Latinos in the Midwest

Introduction

n 1 Introduction The Spanish explorers left huge footprints in the New World, and their cultural influences are widely felt today from the Canadian border with the United States to Tierra del Fuego, an archipelago off the tip of South America. The mixing of Spanish, African, and other Old World cultures in the New World over the past five hundred years has left few, if any, indigenous peoples untouched and has produced a rich cultural tapestry that has variants of the Spanish language as the major thread that ties it together. In the United States, these peoples are called Latinos. They are a heterogeneous subpopulation of the country’s overall population that varies by history, culture and length of time in the geographical area known as the United States. In 1492, Cristóbal Colón, or Christopher Columbus, and his men, after visiting other islands, landed in present-day Cuba and claimed it on behalf of Spain. In 1513, Ponce de León settled the island Borinquen, known today as Puerto Rico, and in the spring of 1513 he landed on the east coast of present-day Florida near present-day San Augustine, naming it “Pascua de Florida” or “Festival of Flowers.” Over the next century, the Spaniards continued to explore and spread their influence in the New World. Hernán Cortés, Cabeza de Vaca, Hernando de Soto, 2 n Introduction and Francisco Coronado are but a few of the men whose exploits would contribute to the imposition of Spain’s power in the New World. In 1539 and the early 1540s, Hernando de Soto made his way, albeit in a rather circuitous route, from Florida to the hinterlands of the southeastern region and the southern parts of the region known today as the Midwest, possibly going as far north as Indiana and Illinois, and then southwesterly to present-day Texas (Chaves Tesser and Hudson 1991; also see Clayton, Knight, and Moore 1993).1 In June 1541, de Soto and his men discovered a muddy river with a strong current that they called the Río Grande, but which in time came to be known as the Mississippi River. De Soto made it to the Great Plains and came in contact with Comanche and Sioux Indians. That expedition turned out to be de Soto’s final one, as he died of fever on June 25, 1542 (Clayton, Knight, and Moore 1993). Around the same time as de Soto’s final expedition, Francisco Vásquez de Coronado y Luján explored the southern Rockies in what is today present-day Arizona and New Mexico and made his way into the Great Plains, reaching Kansas in 1541, where he held the first Christian mass in the interior of North America. During his expedition, one of his parties discovered the Grand Canyon (Hammond 1926a). Fifty-seven years later, in 1598, Juan de Oñate established the northernmost Spanish settlement in New Spain in what is today known as the Española Valley in northern New Mexico (Hammond 1926b; Brebner 1933). In 1605, Oñate led an expedition that followed the Colorado River down to the Gulf of California (Hammond 1927). By the time that Jamestown was founded in 1607 by the Virginia Company, Spanish expeditions had traversed the hinterlands of what is today the United States from the Atlantic Ocean to the Gulf of California. It is from these early settlements and those across Central and South America that the nation’s Latino population has descended across the centuries. Some individuals are descendants of Cortés, conqueror of the Aztecs, or of Moctezuma, ruler of the Atzec Empire. These two men symbolize the worlds of the conquerors and the conquered, but their descendants blend the cultures, both as mestizos and genizaros that comprise the rich tapestry of Hispanic cultures across North and South America. It is from these broad cultural processes and groupings that Latinos in the United States are descended. Today, Latinos are comprised of a mix of peoples who are native and foreign born. Those who are native born have historically been rooted in the Southwest, and include descendants of the Spanish colonists (from both Spain and New Spain), who at the time of the American conquest of Mexico in 1848, included three major groups: Tejanos, Hispanos, and Californios. Generations of Mexican immigrants over the past century and a half have given rise to new generations of native-born Mexican Americans, and continue to do so today. Other...