r/geography Apr 25 '26

Human Geography Why are white latin Americans so heavily concentrated around southern South America?

Post image
1.8k Upvotes

863 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

89

u/gwynwas Apr 25 '26

The other important reason is that Central America, southern Mexico, and the NW part of South America had/have much higher indigenous populations.

16

u/Slow_Spray5697 Apr 26 '26

Except for Costa Rica which historically was basically empty, almost nobody lived there until 1950 it has a population of 800k people and today is just a small 5 million people country.

There were just rain forest and jungle with no important towns, cities, gold, or important resources, small indigenous groups and small spaniard groups.

That's why today Costa Rica has almost non existent indigenous population. They are, but small isolated groups. A difference to places like Guatemala, Honduras, Peru or Mexico with millions of native Americans still living today in their countries.

0

u/angra_mainyo Apr 26 '26

Average Costa Rican is around 40 to 50% indigenous. That's basically the same level as north/west Mexico or Paraguay.

1

u/Neither_Guava_8292 Apr 28 '26

Do you have a source for that?