# Spaniards conquering Mexico vs Europeans conquering the US territories **URL:** \ **Category:** Factual Questions\ **Created:** [December 18, 2010, 8:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spaniards-conquering-mexico-vs-europeans-conquering-the-us-territories/564650 "2010-12-18T20:24:37Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 2
**Author:** ![Chefguy](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/chefguy/32/138_2.png) [@Chefguy](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Chefguy)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2010, 6:31pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spaniards-conquering-mexico-vs-europeans-conquering-the-us-territories/564650/21 "2010-12-20T18:31:14Z")
> [@Teacake](#): > > So did Britain, to be fair. > > And, **Chefguy** , the thing about syphilis coming from America: either it didn’t, or there’s something major we don’t know, [apparently](http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-europe-11952322) (skeletons of twins killed in Pompeii eruption show signs of congenital syphilis - I hate it when people just put a link and I have to click it to find out what it is!). Not from America, but from the islands off the southern coast, such as Cuba. As I said, Columbus never actually reached the shores of NA, and in fact never realized that Cuba was an island. The guy wasn’t very bright, by most accounts. I can’t dispute that syphilis was present in Europe, but I don’t believe it was common; his crews and voyages certainly took care of that aspect. ---
**Author:** ![Wendell\_Wagner](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/w/8491ac/32.png) [@Wendell\_Wagner](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Wendell_Wagner)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2010, 3:18am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spaniards-conquering-mexico-vs-europeans-conquering-the-us-territories/564650/22 "2010-12-21T03:18:33Z")
smiling bandit writes: \> TO this day NorthAm is still getting waves of new immigrants. While there was a \> certain amount of intermarriage over time, new immigrants often had no contact \> with AmerIndians. This meant that the AmerIndian-descended population got \> smaller and smaller (at least as a proportion) over time. Things worked out \> differently in Latin America, for a variety of reasons. Latin America is also still getting waves of new immigrants too. Americans tend to underestimate the extent to which other countries are also ethnic melting pots. ---
**Author:** ![MandaJo](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/m/ac91a4/32.png) [@MandaJo](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/MandaJo)\ **Post date:** [December 21, 2010, 1:30pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spaniards-conquering-mexico-vs-europeans-conquering-the-us-territories/564650/23 "2010-12-21T13:30:45Z")
> [@](#): > > Yes and no. There’s a matter of scale. The Spanish bred with everybody. They’d settle somewhere and immediately start humping the local women. The british didn’t, for example, leave India with so many half-ethnic offspring that radically changed the overall ethnic mix. Well, India was vastly more densely populated when they go there AND 90% of the native population didn’t fall over dead within a few generations. The math works out very differently. ---
**Author:** ![Nava](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/n/da6949/32.png) [@Nava](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Nava)\ **Post date:** [December 22, 2010, 11:57am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spaniards-conquering-mexico-vs-europeans-conquering-the-us-territories/564650/24 "2010-12-22T11:57:21Z")
> [@Teacake](#): > > I was talking about the history of random punters turning up in their country. I think we may have had a few more, though (“think”, ok?). Basque, Greeks, Phoenicians, Punics, Romans, several brands of Germanic barbarians (some of them went through and all the way to Africa, others stopped here), Moors (coming from anywhere in the various Muslim empires for 800 years), “Francos” (which may have been from anywhere north of the Pyrenees, again give it some 800 years). It wasn’t so much immigration waves as a continuous current that sometimes changed direction; the biggest break was during the reign of the Goth kings… oh wait… [Previous page](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/spaniards-conquering-mexico-vs-europeans-conquering-the-us-territories/564650.md?page=1)