Portal:Hispanic and Latino Americans

Welcome to the Hispanic and Latino Americans portal

Proportion of Hispanic and Latino Americans in each county of the fifty states, the District of Columbia, and Puerto Rico as of the 2020 United States census

Hispanic and Latino Americans are Americans that have a Spanish or Latin American background, culture, or family origin. These demographics include all Americans who identify as Hispanic or Latino regardless of race. As of 2020, the Census Bureau estimated that there were almost 65.3 million Hispanics and Latinos living in the United States and its territories.

"Origin" can be viewed as the ancestry, nationality group, lineage or country of birth of the person or the person's parents or ancestors before their arrival in the United States of America. People who identify as Hispanic or Latino may be of any race, because similarly to what occurred during the colonization and post-independence of the United States, Latin American countries had their populations made up of multiracial and monoracial descendants of settlers from the metropole of a European colonial empire (in the case of Latin American countries, Spanish and Portuguese settlers, unlike the Thirteen Colonies that will form the United States, which received settlers from the United Kingdom), in addition to these, there are also monoracial and multiracial descendants of Indigenous peoples of the Americas (Native Americans), descendants of African slaves brought to Latin America in the colonial era, and post-independence immigrants from Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia. As one of only two specifically designated categories of ethnicity in the United States, Hispanics and Latinos form a pan-ethnicity incorporating a diversity of inter-related cultural and linguistic heritages, the use of the Spanish and Portuguese languages being the most important of all. The largest national origin groups of Hispanic and Latino Americans in order of population size are: Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Salvadoran, Dominican, Brazilian, Colombian, Guatemalan, Honduran, Ecuadorian, Peruvian, Venezuelan and Nicaraguan. The predominant origin of regional Hispanic and Latino populations varies widely in different locations across the country. In 2012, Hispanic Americans were the second fastest-growing ethnic group by percentage growth in the United States after Asian Americans. (Full article...)

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María Ruiz de Burton's Who Would Have Thought It? (1872) was the first novel to be written in English by a Mexican living in the United States. After a long period in which Ruiz de Burton's work was almost completely unknown, the novel was rediscovered by critics interested in the history of Chicano literature, and republished to acclaim in 1995. Yet Ruiz de Burton's life was not particularly typical of the Mexican-American experience, as she married a prominent US officer, Captain Henry S. Burton, in the aftermath of the Mexican–American War. The novel reflects her ambiguous position between the Californio elite and the Anglo-Saxon majority of the United States.

It details the struggles of a Mexican-American girl born in Indian captivity, Lola, in an American society obsessed with class, religion, race and gender. The first ten chapters narrate the attack on Fort Sumter (1857–1861), and flashbacks are meant to take the readers back further than that time line, such as the kidnapping of Lola's mother (1846). The last fifty chapters chronicle the events that took place during the Civil War (1861–1864). Each chapter focuses on a particular character and is told from an omniscient point of view. (more...)

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Julian Casablancas

image credit: Moses

Did you know...

... that Crash actress Arlene Tur played professional beach volleyball during her time at Florida International University?
... that Arizona SB1070, the state's new immigration enforcement law, has attracted national attention as the broadest and strictest anti-illegal immigration measure in decades within the United States? (protest pictured)
... that Eliseo Medina is the first Mexican American to serve on the executive board of the Service Employees International Union?
... that playwright Josefina Niggli is believed to be the only Mexican-American woman to have a theatre named after her?
... that a co-founder of the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, Mario G. Obledo, organized a boycott of the Taco Bell Chihuahua, citing the dog's stereotypical Mexican accent?
... that San Diego artist Salvador Torres led the movement to paint murals on the support columns of a freeway in Chicano Park?
... that an entire regiment of the Mexican Army was despatched to expel Mexican folk healer and mystic Teresa Urrea from the country?

2010

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Julia Alvarez (born March 27, 1950) is a Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist. Born in New York of Dominican descent, she spent the first ten years of her childhood in the Dominican Republic, until her father’s involvement in a political rebellion forced her family to flee the country.

Alvarez rose to prominence with the novels How the García Girls Lost Their Accents (1991), In the Time of the Butterflies (1994), and Yo! (1997). Her publications as a poet include Homecoming (1984) and The Woman I Kept to Myself (2004), and as an essayist the autobiographical compilation Something to Declare (1998). Many literary critics regard her to be one of the most significant Latina writers and she has achieved critical and commercial success on an international scale.

Many of Alvarez’s works are influenced by her experiences as a Dominican in the United States, and focus heavily on issues of assimilation and identity. Her cultural upbringing as both a Dominican and an American is evident in the combination of personal and political tone in her writing. She is known for works that examine cultural expectations of women both in the Dominican Republic and the United States, and for rigorous investigations of cultural stereotypes. In recent years, Alvarez has expanded her subject matter with works such as In the Name of Salomé (2000), a novel with Cuban rather than solely Dominican characters and fictionalized versions of historical figures. (more...)

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WikiProject Latinos
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