You often hear that Spanish colonialism was more brutal than British, or that disease is what did for most Native Americans in North America. But the more I read about the plight of Native Americans in the US, the more it seems active extermination played a way bigger role in their decline than is commonly acknowledged by Britain or America.
After all, there is a large percentage of native and mixed race inhabitants in many South American countries. They would have surely faced the same problem of disease resistance.
So what were the differences in the situations? Why are native peoples a large part of modern South America but a tiny minority in North America?
/u/yawarpoma, /u/historianLA, and others have previously answered "Why were Native Americans more completely displaced in British colonial areas than in Spanish/Portuguese colonial areas?
This is an interesting question, but there is a reason for it that doesn't necessarily rely on colonial policies of the relevant governments, and it deserves a fair bit of consideration to be sure. Simply said: Spain colonized already urban regions. I do definitely recommend taking a look at the answers linked by u/voyeur324 as well, but this is my attempt at going through it again.
Summary - The places you're thinking of had preexisting urban cultures and peoples that were a lot harder to override, while Spanish (and Portuguese) colonization in non-urban regions was similarly destructive as that in British and French regions which had lost urbanization a couple centuries prior to colonization. It's a lot harder to eliminate a culture when they're densely packed and have a more cohesive and united identity over larger plots of land.
Full explanation:
So, let's go back. The year is 1100, or thereabouts. Big things are coming, but not foreign things. The Norse have come and settled a tiny bit in the far far north, but it's not working out too great for them, and most of the continent is unaffected. We are seeing Cahokia and the Ancestral Puebloan Civilization getting their game on, the flourishing of two large and urban civilizations north of the Rio Grande. Concurrent to this, we have the later Toltec, while Tiwanaku to the far south has only been gone for a bit. These guys don't matter as much, though, because their collapse is largely political. Mesoamerica and the Andes remain urbanized after these empires as they were during, though new power vacuums lead to changes and new conflicts. The collapse of the Mississippians and the Ancestral Puebloans, however, is not so polite.
No, north of the Rio Grande, things don't go over very well at all. This is not a political collapse, the fall of some great empire, but rather an environmental one. In the later half of the Middle Ages, something drastic happens to the climate across the modern United States that causes irreparable damage to these two centers of urban society and brings their people to flight. While the Puebloans flee their now-arid homeland of Colorado and find their way south to their more present location centered in New Mexico, building a new life in lesser agrarian communities, the Mississippians take the hit hard. The rather cosmopolitan Mississippians (not to say the Puebloans are not diverse, though) fractured into many cultures. Some remained farmers, at the very least. The Muskogean and Caddoan peoples are excellent examples of this, though much like the Puebloans, they were on a smaller scale. However, others, especially in the northern reaches of the Mississippian area, were impacted even worse. It may be a mind-blowing realization to hear that the Plains cultures, most notably the Siouan peoples, are believed to have been originally the dominant northern component of the Mississippian civilization - and, namely, the builders of the great Cahokia. Driven desperate by failing crops and a river that was starting to do more harm than good, they abandoned their homes to Algic peoples and took to a nomadic lifestyle instead. Their society, in essence, collapsed entirely, and had to be rebuilt from scratch in an entirely new place, in an entirely new lifestyle, as a result.
Suffice to say, while the northern parts of the Americas were not always devoid of urbanization, the whole region of the modern United States underwent an apocalyptic collapse and was in a state of post-apocalypse when European diseases first arrived in their number, and for most peoples without ever having met a European.
Imagine that. Society has collapsed entirely, entire cities, nay, entire nations are uprooted and forced into tribes and warbands, populations starve or scatter to the wind, and now a disease ravages the land such as has never been seen before. This is the environment that the Europeans magically stumbled into, and the work of these natives shortly before their collapse helped to shape the continent for when Europeans finally did show up and start settling the region. Just for example, the colony of Plymouth was set up in and on top of a Patuxet village whose inhabitants had all died to disease years earlier - barring one, Tisquantum, Squanto, who returned from captivity in England to find his home village empty.
The preservation of indigenous identity in Latin countries is, in essence, the lack of this in those areas. When Spain arrived, Mesoamerica and the Andes were not only urban, but flourishing. Through whatever graces befell them, these societies had populations in the millions and a much greater deal of ethnic and political cohesion than anywhere to their north. This is, perhaps, the crux of it all.
