thanks! happy to help in any way we can

From our newsletter:

Approximately 3.3M immigrants living in Spain were born in Latin America. When looking at the numbers, we weren't surprised that Spain has the largest LatAm population in Europe, given the shared tongue and cultural roots. Just like it isn't surprising that most foreign-born Portugal residents are from Brazil.

What did surprise us is how few Mexicans returned to their past colonizer — only 66K, or 2% of the 3.3M total. Spain is home to fewer Mexicans than Hondurans, Paraguayans, and even Uruguayans, countries with just a fraction of Mexico's population.

The main reason is simple geography — given Mexico's shared border, the US is the obvious country of choice for migrants.

Colombia is the largest Latin American population (and the third overall) living in Spain. From 1999 to 2004, that population grew 18x from 13K to 249K. What happened? In addition to Colombia's economic hardship in the 90s, an earthquake broke havoc on Colombia's Andes mountains in 1999, which killed more than 1,000 people and destroyed 8,000 coffee "fincas," leaving thousands displaced. Venezuelans fleeing Maduro's dictatorship in recent years led a new wave of migration — multiplying their number by 4x from 2015 to 2021.

Another surprising statistic from the data is that Peruvians are Italy's top Latin American demographic. Ties between both countries extend back to the colonial period when Italians became part of Peru's ruling class and even placed their own Virrey, Carmine Nicolao Caracciolo, in 1716.

Similarly to Colombia and Venezuela, during the socioeconomic hardships of the 90s, thousands of Peruvians (many of Italian descent) fled to rediscover their family origins. And the migrant flow goes both ways — in contemporary Peru, Italian descendants and migrants continue to play an important role.

Source: Wikipedia
Tools: Rawgraphs, Affinity Designer

Great chart; thanks for including us! If you had chosen LinkedIn instead, I think we’d be on the top 😆

The former

Source: The COVID Baby Bump

Tools: Excel, Rawgraphs, Affinity Designer

Fertility rates — aka how many babies the average woman has — have been declining for decades. Data from the US showed, to the concern of many, that the downward trend accelerated during 2020.

But research by Martha Bailey, Janet Currie, and Hannes Schwandt, who looked at the data more closely (and kindly shared it with Latinometrics), explains the why behind the drop. Their work also revealed a surprising COVID aftermath in 2021.

During the pandemic, there was a drop in childbirths by Chinese women as the US shut down Chinese travel in early 2020. A few months later, as the Mexican border closed, a decline was seen in Latin American women's childbirth.

Keep in mind the 9-month pregnancy period; it tells us that this disruption was very likely due to women not being physically present in the US to give birth to their pre-conceived children. What's most surprising about the data the Economists presented is what starts happening in 2021. Latin American women (and also US-born women, to a lesser extent), for the first time in 15 years, reversed the trend of declining births.

By December 2021, the researchers observed an 11% positive deviation from the 2015-19 trend by Latin American women, proposing stimulus checks and increased remote work as potential explanations for the bump. What does this imply? Under the right conditions, many women are eager to become mothers.

Unbelievably for people in the Western Hemisphere, China continues to struggle with lockdowns; thus, births by Chinese women in the US are still well below the 2015-19 trendline.

From our newsletter:

The Day of the Dead is Mexico's most iconic holiday. It’s celebrated on November 1st and 2nd, and honors the dead by lighting candles, setting up altars, and visiting cemeteries. To commemorate this tradition, many families build an altar where they place photos of deceased relatives along with other items that represent them—flowers, tequila, and food are usually involved, meant as offerings that guide spirits back home.

However, according to Google Trends, the popularity of Halloween in Mexico has overtaken the traditional celebration since 2011. Halloween has become increasingly popular among Mexicans because of the growing influence of American culture in the country, especially in the northern states.

Still, Hollywood has been paying closer attention to the Mexican holiday, which has also helped boost the tradition in its home country. In 2015, the James Bond movie Spectre opened with an action scene during a Day of the Dead parade in Mexico City (a fictitious event that wasn’t actually taking place in the city at the time).

The scene worked so well and brought so much international interest in the celebration that the city started actually hosting and promoting it every year since. Coco, which became one of Pixar's most successful films, has also done admirable work showcasing the Day of the Dead internationally.

Even with Hollywood’s help, the popularity of Halloween is likely to remain. Catrinas were originally created by a satirist to mock the Mexican upper class, but are today an emblem of the Day of the Dead holiday.

Now, as Halloween becomes intertwined with Mexico’s tradition, many in the country and beyond make the Catrina their costume of choice on October 31st.

Source: Google Trends
Tools: Rawgraphs, Affinity Designer, Sheets

India is actually the world’s largest democracy 🇮🇳

Source: Morning Consult

Tools: Affinity Designer, Sheets, Rawgraphs

According to Google NGram, Mexican poet Octavio Paz was the most-mentioned author in Spanish publications in the 20th century. He won almost every prestigious prize an author could win: the Nobel, the Neustadt, the Miguel de Cervantes, and the Jerusalem.

From a young age, Paz showed an interest in books, immersing himself in his grandfather's library. Later in life, he traveled the world as a diplomat, living through countless experiences and cultures that helped shape his literary genius.

Chilean poet Pablo Neruda was a source of inspiration for Paz and, interestingly, just like Paz, a diplomat and later a senator. As a diplomat in Spain, Neruda organized a refugee route to Chile during the Spanish Civil War, saving 2,000 lives.

Although every name on our chart deserves its own story, we'll lastly tell you about Colombian Gabriel Garcia Marquez, who is known as the pioneer of the "magical realism" genre. His most famous novel, "Cien Años de Soledad," exemplifies the genre perfectly — a seemingly realistic story of a family with inexplicable or magical events occurring spontaneously in the fictional town of Macondo. The book is considered one of the most influential books of all time, and 50M+ copies have been sold in 46 languages. Like Neruda and Paz, Marquez also won a Nobel Prize.

As far as the writers on our chart go, Isabel Allende and Mario Vargas Llosa are the only surviving ones today. These figures deserve to be remembered by the younger generation of Latin Americans as treasures in the field of literature.

Source: Google NGram
Tools: Affinity Designer

For more data visualizations about Latin America, subscribe to our newsletter.