It is taboo to talk about it, but it does exist. Some people won't acknowledge it.
Go to any latino company and you will find that there is a racial hierarchy among employees, where race is also a predictor of how far you can be promoted.
You can also see it in advertisement, marketing, TV hosts, and all the dumb drama shows on Netflix, and the leadership of fake "latinx" institutions (if you say "latinx" you likely grew up in a mansion).
If you created an unlabeled dataset with the faces of every employee in a latino company, with the same background and dressed in the same way, and then created a ML model to predict their seniority in a company, the most accurate model would be the one that used race and last name as a factor.
What’s interesting is that the Wikipedia page you linked to indicates that it’s unclear that this is a formalized caste system and indicates things have been more fluid:
> Often called the sistema de castas or the sociedad de castas, there was, in fact, no fixed system of classification for individuals, as careful archival research has shown. There was considerable fluidity in society, with the same individuals being identified by different categories simultaneously or over time. Individuals self-identified by particular terms, often to shift their status from one category to another to their advantage. For example, both mestizos and Spaniards were exempt from tribute obligations, but were both equally subject to the Inquisition. Indios, on the other hand, paid tribute yet were exempt from the Inquisition. In certain cases, a mestizo might try to "pass" as an indio to escape the Inquisition. An indio might try to pass as a Mestizo to escape tribute obligations.[18]
> Casta paintings produced largely in 18th-century Mexico have influenced modern understandings of race in Spanish America, a concept which began infiltrating Bourbon Spain from France and Northern Europe during this time. They purport to show a fixed "system" of racial hierarchy which has been disputed by modern academia. These paintings should be evaluated as the production by elites in New Spain for an elite viewership in both Spanish territories and abroad portrayals of mixtures of Spaniards with other ethnicities, some of which have been interpreted as being pejorative in nature or seeking social outrage. They are thus useful for understanding elites and their attitudes toward non-elites, and quite valuable as illustrations of aspects of material culture in the late colonial era.
Not saying it’s impossible as I’m not familiar with the Latino community. And skin color discrimination appears not just in Latino communities. But caste systems pop up everywhere (e.g. America institutionalized it quite well into the socioeconomic structure).
“Casta” seems to be pretty standard Europe-colonized-Americas (no matter which colonial power) racial discrimination; calling it “caste discrimination”, even if the Spanish name literally means “caste”, doesn’t really seem to be helpful, especially in a context that suggests that it is somehow similar to Hindu caste-discrimination and the way that is not covered by generally-existing US anti-discrimination law requiring additional law if it is to be addressed.
Nobody uses it in Latin America. It's as latino as Taco Bell chalupa supreme.
It's just another term from the keep-people-angry industrial complex. No latino I have ever known donates to the "latinx" organizations. So they don't represent the "latinx" voice but rather whoever is funding them.
As silly as Latinx is, I don’t think that’s a valid argument. Nobody uses the term “Italian American” in Italy either. It’s quite specific to Latin-American populations in the USA
As I was saying, it's terminology used by people who had little to no connection to Latin America. People over there hate it and think it is the purest form of cringe.
If you go to an authentic restaurant in the US with latinos in them and call them latinx they will probably either laugh at you or tell you that nobody uses that term, and that they would never identify themselves as latinx.
Latinx is a term used by imperialists to tell their subject population how they should identify themselves. If you use it, you are implicitly identifying yourself as pro-imperialist. Don't be surprised when people react badly to that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Casta
It is taboo to talk about it, but it does exist. Some people won't acknowledge it.
Go to any latino company and you will find that there is a racial hierarchy among employees, where race is also a predictor of how far you can be promoted.
You can also see it in advertisement, marketing, TV hosts, and all the dumb drama shows on Netflix, and the leadership of fake "latinx" institutions (if you say "latinx" you likely grew up in a mansion).
If you created an unlabeled dataset with the faces of every employee in a latino company, with the same background and dressed in the same way, and then created a ML model to predict their seniority in a company, the most accurate model would be the one that used race and last name as a factor.