Chilean ethnic groups

The official statistics collected by the census consider belonging to indigenous or native peoples, but not identification with other groups outside the standard of Chilean nationality.

Chilean Huasos at the beginning of the centuryXX..

By default, it can be considered in the first instance that the Chilean population is 88.9% non-indigenous, 9.1% Mapuche, 0.7% Aymara and 1% belonging to other indigenous peoples, including the Rapanui, Atacameños, Quechuas, Kollas, Diaguitas, Kawésqar, Yaganes or Yámanas. However, it must be considered that identification with Chileanness is mainly conditioned by cultural and dialectal references, as well as by the customs and habits of each subject. Overall, this has dialogued with the different identity constructions around nationality, including Eurocentric perspectives and the exaltation of miscegenation as instruments of racial differentiation.

Estimates of the Chilean population represent ideas adjusted to unstable and variable elements over time. However, it is possible to recognize patterns between each of them:

• The doctor in Latin American studies at the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México (UNAM), Francisco Lizcano, considers Chile a country mainly criollo in cultural and ancestral terms, although with a strong presence of mestizaje and indigenous peoples.
• Professor Joaquín Bosque Maurel affirmed the existence of a majority criollafrom the presentation of the Spanish professor Eugenio García Zarza on migrations in Ibero-America.
• The anthropologist and Spanish professor Claudio Esteva Fabregat, of the University of Barcelona, considered in 1981 that in northern Chile a predominant mestizaje balanced while in the rest of the country the mestizaje It is overwhelmingly Hispanic.
• On the other hand, Chilean historian Gabriel Salazar portrays a fundamental disparity between criollos and mestizosin which territorial inequality prevails and is the cause of systemic invisibility. Although it does not define majority or minorities, it considers the village as an important mass of people seeking to rehabit the historically denied spaces.

• According to the report on Chile made by the Latin Barometer Corporation in 2020 and, based on a self-perception survey, 52% of the total surveyed declared to be white, 26% mestizo6% indigenous, 1% mulatto, 2% Other and 14% did not know or did not respond to the question What race/ethnicity do you consider to belong to?

It can be deduced that the Chilean population is the product of a gradual succession of inter-ethnic exchanges between two main actors: the Mediterranean settler of Spanish origin and the native indigenous of the territories that today correspond to modern Chile.

Indigenous or native peoples

Mapuche Man of Traiguén, at the end of the centuryXIX.

Before the arrival of the Spanish colonists, the area comprising the American Southwest was already inhabited by a multitude of peoples with diverse origins and cultures, who are grouped indistinctly as indigenous peoples or original and that, despite the disappearance of a large part of its population during the colonization process —determined by pandemics, war and cultural dispossession—, they still inhabit the length and breadth of the regions from the country. It should be said that they also make up, to a large extent, the ancestral origin of a significant number of Chileans.

According to the 2012 census, the number of people who declared they felt they belonged to an indigenous or native people rose to 11.1% of the total population, with a significant prevalence of the Mapuche ethnic group within the counts at the national level. national.

During the last three decades, since the 1992 census, it has been possible to collect statistically relevant information regarding the indigenous population within the context of existence of the Republic of Chile. Prior to this, the data may be affected by inaccuracies or be inadequate to establish population comparisons and real statistics, since the census experiences during the colony counted indigenous people within their particular communities, but not inserted within a nation-state system as at present. Likewise, it is highly probable that in certain historical periods self-determination as an indigenous subject was colored by sympathy or shame, as the case may be. For this reason, a notable difference can be verified with the results of the 2002 census, in which that only 4.6% of the population declared to be indigenous, which compromises determining sociopolitical variables in the processes of ethnic identification. On the other hand, the lack of official statistics has an impact on the counts of native speakers of each indigenous language, therefore, the estimates in this regard are unofficial in nature and tend to show large variations between them. Only in the case of the Mapuzungun language, it is presumed that there are between 140,000 and 400,000 speakers.

As previously mentioned, several pre-Columbian indigenous cultures disappeared in Chilean territory for different reasons, the main ones being acculturation and syncretism that produced miscegenation, such as the various pandemics and wars that affected native populations. Later in the 20th century, the expansion of the Chilean state and republican colonialism pushed rationalized extermination programs against the ancient Aónikenk populations, Selknam, Kawésqar and Yagán in the far south of the country.

Spanish colonization

Chilean peasants from the central area.

The arrival of Pedro de Valdivia and the foundation of Santiago in 1541 marks the beginning of the colonial course in the central zone of Chile and that, with the passage of time, will lead to the consolidation of the Chilean cultural standard from the birth of the huasa culture and the traditions around the permanent settlements. These communal organizations achieved institutional stability around the councils, which helped to specify a governing principle capable of offering governance to the incipient towns —consisting mainly of Castilians, Navarrese, Andalusians and Extremadurans—, based on relatively balanced political relations. Despite To this end, outside the urban circuits and ranches, what is understood as a process of miscegenation took place, in which a new subject appears as an otherness opposed to colonial regulations, derived from encounters between settlers and indigenous, but also of renunciation and dispossession. In other words, indigenous people and children of indigenous people acculturated in favor of the Spanish canon, socialized as low people, vagabonds and nomads.

