Portal:Hispanic and Latino Americans/Featured article/Archive
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Hispanic (Spanish: hispano, hispánico, Portuguese: hispânico, Galician: hispánico, Basque: hispaniar, Catalan: hispà is an ethnonym that denotes a relationship to Spain or, in some definitions, to ancient Roman Hispania, which roughly comprised the Iberian Peninsula including the contemporary states of Andorra, Portugal, and Spain and the Crown Colony or British Overseas Territories of Gibraltar. Today, organizations in the United States use the term as a broad catchall to refer to persons with a historical and cultural relationship either with Spain, or with Spain and Portugal, regardless of race. The U.S. Census Bureau defines the ethnonym Hispanic or Latino to refer to "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American (except for Brazil), or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race.", and states that Hispanics or Latinos can be of any race, any ancestry, any ethnicity. Generically, this limits the definition of Hispanic or Latino to people from the Caribbean, Central and South America, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race, distinctly excluding all persons of Portuguese origin. (more...)
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In the United States, a Black Hispanic or Afro Hispanic (Spanish: Afrohispano, literally, "Afro Hispanic") is an American citizen or resident who is officially classified by the United States Census Bureau, Office of Management and Budget and other U.S. government agencies as a Black American of Hispanic descent."
Hispanicity, which is independent of race, is the only ethnic category, as opposed to racial category, which is officially collated by the U.S. Census Bureau. The distinction made by government agencies for those within the population of any official race category, including "African American", is between those who report Hispanic backgrounds and all others who do not. In the case of Blacks of Latin descent, these two groups are respectively termed "Black Hispanics/Afro American Hispanics" and "non-Hispanic Black Americans/non-Hispanic Black Americans", the former being those who report Black African ethnicity as well as a Hispanic ancestral background (Spain and Hispanic Latin America), and the latter consisting of an ethnically diverse collection of all others who are classified as Black or African Americans that do not report Hispanic ethnic backgrounds. (more...)
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Hispanic Americans, also referred to as Latinos, fought in every major battle in the European Theatre of World War II in which the armed forces of the United States were involved, from North Africa to the Battle of the Bulge, and in the Pacific Theater of Operations, from Bataan to Okinawa. According to the National World War II Museum, between 250,000 and 500,000 Hispanic Americans served in the U.S. Armed Forces during World War II, out of a total of 12,000,000, constituting 2.3% to 4.7% of the U.S. Armed Forces. The exact number is unknown as, at the time, Hispanics were not tabulated separately, but were generally included in the general white population census count. Separate statistics were kept for African Americans and Asian Americans.
On December 7, 1941, when the United States officially entered the war, Hispanic Americans were among the many American citizens who joined the ranks of the Army, Navy and Marine Corps as volunteers or through the draft. Not only did Hispanics serve as active combatants in the European and Pacific Theatres of war, but they also served on the home front as civilians. Hundreds of Hispanic women joined the Women's Army Auxiliary Corps (WAACs) and Women Accepted for Volunteer Emergency Service (WAVES), serving as nurses and in administrative positions. Many worked in traditionally male labor jobs in the manufacturing plants that produced munitions and materiel, replacing men who were away at war. (more...)
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How the García Girls Lost Their Accents is a 1991 novel written by Dominican-American poet, novelist, and essayist Julia Alvarez. Told in reverse chronological order and narrated from shifting perspectives, the text possesses distinct qualities of a bildungsroman novel. Spanning more than thirty years in the lives of four sisters, the story begins with their adult lives in the United States and ends with their childhood in the Dominican Republic, from which their family was forced to flee due to the father’s opposition to Rafael Leónidas Trujillo's dictatorship.
The novel's major themes include acculturation and coming of age. It deals with the myriad hardships of immigration, painting a vivid picture of the struggle to assimilate, the sense of displacement, and the confusion of identity suffered by the García family, as they are uprooted from familiarity and forced to begin a new life in New York City. The text consists of fifteen interconnected short stories, each of which focuses on one of the four daughters, and in a few instances, the García family as a whole. Although it is told from alternating perspectives there is particular focus throughout the text on the character of Yolanda, who is said to be the both the protagonist and the author's alter ego. (more...)
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Puerto Rico (English: /ˌpɔːrtə ˈriːkoʊ/ or /ˌpwɛərtə ˈriːkoʊ/; Spanish: [ˈpweɾto ˈriko]), officially the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico (Spanish: Estado Libre Asociado de Puerto Rico, pronounced [esˈtaðo ˈliβɾe asoˈsjaðo ðe ˈpweɾto ˈriko]), is an unincorporated territory of the United States, located in the northeastern Caribbean east of the Dominican Republic and west of both the United States Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands.
