Race in colonial Latin America was different from race in the United States of America. In colonial Latin America “race” was measured in terms of appearance, rather than in terms of “ancestry”; whereas it was the opposite in the U.S.A. Peter Winn states, “Andean people have straight hair, so to avoid being ‘Indian’ with straight hair, they would go to a beauty parlor to get a perm.” In Bolivia almost everyone had some kind of Indian ancestry, but they wanted to ignore this and so they did everything in their power to look less “Indian.” On the other hand, in Brazil, a sociologist named Gilberto Freyre established the theory of “racial democracy,” in his book, published in 1933, called Casa-Grande & Senzala. The term which became a symbol of
