Americans don't consider Portuguese from Portugal to be non-white. Nobody calls Devin Nunes a POC, for example. They consider Brazilians to be people of color even if they are pureblood Portuguese, which is absurd. But that's how it works.

>Does the actual ancestry matter or are we just assuming that everyone who is not from Europe is a PoC?

Somehow the people who successfully colonized latin america get grouped in as marginalized because its too hard to do a color shade test or a blood quantum test.

Race isn't scientific. Even less so when you collapse the whole world into two races. White and not-white.