![]() Beginning in the mid-nineteenth century, as Spain declined in power, wealth, and influence, many Americans began to romanticize Spain. They continued to speak Spanish and to embrace and maintain Spanish cultural traditions.Īlthough antagonism toward the countries of Spain and Mexico continued to be common throughout the nineteenth century, attitudes toward America’s Spanish heritage and the contributions of its citizens of Spanish descent were not uniformly negative. Spanish farming traditions, religious beliefs, and even commercial patterns further transformed vast swaths of North America during this period, influencing the lives of many Americans whose ancestors had not originated in Spain.Īlthough neither the terms “Hispanic” nor “Latino” were used to define these new Americans and the specific ethnic backgrounds of these new citizens varied greatly, many of them strongly identified with their Spanish roots. The acquisition of Spanish and Mexican territories brought Hispanic-styled buildings and structures, many of which reflected the dominance of Spanish and Mexican culture, into the borders of the United States. These territories varied in the intensity of their identification with Spanish culture, language, and history, with some, such as Cuba being heavily influenced by Spanish culture and others, such as Guam being markedly less influenced. These included, Cuba, Puerto Rico, the Philippines and Guam, all of which had formerly belonged to Spain. Similarly, the brief Spanish-American war brought multiple territories into the United States in 1898. Some decades later, the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the Mexican-American war in 1848, ceded California, Nevada, Utah, New Mexico, most of Arizona and Colorado, and parts of Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas and Wyoming to the United States in the process, thousands of Mexicans living in these areas became American citizens. This change had begun in the early nineteenth century when Florida (1845) and Louisiana (1812), both of which had been initially held by the Spanish, had become states. Yet even as Anglo-Americans condemned Hispanic culture and influence, thousands of residents of Hispanic descent became American citizens during the nineteenth century. Finally, although the United States increasingly included people who were not of British ancestry, many Americans continued to share the centuries-old distaste the British felt for Spain. Within the United States, many Euro-Americans expressed concerns over the racial mixing that was more overt in Spanish, as opposed to British, territories.įervent anti-Catholicism continued to dominate much of the country, with many Americans seeing Spain as a symbol of all that they disliked and feared about the Roman Catholic Church. Many Americans used the idea of Spanish “tyranny” and “oppression” as a means of justifying Anglo-American colonialism and expansion into Spanish and former Spanish colonies. The reasons for this very negative view of Spain and Spanish culture were varied. Arguing that the Spanish had corrupted North and South America, many American writers insisted that the Spanish were “unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, cowardly, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian-a unique complex of pejoratives that historians from Spain came to call the Black Legend, la leyenda negra.” ![]() ![]() Spain had, after all, been a major world power, dominating and colonizing much of the Americas.īut during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans saw the influence of Spain and Spanish culture on American history and culture through a negative lens. Throughout much of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Americans were aware of the role that Spain had played in the development of North and South America during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Why, then, do we begin our history with the Pilgrims? And why, especially as we so quickly became a nation of diverse ethnic groups, do we focus on these early English settlements? Augustine, Santa Fe, and San Juan (Puerto Rico) were Spanish, not English. Similarly, the earliest European settlements here such as St. But dig a little deeper and most of us will remember that the first Europeans to come to what is now the United States were, more often than not, Spanish. Ask any American about the first Europeans to settle in the United States and they will begin to talk about Pilgrims, turkeys, and Plymouth Rock.
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