Puerto Rico (Spanish for "rich port") is an archipelago that includes the main island of Puerto Rico and a number of smaller islands, the largest of which are Vieques, Culebra, and Mona. The main island of Puerto Rico is, by land area, the smallest of the Greater Antilles. With around 3.6 million people, it ranks third in population among that group of four islands, which include Cuba, Hispaniola (Dominican Republic and Haiti), and Jamaica. The capital and largest city is San Juan. Due to its location, Puerto Rico has a tropical climate and is subject to hot weather all-year-round. The national language is Spanish but English is recognized as an official language as well. (more...)
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On September 17, 1963, a freight train collided with a bus carrying 58 migrant farmworkers on a railroad crossing outside Chualar in the Salinas Valley, California, killing 32 people and injuring 25. It was the worst fatal vehicle accident in United States history, according to the National Safety Council.
The accident has long been a rallying point for immigration rights and Chicano farmworker activists. All but two of the victims were Mexican or Mexican-American, and most were Mexican guest workers participating in the bracero program, which had been in place since 1942 and had been drawing mounting criticism from labor activists and civil rights workers who contended that it exploited Mexican laborers and deprived Americans of jobs. The accident supported the views of critics that Bracero workers were treated shabbily, helping to spur the demise of the program in 1964. (more...)
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Caballero: A Historical Novel, often known only as Caballero, is a historical romance coauthored by Jovita González and Margaret Eimer (under the pseudonym Eve Raleigh). Written in the 1930s and early 1940s, but not published until 1996, the novel is sometimes called Texas's Gone with the Wind.
The book is set in the vicinity of Matamoros at the time of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, in which Mexico ceded its lands north of the Rio Grande to the United States. Its principal character is Don Santiago Mendoza y Soría, a landowner and descendant of the Spanish explorers who first colonized the region, and his family and servants, whose destinies are rewritten by the treaty, the occupation of the region by the American military, and the influx of English-speaking Americans.
Since its rediscovery and publication, Caballero has been branded an important Tejano achievement of national and international relevance and has received much scholarly attention. It is also recognized as an important early piece of Mexican-American literature, in particular for its awareness of the ethnic, gender and class struggles that have characterized Texas history. (more...)
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Cuban Americans (Spanish: cubano-americanos, norteamericanos de origen cubano or estadounidenses de origen cubano) are Americans who trace their national origin to Cuba; and even though they identify themselves as Cubans. Cuban Americans form the third largest Hispanic group in the United States and also the largest group of Hispanics of European ancestry (predominantly Spanish) as a percentage but not in numbers.
Many communities throughout the United States have significant Cuban American populations. The South Florida area, with a Cuban American population of 856,007 in its environs, stands out as the most prominent Cuban American community, in part because of its proximity to Cuba.
South Florida is followed by the Tampa Bay Area and North Hudson, New Jersey, particularly Union City and West New York. With a population of 141,250, the New York metropolitan area's Cuban community is the largest outside of Florida. Nearly 70% of all Cuban Americans live in Florida. (more...)
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Day of the Dead (Spanish: Día de Muertos) is a Mexican holiday observed throughout Mexico and around the world in other cultures. The holiday focuses on gatherings of family and friends to pray for and remember friends and family members who have died. The celebration takes place on October 31, November 1 and November 2, in connection with the triduum of Hallowtide: All Hallows' Eve, Hallowmas, and All Souls' Day.
In many American communities with Mexican residents Day of the Dead celebrations are very similar to those held in Mexico. In some of these communities such as in Texas the celebrations tend to be mostly traditional. For example, the All Souls Procession has been an annual Tucson event since 1990. The event combines elements of traditional Day of the Dead celebrations with those of pagan harvest festivals. People wearing masks carry signs honoring the dead and an urn in which people can place slips of paper with prayers on them to be burned. Likewise, Old Town San Diego, California annually hosts a very traditional two-day celebration culminating in a candlelight procession to the historic El Campo Santo Cemetery. (more...)
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Dominican Americans (Spanish: domínico-americanos, norteamericanos de origen dominicano or estadounidenses de origen dominicano) are Americans who have full or partial origin from the Dominican Republic. Although their emigration began in the sixteenth century, thousands of Dominicans passed through the gates of Ellis Island in the 19th and early 20th centuries. The most recent movement of emigration to the United States began in the 1960s, after the fall of the Trujillo regime. In 2010, there were approximately 1.41 million people of Dominican descent in the US, including both native and foreign-born. Dominican Americans are the fifth-largest Hispanic group in the United States, and the largest group of Hispanics of African ancestry (both full and partial African ancestry). (more...)
