Behind the Numbers: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
Behind the Numbers: Race and Ethnicity in Latin America
BY Judith A. Morrison
From issue: ,
Understanding the needs of Afro-descendant and Indigenous peoples starts with asking the right questions.
Throughout Latin America, race and ethnicity continue to be among the most important determinants of access to opportunity and economic advancement. Indigenous and Afro-descendant peoples in Latin America represent 40 percent of the total population—a sizeable share—yet they remain a disproportionate segment of the poorest of the poor. While a priority for social inclusion measures, they have not seen the sharp reductions in poverty experienced by the overall population and are still more likely than the general population to live in extreme poverty. In countries such as Bolivia, Guatemala, Honduras, Nicaragua, Panama, and Paraguay, for example, over 60 percent of Indigenous peoples and Afro-descendants are poor. Americas Quarterly’s Social Inclusion Index is especially useful in highlighting these discrepancies.
In Panama, for example, 90 percent of Indigenous peoples live below the poverty line and 69.5 percent live in extreme poverty, compared to just 30 percent of the non-Indigenous population. In Peru, 34 percent of Afro-descendants live below the poverty line, compared to only 23 percent of mestizos. In Brazil, per capita monthly incomes for Brazilians of European descent are more than double those of Afro-descendants. Similar poverty and income gaps can be found in countries throughout the region.
Access to Education and Employment
Indicators related to education, health, labor markets, and access to basic infrastructure depict a similar phenomenon throughout the region. Access to labor markets and economic opportunities represent a particularly sticky problem for both Afro-descendant and Indigenous populations. Despite some advances, there continue to be serious hurdles limiting Afro-descendants’ access to primary and secondary education in countries such as Colombia, Costa Rica and Panama. There are also serious concerns related to gaps in quality and access to higher education. For example, Afro-descendants obtain a university degree at half the rate of the national average in Colombia and Costa Rica, despite relative parity in primary and secondary education attainment rates.
But the gaps persist beyond education. A 2010 Ethos Institute study of 105 large businesses in Brazil found that only 5.3 percent of executives were Afro-descendants—a mere 0.5 percent were women—and that only 28 percent of those businesses had policies in place to improve Afro-descendant representation in leadership positions. Just 3 percent of the corporations studied had specific goals related to increasing the number of Afro-descendant executives. In Panama, formal sector labor market participation of Indigenous peoples is more than 30 percentage points lower than that of the non-Indigenous population. And in Colombia, a small survey of the labor market suggests that being an Afro-descendant applicant lowers the chance of receiving an initial contact for an interview by approximately 8 percent, while being white increases it by 3 percent.
More:
http://www.americasquarterly.org/content/behind-numbers-race-and-ethnicity-latin-america
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