The share of Latinos in the U.S. who are … The Mexicans who decided to stay in what was now U.S. territory were granted citizenship and the country gained a considerable Mexican-American population. READ MORE: Hispanic Heritage: Full Coverage. In 1945, along with four other families, they filed a class action lawsuit against four Orange County school districts. –United Stated Census Bureau, Educational Attainment of the Population 18 Years and Over, by Age, Sex, Race, and Hispanic Origin: 2014. In 2016, 52 percent of Latinos surveyed by Pew said they had experienced discrimination. There are a few theories about the origins of Chicano, including that it comes from mexicano (pronounced meshicano), a word that some “groups of Nahuas (Indigenous speakers of Nahuatl) began calling their language,” writes David Bowles, an author and professor at the University of Texas Rio Grande Valley. Their goal: Ensure that all children could attend California schools regardless of race. Though Latino deemphasized the connection to Spain, some still rejected the term as it attempted to group several distinct cultures into one. On February 18, 1946, he ruled that the school districts discriminated against Mexican-American students and violated their Constitutional rights. Another little-remembered facet of anti-Latino discrimination in the United States is school segregation. Latino students were expected to attend separate “Mexican schools” throughout the southwest beginning in the 1870s. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which marked the war’s end, granted 55 percent of Mexican territory to the United States. Nevertheless, Latino people were excluded from restaurants, movie theaters and schools. While not every Mexican or Mexican American would use the term, it gained traction, including among Mexican Americans who were fighting for civil rights. “But Hispanic was helpful because it seemed more American.”. Lynchings, “repatriation” programs and school segregation may be in the past, but anti-Latino discrimination in the U.S. is far from over. Each year, we celebrate the history and culture of Hispanic and Latino Americans and their contributions to society. Immigrants are a declining share of the Latino population. By 1920, they had “virtually disappeared,” Gutiérrez writes. There were nearly 60 million Latinos in the United States in 2017, accounting for approximately 18% of the total U.S. population. The United States historically had few Hispanics, Asians, and Native Americans, especially before the late twentieth century. For more, read the accompanying blog post, “ Key facts about U.S. Hispanics and their diverse heritage.” Based on the 2010 census, Hispanics are now the largest minority group in 191 out of 366 metropolitan areas in the United States. It was created by English-speaking U.S. Latinx people for use in English conversation.”. Some have fallen out of favor, while others have evolved. At first, the schools were set up to serve the children of Spanish-speaking laborers at rural ranches. The violence began during California’s Gold Rush just after California became part of the United States. It took seven months for Judge Paul J. McCormick to render a decision. The National Council of La Raza, known today as UnidosUS, led in lobbying the Census Bureau to change the way it categorized Latinos and uniting Puerto Ricans and Mexicans to “hammer out a Hispanic agenda.”, “In the late 1960s and early 1970s as people in the Census Bureau and bureaucrats in the Nixon administration were thinking about what this new group would be called, Hispanic became a term that people thought would probably be well-known because it was linked to hispano,” Mora says. School segregation, lynchings and mass deportations of Spanish-speaking U.S. citizens are just some of the injustices Latinos have faced. Mexican American Immigration, and Discrimination, Begins The story of Latino-American discrimination largely begins in 1848, when the United States won the Mexican-American War. But Ramón A. Gutiérrez, a Preston & Sterling Morton Distinguished Service Professor of United States history at the University of Chicago, explains that it was previously a Spanish-language word that came from Latino America, which Colombian writer José María Torres Caicedo helped popularize. At age 8, Mendez played a pivotal role in a 1946 landmark court case that desegregated California schools. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! Let's take a look at some of their influence on American culture. We continue to track different racial and ethnic groups today. These and other horrific acts of cruelty lasted until the 1920s, when the Mexican government began pressuring the United States to stop the violence. Then Mendez’s parents fought back. FACT CHECK: We strive for accuracy and fairness. The bare-bones facilities offered to students like Mendez lacked basic supplies and sufficient teachers. Since 1988, the U.S. Government has set aside the period from September 15 to October 15 as National Hispanic Heritage Month to honor the many contributions Hispanic Americans have made and continue to make to the United States of America. Others, like Rodriguez’s father, did not wait for raids or enforcement and returned to Mexico independently to escape discrimination and the fear of removal. It could have also been a nod to the use of X during the Civil Rights Movement in the United States. Hispanic History Hispanic Heritage Month is an annual celebration of the history and culture of the U.S. Latinx and Hispanic communities. Today, an