Hispanic American

Latin America

Hispanic Americans, also called Latinos, feminine Latinas, and Latinxs, people living in the United States who are descendants of Spanish-speaking peoples. Since most Hispanics trace their ancestry to Latin America, they are also often called Latinos. Hispanics make up the largest ethnic minority in the United States, forming more than one-sixth of the country’s population. There are more than 50 million Hispanic Americans, living in all 50 states. Hispanics do not always think of themselves as a single group, however, often identifying more with their family’s country or area of origin. This highly diverse group includes people with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, El Salvador, the Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Colombia, Honduras, and other parts of Central and South America and the Caribbean, as well as Spain. Hispanics may be recent immigrants or people whose families have been settled in the United States for generations. Most Hispanic Americans are U.S. citizens who were born in the United States.

Spanish-speaking people have lived in what is now the United States since before the country’s founding. Before there was New England, there was New Spain, and before there was Boston, Massachusetts, there was Santa Fe (now in New Mexico). The teaching of U.S. history normally emphasizes the founding and growth of the American colonies, their emergence as an independent nation in 1776, and the development of the United States from east to west. That treatment often omits the fact that there was significant colonization by Spain of what is now the American Southwest from the 16th century onward. It also tends to ignore, until the Mexican-American War (1846–48) is mentioned, that the whole Southwest, from Texas westward to California, was once a Spanish-speaking territory with its own distinctive heritage, culture, and customs.