Chilean people are natives of and long-term immigrants to
Chile. Chileans are mainly of
Spanish, and
Amerindian descent with small, albeit important, degrees of 19th- and 20th-century European immigrant ancestry. There is a strong correlation between Chilean people's
ancestry or
ethnicity and
socioeconomic situation: a marked continuum exist between the
lower classes of high Amerindian ancestry and the
upper classes of mainly European ancestry. Indigenous inheritance (cultural or genetic) is most visible in rural areas and in aspects of culture such as
Chilean cuisine and
Chilean Spanish. Although post-independence immigrants never made up more than 2% of the population, there are now hundreds of thousands of Chileans with
German, British, French, Croatian, Italian or
Palestinian ancestry.