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The History of women in Puerto Rico traces back its roots to the Taíno, the inhabitants of the island before the arrival of Spaniards. During the Spanish colonization the cultures and customs of the Taíno, Spanish, African and women from non-Hispanic countries blended into what became the culture and customs of Puerto Rico. Many women in Puerto Rico were Spanish subjects and were already active participants in the labor movement and in the agricultural economy of the island.
After Puerto Rico was ceded to the United States in 1898 as a result of the Spanish-American War, women once again played an integral role in Puerto Rican society by contributing to the establishment of the state university of Puerto Rico, women's suffrage, women's rights, civil rights, and to the military of the United States.
During the period of industrialization of the 1950s, women in Puerto Rico took jobs in the needle industry, working as seamstresses in garment factories. Many Puerto Rican families also migrated to the United States in the 1950s, which included women. Currently, women in Puerto Rico have become active in the political and social landscape in the continental United States in addition to their own homeland, with many of them involved in fields that were once limited to the male population, as well as gaining influential roles as leaders in their fields. (more...)
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Mexican Americans (Spanish: mexicano-americanos, norteamericanos de origen mexicano or estadounidenses de origen mexicano) are Americans of full or partial Mexican descent. As of July 2012, Mexican Americans make up 10.9% of the United States' population with over 34 million Americans listed as being of full or partial Mexican ancestry. As of July 2012, Mexican Americans comprise 64.3% of all Hispanics and Latinos in the United States.
The United States is home to the second largest Mexican community in the world second only to Mexico itself comprising nearly 22% of the entire Mexican origin population of the world. Canada is a distant third with a small Mexican Canadian population of 96,055 (0.3% of the population) as of 2011.
In addition, as of 2008 there were approximately 7,000,000 undocumented Mexicans living in the United States. Upgrading their legal status became a major issue in 2013. Over 60% of all Mexican Americans reside in the states of California and Texas. (more...)
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A Puerto Rican (Spanish: 'puertorriqueño'; Taíno: boricua) is a person who was born in Puerto Rico. People born and raised in other parts of the world, most notably in the continental United States, of Puerto Rican parents are also sometimes referred to as Puerto Ricans.
Puerto Ricans commonly refer to themselves as boricuas. "The majority of Puerto Ricans regard themselves as being of mixed Spanish-European descent. Recent DNA sample studies have concluded that the three largest components of the Puerto Rican genetic profile are in fact indigenous Taíno, European, and African". The population of Puerto Ricans and descendants is estimated to be between 8 to 10 million worldwide, with most living within the islands of Puerto Rico and in the United States. Within the United States, Puerto Ricans are present in all states of the Union, and the states with the largest populations of Puerto Ricans relative to the national population of Puerto Ricans in the United States at large are the states of New York, Florida, New Jersey, and Pennsylvania, with large populations also in Massachusetts, Connecticut, California, Illinois, and Texas.
For 2009, the American Community Survey estimates give a total of 3,859,026 Puerto Ricans classified as "Native" Puerto Ricans. It also gives a total of 3,644,515 (91.9%) of the population being born in Puerto Rico and 201,310 (5.1%) born in the United States. The total population born outside Puerto Rico is 322,773 (8.1%). Of the 108,262 who were foreign born outside the United States (2.7% of Puerto Ricans), 92.9% were born in Latin America, 3.8% in Europe, 2.7% in Asia, 0.2% in Northern America, and 0.1% in Africa and Oceania each. (more...)
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The Salad Bowl strike was a series of strikes, mass pickets, boycotts and secondary boycotts that began on August 23, 1970 and led to the largest farm worker strike in U.S. history. The strike was led by the United Farm Workers against the International Brotherhood of Teamsters. The Salad Bowl strike was only in part a jurisdictional strike, for many of the actions taken during the event were not strikes. The strike led directly to the passage of the California Agricultural Labor Relations Act in 1975. (more...)
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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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The Support Our Law Enforcement and Safe Neighborhoods Act (introduced as Arizona Senate Bill 1070 and thus often referred to simply as Arizona SB 1070) is a legislative Act in the U.S. state of Arizona that at the time of passage in 2010 was the broadest and strictest anti-illegal immigration measure in recent U.S. history. It has received national and international attention and has spurred considerable controversy.
