Latino Historiography
The States in the United States with Hispanic cultural and historical influence is impressive. The Spanish Empire significantly touched a vast area stretching along the California coast past Oregon, Washington, and Alaska. In the interior Nevada, Utah, Colorado, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Missouri, and Louisiana formed a large trade network centered in the Spanish settlements of Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Spanish occupation of the Louisiana-Florida frontier influenced trade along the Mississippi River from New Orleans to Arkansas Post and St. Louis. Virginia and the Carolinas are not without their Hispanic past, for explorers and missionaries were among the first Europeans to touch their shores.
Similarly, far from the continental United States, the Virgin Islands, Puerto Rico, Hawaii, and Guam share varying degrees of the same Hispanic heritage. In many cases, history, ethnic composition, place names, linguistics, and cultural manifestations are a part of the Latino legacy that Spanish colonialism in North America spawned. Because of Spanish colonialism, the United States shares a common heritage with the rest of the Western Hemisphere.
The history of the Latino heritage began with the European discovery of the New World by Christopher Columbus, which introduced European cultural traditions including language, law, governance, religion, lore, science, technology, and a literary tradition to the Americas based on values developed throughout the history of western civilization.
The people who now reside in the USA and call themselves Latinos have long and complex historical genealogies in this country. Many of them entered the US willingly as immigrants in the 20th century, but just as many were territorially incorporated through America's wars of imperial expansion in the 19th century.
"We did not cross a border; the border crossed us", as many ethnic Mexican residents of the Southwest correctly explain. Or as others oft remark, "We are here because you were there." Mexicans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans, the three groups that today constitute the bulk of American Latinos, first entered the stage of history in two very separate zones of imperial concentration in the Americas that were born in 1492 with the voyages of Christopher Columbus.
The first area of Spanish imperial settlement in the Americas was in the Caribbean, with Cuba, Puerto Rico, and Hispaniola as its principle sites. The native inhabitants of these islands were few in number at contact, were quickly decimated by European diseases, and labor demands and their labor was just as rapidly replaced by African slaves. This is why the Spanish Caribbean has long had such a strong African cultural tradition and such a distinct racial legacy around issues of blackness.
Cuba is by far the largest Caribbean island, almost eleven times bigger than Puerto Rico. For four centuries, Cuba was one of the most productive and prosperous of Spain's colonies. It was the staging point for the early Spanish expeditions of exploration and conquest in the Americas, and it was through the port of Havana that most trade flowed between Europe and Spanish America. Florida and Louisiana by virtue of their geographic proximity and trade were closely tied to Cuba in the colonial period and have remained in its cultural orbit ever since. Of the 50.5 million Latinos now living in the U.S., 12 percent or 6.3 million trace their ancestry back to these initial Spanish settlements in Cuba and Puerto Rico.
The largest group of Latinos in the U.S. is from Mexico, representing about 63 percent of the group's total and numbering 31.7 million by the 2010 census count. In the early 16th century, expeditions of exploration originating in Cuba learned of the wealthy Aztec Empire in the Valley of Mexico with its immense population of some 20 million and its streets putatively paved in gems, silver, and gold.
In the 18th century, the mines of northern Mexico were producing the bulk of the world's silver. The settlement of New Mexico, Texas, and California became an imperative for Spain as a way of protecting these operations and thwarting English, French, American, and Comanche threats.
Many Latinos date their origin as subjects or citizens of the U.S. to the period between 1800 and 1900. American history textbooks still largely narrate the 19th century as a series of pivotal wars, from the Texas Revolution (1836), to the U.S.-Mexico War (1846), to the Spanish American War (1898). When American history is told and taught this way Latinos all but disappear. Mexican Texans and Anglos united during the Texas Revolution against a Mexico they deemed tyrannical.
When modern Americans are urged to "Remember the Alamo," however, it is a call to remembrance not of this unity but of the butchery Mexico unleashed to crush Texan self-rule. The popular names we still use to refer to America's expansionistic wars intentionally erase many of the major actors, certainly all of the vanquished, particularly those who became subjects and second-class citizens of the U.S. by virtue of their race and subjugation. Mexicans, Tejanos, and Comanches are often missing from the imperial narratives of the Texas Revolution.
In its most elemental form, Manifest Destiny asserted that God providentially had chosen the Anglo-Saxon race of the U.S. to bring civilization to inferior, dark peoples, to sweep away monarchy and replace it with democracy, to establish republican forms of government premised on Protestantism, and to generously help benighted pioneers and people who occupied the spaces America coveted. Manifest Destiny was a complex time/space matrix of ideas variously inflected, but unitarily evolutionary and racialist, explaining America's need for new lands, ports, and markets, for secure national borders, and most of all, for its God-ordained destiny to greatness.
Well into the 20th century, Spanish colonial history was misunderstood and suffered from the propaganda created in an earlier time and sustained for over four centuries. The main contributor to misconceptions was the Spanish Black Legend, which promoted the notion that Spanish colonials came to exterminate Indians and destroy cultures. Therefore, they were unworthy of any divine blessings or human acknowledgement.
The Spanish Black Legend contributed to the diminished role of Latinos in US national story. Spawned in the 16th-century Spanish-English rivalry that ended in England winning the war of propaganda, the Black Legend perpetuated negative stereotypical notions about Spain and its people who settled the Americas. Thus, the dichotomy of England as the good empire and Spain as the evil empire emerged in American lore, history, and literature.
Negative beliefs about Spain prevailed and became embedded in U.S. history textbooks. Very little in textbooks revealed much about Spanish colonial enterprises, settlement, and governance other than the role of exploration and conquest in our national story. Textbooks do not mention that the Spanish established the “town meeting,” called the cabildo, as early as 1509 in Puerto Rico and other areas in the Caribbean; Mexico City in 1525; San Agustín, Florida in 1565-1570, and New Mexico in 1598-- long before the House of Burgesses in Virginia or the New England Town Meeting. The Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe, New Mexico's third capital, housed the cabildo from 1610 to the end of the Spanish Period in 1821.
History books influenced a resurgence of the 16th century propaganda in negatively narrating the histories of the Battle of the Alamo (1836), the Mexican War (1846-48), and the Spanish-American War (1898). Such biases are reflected in issues dealing with immigration from Mexico or Latin America. The writing of the history of Spanish colonialism through the lens of Spanish Black Legend stereotypes has had a negative influence on how Latino heritage is viewed.
Understanding the underpinnings of negative views of Latino history and heritage in the past contributes to a more positive approach and appreciation of a people who have participated in the local, regional, and national historical process of the development of North America from the earliest European migrations across the Atlantic that began over 500 years ago. Latino heritage and culture are not monolithic. Interpreting the American Latino heritage is ever more challenging when one considers that the Latino culture has many faces basically comprised of five heritages inclusive of Spanish, Indian, African, Asian, and Anglo-American.
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