The mixing of races in Latin America is the direct policy of teh Catholic Church from long before Vatican II. It is based on the acknowlegement that we are all children of God.
There really isn't a lot of race mixing in Latin America...
Central America, certain parts of Mexico and Andean South America are very mestizo, but a lot of Hispanics are white and 100% European descended. Go to Argentina, for example. It's very pale, Italian descended folk. Chile and Brazil also have a lot of Germanic and Polish surnames thanks to heavy immigration. One of the most famous Chileans, a television star, was born Mario Kreutzberger Blumenfeld.
Some race-mixing does exist, though, in places like Malta. Italian surnames speaking a Semitic-derived language that speakers of Carthaginian Arabic dialects can understand quite well, to my knowledge.
Source: Am Hispanic
By teh way the Latin American people as a whole are predominantly Catholic who are friendly to Catholic TRadition. If anything is in danger of being displaced it could be the Protestant Anglo Saxon culture in favor of one that is more Catholic
2. Then why are they fleeing to Protestantism at record rates there? Catholic tradition hasn't been alive in most of Latin America for a long time. There's pockets of TradCats in Mexico and Brazil, but otherwise Latin American Catholicism is primarily cultural. Catholic to them is just a part of heritage.