Only if you count the 17% who are hispanic as white, otherwise it's 62%. But Hispanic white people will probably stop being viewed as a separate racial groups before that long, as happened with the Irish.
That may be partially true. But this topic gets very murky, very quick.
Spanish are just as white was the rest of the Europeans. It was back about 450 years, when the Spaniards came over to the Americas and made what is called the Hacienda. Just like when the USA had their racial times regarding Africans, the Spanish did so to the natives here. What happened was a mixing between white Spanish and Incans, Aztecs, and Mayan descents. After much institutionalized slavery and racism, mixed with rape and destruction of the culture, we end up with people called "Mestizo", or mixed.
What we think of as Latinos, or Mexicans, or other derogatory words are the result of 450 years of slavery, rape and destruction of their culture.
Unfortunately, what happens is that the Spanish are the whites, and the Indians are the native cultures. Then you end up with Mestizo, which somewhat maps to the word Nigger here in the US. And unlike our incursion with slaves in the US, the Hacienda system lasted for almost a half a millennium.
Mestizo means mixed. And that's what they are treated as. Not good enough to be native, and not 'pure blood'.
> Then you end up with Mestizo, which somewhat maps to the word Nigger here in the US.
This is absolutely false. Mestizo is a normal and accepted term both in the US and throughout latin america. It is not considered an insult anywhere, unlike Mulatto. What else would you call us mixed people?
> Not good enough to be native, and not 'pure blood'.
Again wrong, most racism south of the US border is towards the indigenous. Mestizos see themselves as superior, since we are both european and native. While the aristocracy may look pure european the majority of latin american countries are mestizo and is a big source of pride and identity.
