Latin American nations were deliberately constructed as raceless or new-race projects

Evidence

So race in post-abolition Latin America has factored centrally and more or less self-consciously into the project of nation-building. Nations either were articulated by leading national(ist) intellectuals as “a new race” (Freyre, for example, concerning Brazil, or Vasconcelos’s “La raza cosmica” in the case of Mexico) or as incorporating all members of the population, regardless of race, into the national body. The nation, in this formulation, was to be raceless (as in Jose Marti’s conception in the Cuban case). — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1210