Miscegenation in the context of "Casta"

Mestizo is a term primarily used to denote people of mixed Spanish and Indigenous ancestry in the former Spanish Empire. In certain regions such as Latin America, it may also refer to people who are culturally European, even though their ancestors were Indigenous Americans. The term was used as an ethno-racial exonym for mixed-race castas that evolved during the Spanish Empire. It was a formal label for individuals in official documents, such as censuses, parish registers, Inquisition trials, and others. Priests and royal officials might have classified persons as mestizos, but individuals also used the term in self-identification. With the Bourbon reforms and the independence of the Americas, the caste system disappeared and terms like "mestizo" fell in popularity.

The noun mestizaje, derived from the adjective mestizo, is a term for racial mixing that did not come into usage until the 20th century; it was not a colonial-era term. In the modern era, mestizaje is used by scholars such as Gloria Anzaldúa as a synonym for miscegenation, with positive connotations.

Bandeirantes (Portuguese: [bɐ̃dejˈɾɐ̃tʃis]; lit. 'flag-carriers'; singular: bandeirante) were frontiersmen and explorers in colonial Brazil who, from the early 16th century, participated in inland expeditions to find precious metals and enslave indigenous peoples. They played a major role in expanding Brazil's borders to its approximate modern-day limits, beyond the boundaries demarcated by the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas.

Most bandeirantes hailed from São Paulo, then a small village in the Captaincy of São Vicente from 1534 to 1709 and later the Captaincy of São Paulo from 1720 to 1821. Some bandeirantes were descended from Portuguese colonists who settled in São Paulo, but most were of mameluco descent with both Portuguese and indigenous ancestry. This was due to miscegenation being the norm in colonial Brazilian society, as well as polygamy.

Interracial marriage is a marriage involving spouses who belong to different "races" or racialized ethnicities.

In the past, such marriages were outlawed in certain U.S. states, Nazi Germany and apartheid-era South Africa as miscegenation (Latin: 'mixing types'). The word, now usually considered pejorative, first appeared in Miscegenation: The Theory of the Blending of the Races, Applied to the American White Man and Negro, a hoax anti-abolitionist pamphlet published in 1864. Even in 1960, interracial marriage was forbidden by law in 31 U.S. states.

In the United States, many U.S. states historically had anti-miscegenation laws which prohibited interracial marriage and, in some states, interracial sexual relations. Some of these laws predated the establishment of the United States, and some dated to the later 17th or early 18th century, a century or more after the complete racialization of slavery. Nine states never enacted anti-miscegenation laws, and 25 states had repealed their laws by 1967. In that year, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia that such laws are unconstitutional under the Fourteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution.

The term miscegenation was first used in 1863, during the American Civil War, by journalists to discredit the abolitionist movement by stirring up debate over the prospect of interracial marriage after the abolition of slavery.

The history of immigration to Argentina can be divided into several major stages:

• Spanish colonization between the 16th and 18th century, mostly male, largely assimilated with the natives through a process called miscegenation. Although, not all of the current territory was effectively colonized by the Spaniards. The Chaco region, Eastern Patagonia, the current province of La Pampa, the south zone of Córdoba, and the major part of the current provinces of Buenos Aires, San Luis, and Mendoza were maintained under indigenous dominance—Guaycurúes and Wichís from the Chaco region; Huarpes in the Cuyana and north Neuquino; Ranqueles in the east of Cuyo and north from the Pampean region; Tehuelches and Mapuches in the Pampean and Patagonian regions, and Selknam and Yámanas in de Tierra del Fuego archipelago—which were taken over by the Mapuches; first to the east of Cordillera de los Andes, mixing interracially with the Pehuenches in the middle of the 18th century and continuing until 1830 with the indigenous Pampas and north from Patagonia, which were conquered by the Argentine State after its independence.
• The African population, forcibly introduced from sub-Saharan Africa (mainly of Bantu origin), taken to work as slaves in the colony between the 17th and 19th centuries in great numbers.
• Immigration mostly European and to a lesser extent from Western Asia, including considerable Arab and Jewish currents, produced between the end of the 19th century and the first half of the 20th century (particularly Italians and Spaniards in that quantitative order), promoted by the Constitution of 1852 that prohibited establishing limitations to enter the country to those "strangers that bring through the purpose of working the land, bettering the industries, and introducing and teaching the sciences and the arts"  and order the State to promote "European" immigration, even though after predomination of Mediterranean immigrants, from Eastern Europe and the western Asia. Added to this is the Alberdian precept of "to govern is to populate." These politics were destined to generate a rural social fabric and to finalize the occupation of the Pampean, Patagonian, and Chaco territories, that until the 1880s, were inhabited by diverse indigenous cultures.
• European immigration in the 19th century and early 20th century (mainly Italian and Spanish), focused on colonization and sponsored by the government (sometimes on lands conquered from the native inhabitants by the Conquest of the Desert in the last quarter of the century).
• The immigration from nearby countries (Uruguay, Chile, Brazil, Bolivia, and Paraguay) from the 19th to 21st century. These immigration streams date back to the first agro-pottery civilizations that appeared in Argentine territory.
• From the 1980s and 1990s, the migration currents especially come from Chile, Paraguay, Bolivia, Peru, Asia (particularly from Korea, China, and Japan in this period) and Eastern Europe.
• During the 21st century, a part of Argentine migrants and their descendants returned from Europe and the United States. In addition, immigrants from Bolivia, Paraguay, and Peru; now there are also migratory streams from China, Brazil, Colombia, Cuba, Venezuela, Senegal, Ecuador, Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
• Mostly urban immigration during the era of rapid growth in the late 19th century (from 1880 onwards) and the first half of the 20th century, before and after World War I and also after the Spanish Civil War.

Racial nationalism is an ideology that advocates a racial definition of national identity. Racial nationalism seeks to preserve "racial purity" of a nation through policies such as banning race mixing and the immigration of other races. To create a justification for such policies, racial nationalism often promotes eugenics, and advocates political and legislative solutions based on eugenic and other racial theories.

Nationalism in Northeast Asia (China, Korea and Japan) is partly related to 'racial nationalism' (民族主義), it was influenced by the German ethnonationalist tradition (Völkisch movement and Blood and soil) of the 19th century, which was imported from Japan during the Meiji period. This kind of nationalism is related to the term 民族 similar to the German word Volk.

The term racial hygiene was used to describe an approach to eugenics in the early 20th century, which found its most extensive implementation in Nazi Germany (Nazi eugenics). It was marked by efforts to avoid miscegenation, analogous to an animal breeder seeking purebred animals. This was often motivated by the pseudoscientific belief in the existence of a racial hierarchy and the related fear that "lower races" would "contaminate" a "higher" one. As with most eugenicists at the time, racial hygienists believed that the lack of eugenics would lead to rapid social degeneration, the decline of civilization by the spread of inferior characteristics.

Like eugenics, racial hygiene was largely discredited and abandoned following World War II.