The native americans died off due to the diseases brought over by the europeans. I think multiple plagues hit at once and wiped out 95% of people.
But the southwest is full of latinos whose families have been here for hundreds of years. Why did they survive while the native americans were wiped out by disease?
For that matter, why didn’t the native Africans get wiped out in Africa the way Indians got wiped out in the US when Europe invaded that continent? Or why didn’t Indians get wiped out in India when the british invaded?
I thought caucasians brought the diseases and latinos were native to latin america and the southwest, while indians were native to the northeast, south and midwest area.
Eric is a Paiute Indian. He is a damn good dart player and helped us win multiple championships. Native Americans have not died off. A lot of them around where I live.
Various diseases introduced from Europe and Africa hit over time. It wasn’t something that happened immediately, but that kind of death rate occurred over a period of decades or centuries.
The people of the New World were particularly vulnerable to these diseases because they had been isolated for 15,000+ years and lacked the resistance to them that Europeans and Africans had built up through exposure and genetic adaptations.
Most Latinos are mestizos, descended from both Europeans and Native Americans. They would have inherited the resistance to disease of their European ancestors, and their Native American ancestors would have been those who had more natural resistance and survived the European diseases.
The diseases in question are not European diseases, they are Old World diseases, and many are prevalent throughout Eurasia and Africa. Some tropical diseases like malaria and yellow fever were just as deadly to Europeans who went to Africa as they were to Native Americans when they were introduced to the Americas. But in general, human populations throughout the Old World were resistant to diseases that Native Americans were vulnerable to, and didn’t suffer the same kind of mortality. However, some isolated populations such as those in Pacific Islands also suffered high mortality when exposed to foreign diseases.
Are you serious? Where does Latino as a term even come from? Latin? Which is from Europe. You do know that Hispanic is derived from Spain correct? C’mon now…
As to why? Genetics is a thing. The new world had nowhere near the genetic diversity as the old world. I’m not a anthropologist but I’m pretty sure not too much genetic diversity came over from Siberia.
To be clear, “Latinos” can be any race, including Caucasian, Native American, or sub-Saharan African, or any combination of these (or other races). However, in contrast to settlement patterns in English colonies, much colonization of Spanish colonies in the Americas was by men who came without wives and took Native American women as partners, resulting in a “mestizo” or mixed population, many of whom resemble Native Americans in appearance.
Different Latin American countries had different settlement patterns. Some countries like Costa Rica and Argentina are more heavily Caucasian, others like Guatemala and Bolivia have a stronger indigenous element, while African ancestry is prevalent in the Caribbean region.
And “Latin American” refers to those people from countries speaking a language derived from Latin, in particular Spanish (in many countries) and Portuguese (in Brazil). (Technically it could also refer to French, but no one refers to Quebecois as "Latin Americans.)
Latinos are not necessarily indigenous people. Most Latinos actually are white. Wiki has a long article about white people of Latino origin : White Hispanic and Latino Americans - Wikipedia
And some of them look nothing like a “movie indian”, both because a lot of movie indians were actually Andalusians (specially in spaghetti westerns) and because of mixed ancestry. One of my coworkers in Miami was a blondish Seminole with a lot of Scots-Irish ancestry; three of his parents (divorced, remarried) were members of the tribal council at the time, we’re not talking about someone who merely claimed an Indian princess twenty generations ago.
Animal domestication was probably a factor also. Pre-Columbian Americans didn’t have cattle, pigs, sheep, goats, or horses - and those animals represented a major source of diseases which crossed over to their owners.
As already pointed out, quite a few (though not all) Latinos have Native ancestry.
Also, the “southwest” still has some Native groups that are relatively large, like the Navajo nation and the Hopi. There are also somewhat smaller but still existing groups like the Pima (whose lands extend into both the US and Mexico). So by no means were the Natives in the southwest “wiped out”.
Because they’d had prior exposure to many of the diseases in Europe - as pointed out, they weren’t “European diseases” so much as Old World diseases. In addition, Africa had diseases the Europeans had not been exposed to previously so in that case it was often the Europeans who became sick and/or died, not the Africans.
Here’s a list of just the federal or state recognized tribes, for the USA alone. I don’t see a list for all of the Americas; but it would be much longer. And that’s not a complete list even for the USA, as it’s only the officially recognized tribes.