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El Salvador POPULATION
Although historically El Salvador has been home to a
culturally diverse mix of peoples including blacks, Indians,
Hispanics, and North Europeans, by the 1980s the population of
the country was essentially homogeneous in terms of ethnicity and
basic cultural identity. Virtually all Salvadorans spoke Spanish,
the official language, as their mother tongue, and the vast
majority could be characterized as mestizos (or ladinos, a term
more commonly used in Central America), meaning persons of mixed
biological ancestry who follow a wide variety of indigenous and
Hispanic customs and habits that over the centuries have come to
constitute Spanish-American cultural patterns. In the late 1980s,
the ethnic composition of the population was estimated as 89
percent mestizo, 10 percent Indian, and 1 percent white.
In contrast to most other Central American countries, El
Salvador no longer possessed an ethnically or linguistically
distinct Indian population, although persons of Indian racial or
cultural heritage still lived in the western departments of the
country
(see Indians
, this ch.). During the twentieth century,
this population was rapidly assimilated into the dominant
Hispanic culture. Similarly, there was no ethnically or
culturally distinct black population.
In spite of ethnic homogeneity, however, Salvadoran society
in the 1980s exhibited strong contrasts in life-style based on
extremes of great wealth and abject poverty. These contrasting
life-styles, in turn, created serious rifts in Salvadoran society
that effectively divided the population into distinctive
subcultural groups.
Data as of November 1988
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