In Louisiana, the term "Creole" was first used to describe people born in Louisiana, who used the term to distinguish themselves from newly arrived immigrants. It was not a racial or ethnic identifier; it was simply synonymous with "born in the New World," meant to separate native-born people of any ethnic background—white, black, or any mixture thereof—from European immigrants and slaves imported from Africa. Later, the term was racialized after newly arrived Anglo-Americans began associate créolité, or the quality of being Creole, with racially mixed ancestry. This caused many white Creoles to eventually abandon the label out of fear that the term would lead mainstream Americans to believe them to be of racially mixed descent (and thus endanger their livelihoods or social standing). Later writers occasionally make distinctions among French Creoles (of European ancestry), Creoles of Color (of mixed racial ancestry), and occasionally, Black Creoles (of primarily African descendant); these categories, however, are later inventions, and most primary documents from the eighteenth, nineteenth and early twentieth centuries make use of the word "Creole" without any additional qualifier. Creoles of Spanish and German descent also exist, and Spanish Creoles survive today as Isleños and Malagueños, both found in southern Louisiana. However, all racial categories of Creoles - from Caucasian, mixed racial, African, to Native American - tended to think and refer to themselves solely as Creole, a commonality in many other Francophone and Iberoamerican cultures, who tend to lack strict racial separations common in United States History and other countries with large populations from Northern Europe's various cultures. This racial neutrality persists to the modern day, as many Creoles do not use race as a factor for being a part of the ethno-culture.