That claim is thrown around occasionally, but it's just not true. There are plenty of racial problems in Latin America, historically speaking. Now, it's important to remember at the beginning of the discussion that Latin America is a huge place, with many different countries and people, so the exact racial difficulties can vary from place to place.

It is true that there was a lot of racial mixing in Latin America pretty much from day one. When the Spaniards first started colonizing the New World they rarely brought women with them and there were many Spanish/Native children born in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. As the colonial age progressed and the colonial powers shifted from Native labor to African labor the situation changed somewhat. Mixed race children were still very common (and in fact were fairly common in the US as well), and the French and Spanish both had very specific categories for racial mixing. In French colonies there is the distinction of mulattoes, quadroons, and even octoroons. Similar naming practices applied in Spanish colonies as well. In theory this allowed members of society to judge the capacities and legal rights of individuals on a very fine tuned level, though in reality this was rarely the case.

The situation is complicated even more by the large presence of free people of color in both French and Spanish colonies. It was entirely possible that an African might not be a slave, and in fact might well have held slaves himself.

After the Latin American revolutions in the beginning of the nineteenth century, most Latin American countries banned slavery, but this certainly did not put an end to racial issues. In most Latin American countries whiteness was associated with class. This led to some interesting situation where a dark skinned person was perceived as less dark as they became wealthier.

Additionally, it might be worth noting that the US incursions into Latin America often brought a racist ideology with them. Though the degree to which this ideology was internalized in Latin American countries is questionable, the fact remains that in area like Haiti and in Panama, American businessmen and soldiers contributed to a racist environment.

In the twentieth century racial problems persist in Latin America, even in places where you do not think to look for it. An excellent example is Uruguay, which has a small African-American population. In Uruguay African Americans have faced many of the same problems that they have in other parts of the hemisphere. There however, the problems were not legal, such as in the Jim Crow South, but cultural and economic, with African Americans being over represented in the lowest economic classes. There the Candombe, a traditional African dance and celebration is very popular, but African Americans have been cut out of their own traditions in many ways, as Candombe groups were increasingly white folk in black face, complete with Jezebel and Mammy stereotypes.

In some areas the racial problems are not with African Americans, but with the surviving Native populations. Isolated Native villages in Chile, for instance, have struggled for the last century with maintaining their traditional holdings and lifestyles in the face of increasing corporate power. There is an excellent book about Chilean Natives called Courage Tastes of Blood that goes into detail about the problems they have faced in the mid twentieth century, especially in light of the short lived presidency of Salvadore Allende and the subsequent coup.

Modern Cuba provides another example of the underhanded ways that racial problems persist. Though the official stance of hte Cuban government is that racism does not exist in Cuba, the fact is that there too dark skinned Cubans face significantly more trials than light skinned Cubans. I had the pleasure of hearing Roberto Zurbano speak a few years ago and he addressed this very problem. He also wrote this article for the New York Times discussing the racial problems in Cuba.

The upshot of all this is that while formal segregation did not exist in much of Latin America, racial problems persisted and continue to persist. Frequently the problems were cultural and economic, as former slaves were rarely able to break into what we would consider the upper and middle classes and such difficulties tend to persist down the generations. It would be a mistake to say that race was less important in Latin America than it has been in the United States, even if racial understandings and prejudices have evolved in different ways.

Selected Reading: Mallon, Courage Tastes of Blood, Andrews, Blackness in the White Nation, Earle, The Body of the Conquistador, Renda, Taking Haiti, Greene, The Canal Builders.