generation of 50/50 mixed race people, or took the already pre-existing mixed race women, and made the first generation of people with people with father and grandfather from european descent. As a consequence of high illiteracy levels and poor records of poor and middle-class free people, it didn’t take long until some of these people passed as “white”.
Now notice that are some techniques to understand from where your ancestors came from, regarding the gender. Mitocondrial DNA (mDNA) is exclusively passed through mother to child, and Y cromossome is exclusively passed through father to son. So, by analyzing the genes in mDNA and Y-cromosome, it can be known which was the genetic contribution and from where it came from. And by analyzing this in many people, scientists have found that there is very little european maternal DNA in black/mixed/indian populations in the American continents and a significantly high amount of paternal DNA in those.
It is only on the 19th and early 20th century that ships with both adult women and men, as well as children sometimes, will come to the American continents. However, as land was extense and most of immigrant ships came with some sort of family tools as well as a higher literacy rate (most immigrants were not literate but most families had someone who was), better agricultural techniques could be done and these immigrants thrived, having higher reproduction rates than the Natives.
TL;DR: European men had children with Native and African women from 16th to 19th century with a high rate of success, estabilishing a mixed race population. 19th and early 20th century had immigrants having 10+ children per family.
Wow, who knew the secret to rapid population growth was just giving away land? Time to try this in my neighborhood.
There’s a few factors.
The big one is war. Spain wasn’t Spain. Spain was The Crown of Castille. At the time of North American colonization the Spanish had just won a major war uniting Castille, Andorra, Aragon (Barcelona), and the Kingdom of Sicily under one banner. This made the crown of Castille one of the strongest in Europe and one of the few countries that didn’t have a war during this period.
Next up they established the first American colony, Santo Domingo (Hispanoles or modern day Haiti/Dominican Republic). A lot of money was invested into fortifying it against the locals which allowed for a jump point for all Europeans to exploit the Americas and became a centre for all trade.
Finally, the groups that the Spanish went to war with and ended up conquering were all at war with each other. By the first time meeting the Aztecs they just finished a war. So that meant that a lot of their procreation aged women were le single. Now take the number two (the number of parents a person has) and bring it to the power of how many generations have passed, let’s say 20. That’s how many ancestors you have, 1,048,576. That’s a big number. And each of these people had brothers and sisters and might have intertwined with other families.. and before long you find out that most of Europe can trace their heritage from Charlemagne. It means that it doesn’t take a lot of effort to trace your heritage to Spain.
Now the other part, why are there so many people in Latin America and so few in Spain? Well the short answer is… Spain sucks. Latin America was colonized and given structure without a real power struggle until the early 19th century. Slaves were actively being imported and the life of the colony favored larger families. When revolutions spread across Latin America a lot of them ended up being a lot more bloodless
And that wasn’t the case of Spain. Much of the history of Europe is based around the names Bourbon and Habsburgs. The Habsburgs took over Spain and Austria in the 17th century they instituted mercantilism and began getting involved in trade wars with France and Sweden. This resulted in severely reduced prosperity and a lot of famine.
The French Bourbon Family take over Spain in the 18th century after engaging in a bloody succession war. Since France and Spain border they opt to not have any defenses on their borders. And then in the 19th century Napoleon comes to power after a revolution. Spain gets its army decimated by France (TWICE) and just has problems with loyalties. Napoleon installs his brother as king and the population engage in a bloody revolution against Napoleon.
And basically since then ,Spain has been in revolt. Spain stabilized slightly after WW2 and since then it’s population has doubled.
Spain ruled as an imperial power, but that doesn’t mean all the people who lived there were from Spain, although Spanish became the primary language of governance in most of the empire. People immigrated from Spain but also many countries of Europe including from present day Italy and Germany. They also brought slaves from Africa. Not all the indigenous peoples died out, there are huge portions of many countries with indigenous or mixed demographics.
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