Census registrations during the colony were few and limited. There is a record of the first one carried out between the years 1777 and 1778, from the Maule River to the border with the Atacama Desert, including the province of Cuyo then belonging to the General Captaincy of Chile. A total of 259,646 individuals could be counted, of which 190,919 whites, 20,651 mestizos, 22,568 Indians and 25,508 blacks.

However, leaving aside the narrative importance of these data, it is not prudent to trust them with absolute validity in terms of population representativeness and methodological reliability, due to the limitations of the time as well as the scope of the colonial order over the populations who inhabited the territories. Nor is it known for sure what the classification criteria were and under what conditions a subject belonged to one category or another. What it is possible to know according to the historical literature is that during the XVIII century they were grouped as Spanish to all those who, broadly speaking, saw themselves and behaved as such, adding a category more or less close to what is known today as nationality. Even taking this into account, the non-colonial communities made up significant numbers, which could have been partially higher depending on the free indigenous people not subordinated by the encomienda, among other possibilities.

On the other hand, the cultural hegemony of the settlers in the early conformation of Chilean society is a preponderant factor because, although many elements are absorbed from the native indigenous cultures, it is not enough to early configure a normativity of character mestizo, as occurred in colonial processes in other Spanish-American countries, revealing the problematic situation of acute initial inequality that further advanced with the independence of Chile at the beginning of the century XIX.

European immigration

German colonies in the province of Aysén in 1951.

The nickname immigrant appears according to the arrival of non-Hispanic Europeans at the beginning of the XIX century during the first republican decades of Chile, in which it was consolidated economically and politically as an autonomous entity. The modernizing spirit characteristic of the time led to the implementation of repopulation policies in specific regions of the country, accompanied by beliefs that saw in the European a "spirit of order and work". This determined the income of families from Germany, Austria, the United Kingdom and Ireland, Croatia, France, the Netherlands, Italy and Switzerland.

In the 1850s the Chilean state under the government of Manuel Bulnes sponsored the immigration of Germans, Austrians, Swiss and French in order to colonize the southern regions of the country, especially Valdivia and Llanquihue for their agricultural and livestock potential. In 1861 there were already 263 German families in the area, which together made a total of 1,375 people.

In the period between 1883 and 1890, approximately 7,000 European settlers settled in the vicinity of the southern zone, supported by a strong state presence that actively cooperated in the occupation of territories. Immigration of European origin was It can be conceived within a framework of territorial colonization promoted by a series of laws that made it possible, as well as institutionalized efforts, verifiable with the opening in 1872 of the General Immigration Office or the creation in 1889 of the Land and Colonization Service.

State commitments to immigration, however, must be understood as the materialization of a modernizing project. Although affected by contradictions that, on occasions, had an impact on the non-achievement of the initially proposed objectives, on the violent relocation and even extermination of indigenous communities that also inhabited the colonized territories and on the low productivity of the settlers.

During the 1930s and as a result of the aftermath left by the Spanish Civil War, a number of 2,200 Spaniards disembarked from Winnipeg in the city of Valparaíso. A French ship that was provided to the refugees thanks to the management of Pablo Neruda, special consul for Spanish immigration, appointed in Paris by President Pedro Aguirre Cerda in 1939.

Asian immigration

The arrival of immigrants from Asia dates back a long time. Beginning in the year 1850, people of Chinese origin arrived in Tarapacá to work in the Peruvian guanos and later, with the Chilean annexation of the Norte Grande, as port and nitrate workers. Working and living conditions went from semi-slavery during the Peruvian administration to salaried contractual dependence after the Chilean annexation. According to data collected from official statistics, Chinese immigration in the 19th and 20th centuries reached its highest point on year 1920 with a total of 1,335 individuals, the overwhelming majority of them male. According to the INE, the number of habitual Chinese residents amounted to 13,405 people in 2018.

The Japanese converged in modest numbers towards Chile, mostly with the purpose of settling in the nitrate exploitation areas. Japanese transport ships had helped move Chinese immigrants, setting a baseline for future relations with Japan. It is estimated that in 1920 there were around 500 Japanese living in the country scattered from north to south.

American Immigration

Since 1990 and at the beginning of the XXI century, due to political stability and socioeconomic improvement in Chile, it has been the attraction of a significant number of immigrants from various Latin American countries, which represented, at the end of 2019, approximately 1,500,000 people, corresponding to 8% of the population residing in Chilean territory, this without counting their offspring born in Chile, for the purposes of ius soli. Their main origins, and nationalities of origin, correspond to: 455,494 Venezuelans, 235,165 Peruvians, 185,865 Haitians, 161,153 Colombians, 120,103 Bolivians, 79,474 Argentines, 41,403 Ecuadorians, 20,080 Dominicans, 19,9160 Brazilians5. Cubans and 10,380 Mexicans.

This has prompted a change in the physiognomy of certain communes of the country where their number is concentrated. In communes such as Santiago Centro and Independencia, one in three residents is a Latin American foreigner (28% and 31% of the population of these communes, respectively). Other Greater Santiago communes with high numbers of immigrants are Estación Central (17%) and Recoleta (16%). In the northern regions of the country, since they are the main national economic activity, a high number of this type of immigrants has also been found. For example, in the Antofagasta region, 17.3% of the population is foreign from Latin America, with communes such as Ollagüe (31%), Mejillones (16%), Sierra Gorda (16%) and Antofagasta (11%), with high percentages of Latin American immigrants, mainly Bolivians, Colombians and Peruvians.