U.S. federal law requires all aliens over the age of 14 who remain in the United States for longer than 30 days to register with the U.S. government, and to have registration documents in their possession at all times; violation of this requirement is a federal misdemeanor crime. The Arizona Act additionally made it a state misdemeanor crime for an alien to be in Arizona without carrying the required documents, required that state law enforcement officers attempt to determine an individual's immigration status during a "lawful stop, detention or arrest", or during a "lawful contact" not specific to any activity when there is reasonable suspicion that the individual is an illegal immigrant. The law barred state or local officials or agencies from restricting enforcement of federal immigration laws, and imposed penalties on those sheltering, hiring and transporting unregistered aliens. The paragraph on intent in the legislation says it embodies an "attrition through enforcement" doctrine. (more...)
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The Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) , AFL-CIO, is a labor union representing migrant farm workers in the Midwestern United States and North Carolina.
FLOC was founded in Toledo, Ohio, in 1967 by Baldemar Velasquez. A migrant worker who had worked in the fields since he was six years old, Velasquez led his first strike at the age of 12. By the time he was 20 years old and a college student, Velasquez had already faced numerous beatings and arrests. But in 1967, with the help of his father and others, Velasquez organized FLOC among migrant field workers picking tomatoes in Ohio.
FLOC's initial organizing strategy was to focus on workers, as most unions did. FLOC organizers followed migrant workers year-round, moving south to Texas and Florida every winter to build an organizing base. By 1977, however, FLOC had only 700 members. (more...)
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The Great American Boycott (Spanish: El Gran Paro Estadounidense, lit. "the Great American Strike") was a one-day boycott of United States schools and businesses by immigrants in the United States, of mostly Latin American origin that took place on May 1, 2006. The date was chosen by boycott organizers to coincide with May Day, the International Workers Day observed as a national holiday in Asia, most of Europe, and Mexico, but not officially recognized in the United States due to its Communist associations.
As a continuation of the 2006 U.S. immigration reform protests, the organizers called for supporters to abstain from buying, selling, working, and attending school, in order to attempt to demonstrate through the extent to which the labor obtained of illegal immigrants is needed. Supporters of the boycott rallied in major cities across the U.S. to demand general amnesty and legalization programs for illegal aliens. For this reason, the day is referred to as A Day Without an Immigrant in reference to the 2004 political satire film A Day Without a Mexican.
In a show of solidarity, internationally, labor unions and other groups engaged in a one-day boycott of U.S. products called the "Nothing Gringo Boycott", particularly in Mexico and Central American countries. (more...)
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La Bamba is a 1987 American biographical film written and directed by Luis Valdez that follows the life and career of Chicano rock 'n' roll star Ritchie Valens. The film stars Lou Diamond Phillips as Valens, Esai Morales, Rosanna DeSoto, Elizabeth Peña, Danielle von Zerneck, and Joe Pantoliano. The film also covers the effect that Valens' career had on the lives of his half-brother Bob Morales, his girlfriend Donna Ludwig and the rest of his family.
This production had the full support of the Valenzuela family. The real Bob Morales and Connie Valenzuela came to the set to help the actors portray their characters accurately, and Connie (in life known as "Concha") makes a cameo appearance as an older lady sitting next to Ritchie at the family's first party. (more...)
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The San Elizario Salt War also known as the Salinero Revolt or the El Paso Salt War, was an extended and complex political, social and military conflict over ownership and control of immense salt lakes at the base of the Guadalupe Mountains of West Texas. What began in 1866 as a political and legal struggle among Anglo Texan politicians and capitalists gave rise to an armed struggle waged in 1877 by the ethnic Mexican inhabitants living in the communities on both sides of the Rio Grande near El Paso, Texas against a leading politician, supported by the Texas Rangers. The struggle climaxed with the siege and surrender of 20 Texas Rangers to a popular army of perhaps 500 men in the town of San Elizario, Texas. The arrival of the African-American 9th Cavalry and a sheriff's posse of New Mexico mercenaries caused hundreds of Tejanos to flee to Mexico, some in permanent exile. The right of individuals to own the salt lakes previously held as a community asset was established by force of arms. (more...)
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Self-Help Graphics & Art, Inc. is a community arts center in East Los Angeles, California, USA. Formed during the cultural renaissance that accompanied the Chicano Movement, Self Help, as it is sometimes called, was one of the primary centers that incubated the nascent Chicano Art movement, and remains important in the Chicano art movement, as well as in the greater Los Angeles community, today. As a center of culture, SHG also hosts musical and other performances, and organizes Los Angeles's annual Day of the Dead festivities. Throughout its history, the organization has worked with well-known artists in the Los Angeles area such as Los Four and the East Los Streetscapers, but it has focused primarily on training and giving exposure to young and new artists, many of whom have gone on to national and international prominence. (more...)