When Spain came into Mesoamerica, they did quite a bit of damage. Although the vast majority of their army was provided by Tlaxcala alone, with literal hundreds of thousands of soldiers from them, Spain was the ultimate victor and claimed the victory mostly in their own name. They spared the Tlaxcaltec the slaughter and ruining, which today is one of the most densely populated states in Mexico, and is one of the places where the Nahuatl language has maintained a (relatively) strong grip - iirc in the top 5 states in Mexico for Nahuatl speakers. The Tlaxcaltec converted to Catholicism on their own, and became missionaries for Spain among indigenous communities as well. This all to show, by contrast, what happens to those Spain did not like particularly.
So, the bulk of the Spanish conquest was the Aztec Empire, and each was punished for their resistance. Aztec infrastructure, such as aqueducts, was ravaged, drained, or destroyed, the people enslaved en masse, and cities torn down to either feudalize the population or replace them with Spanish colonial centers. While the indigenous peoples were affected by imported disease such as smallpox, the natives survived this and gained their immunity from the exposure. However, it was followed by outbreaks of Cocoliztli, an indigenous disease seemingly birthed by the poor living conditions imposed and wholesale destruction of indigenous sanitation and water-supplying infrastructure by the Spanish authorities. Even with all this though, indigenous culture was able to keep hold on some level, and mixing was allowed to happen, because even with all the devastation, more cohesive and populous ethnic groups than would be found northwards meant any intermarriage was likely to involve a properly sizable community, while preexisting urbanization meant that many of their traditions would necessarily carry on into colonial times and be adopted and adapted as necessary. That Spain took centuries more to consolidate power and finish conquering the Maya also meant many natives had much longer to adjust or less time under colonial authority before Mexican independence rolled around and they weren't dealing with a vast, overseas empire anymore. Indigenous Mexicans today have finally recovered a population, 25 or 30 million, that they had when Spain first arrived.
The Andes had a similar situation in many ways. Spain integrated Inca nobility, government, and cities into their colonial authority. It would've been even more important given the difficulty the Andes provide and the development the natives had already provided to overcome them. Although perhaps up to 93% of the Andean peoples were killed by disease, Spain found many more allies in the Andes than it did in Mesoamerica, so many regions weren't hit as hard as could've been. In Peru, natives make up to around 25-30% of the population, as in Guatemala, while a 2001 census in Bolivia stated that some 66% of the population held an indigenous identity. This somewhat holds up linguistically, where more recent data points to only ~44-45% of the population being monolingual in Spanish.
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In large part, it's because the British and Spanish worked on very different models of colonization.
In the British colonies, the goal was settlement. The colonists established their own villages, towns, and cities largely separate from the natives. While there was certainly interaction, they did not merge their societies. In order for the British to have land and resources, they often fought with natives and displaced them. Additionally, a large number of natives died from diseases such as smallpox. This tradition continued after the formation of the United States, and it expanded with the idea of Manifest Destiny. British colonists and their American descendants wanted to live separately from natives.
The Spanish did not really practice settler colonialism. Rather, their primary goal was to economically exploit new land and people. Native societies such as the Mexica and Inca had tribute systems where peasants would pay a portion of their income (or crop) to nobles. The Spanish conquerors replaced the nobles in this system and collected that tribute themselves (the Crown would grant encomenderos, or the right to tribute from certain people or a certain area, to Spaniards that they wanted to reward). Additionally, the Spanish used native labor in silver mines. In fact, they extracted so much silver from South America that it devalued the Chinese currency when it ended up in Asia.
Thus, it was clearly in the best interest of the Spanish to keep the natives around. Despite this, a huge portion of the population died from disease and poor working conditions. Mestizos, or people of mixed European and native ancestry, make up a large portion of the Latin American population today because most Spanish colonists were men. As the Spanish did not practice settler colonialism, most people who went to America were soldiers and people seeking economic opportunity. It should be noted here that Spaniards could only go to the colonies with permission from the Crown, which was fairly hard to get. This permission was also only granted to those from Castile (at least until late in the colonial period). Thus, very few families were traveling from Spain to the New World. If conquistadors wanted female companionship or kids, natives and mestizos were their only options.
I hope this helps. Feel free to ask follow up questions. My sources are lectures from classes I took with Professors Teofilo Ruiz and William Summerhill. I'd be happy to recommend books if you're interested.