estimated 54 million Latinos live in the U.S. and around 43 million people speak Spanish. Some have offered “Latino” as an alternative. Some even argued non-Latino whites imposed the word on Latinos. Ever since the first census, the Census Bureau has tracked different racial groups (in the 1790 census, for the sake of allocating votes according to the Three-Fifths Compromise). Throughout the 1960s, Latino-American and Mexican-American history departments opened at many major universities. Though no formal decree was ever issued by immigration authorities, INS officials deported about 82,000 people during the period. Children were arbitrarily forced to attend based on factors like their complexion and last name. Many leave for Europe and the United States and the 14th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution is adopted, declaring all people of Hispanic origin born in the United States as U.S. citizens. As one victim of “repatriation” told Raymond Rodriguez, who wrote a history of the period, Decade of Betrayal, “They might as well have sent us to Mars.”. Heart disease and cancer in Hispanics are the two leading causes of death, accounting for about 2 of 5 deaths, which is about the same for whites. The impact on Spanish-speaking communities was devastating. Instead of going to the pristine, well-appointed 17th Street Elementary, she was told to attend Hoover Elementary—a dilapidated, two-room shack. The History and Politics of Hispanic and Latino Panethnicities.” Newspapers from the 1850s reveal that in San Francisco, for example, the term “Hispano-Americanos” appeared in ads. They estimate that the number of Latinos killed by mobs reach well into the thousands, though definitive documentation only exists for 547 cases. Mob violence against Spanish-speaking people was common in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, according to historians William D. Carrigan and Clive Webb. The railroad and other companies flouted existing immigration laws that banned importing contracted labor and sent recruiters into Mexico to convince Mexicans to emigrate. Meanwhile, 54 percent used “their family’s Hispanic origin term (such as Mexican, Cuban Salvadoran) to identify themselves” and 23 percent used “American” most commonly. Immigration agents blocked exits and arrested around 400 people, who were then deported to Mexico, regardless of their citizenship or immigration status. their own distinct political and cultural identities. Hispanic and Latin Americans come from diverse social, economic, and geographic backgrounds making them all very different depending on their family heritage and national origin. Another possibility is that Chicano is a result of hypocorism. And many of them have a history as complicated as trying to unify multiple nationalities under one banner. The raid was just one incident in a long history of discrimination against Latino people in the United States. The following are lists of the Hispanic and Latino population per each state in the United States.. As of 2012, Hispanics and Latinos make up about 17% of the total U.S. population. The U.S. has a long and largely forgotten history of violence against Latinos, ... anti-Latino sentiment.” ... And so it was celebrated as an era of nation-building in the United States. © 2020 A&E Television Networks, LLC. Hispanic peopleare those coming from areas where Spanish is spoken, especially from Latin America. If there is a group made up of women, they can be described as “ellas.” If there is a group with men and women, it defaults to the masculine (ellos instead of ellas). (When asked, officials conceded that they never gave students proficiency tests.) “It’s basically using baby talk,” Bowles says. His wife refused to accompany him and the family never saw him again. Anglo-Americans treated them as a foreign underclass and perpetuated stereotypes that those who spoke Spanish were lazy, stupid and undeserving. Immigration from Latin America—and the attendant growth of the nation's Hispanic or Latino population—are two of the most important and controversial developments in the recent history of the United States. But by the 1960s, the word had changed. In the late 1920s, anti-Mexican sentiment spiked as the Great Depression began. One of the first mentions of Chicano in print is in Spanish-language newspaper La Crónica in 1911, where it was used as a slur against “less cultured” Mexican Americans and recent immigrants. For some Mexicans who shunned Latino and Hispanic, this meant turning to the word “Chicano.”. The terms Latino, Hispanic and Latinx are often used interchangeably to describe a group that makes up about 18 percent of the U.S. population. Few people, however, know what a major impact Latinos have had on the course of U.S. history. Mexican-Americans hold a rally at the California state capitol to protest discrimination. Among major industries, 27.3 percent of workers in construction were of Hispanic or Latino ethnicity in 2014. Latino and Hispanic activists also pushed educational institutions to include the contributions of Latinos and Hispanics in discussions of U.S. History. He became the first Hispanic four-star general of the United States Army in 1982, and received a number of military honors, including the distinguished … Though Latinos were critical to the U.S. economy and often were American citizens, everything from their language to the color of their skin to their countries of origin could be used as a pretext for discrimination. The appearance of the term was borne from decades of lobbying. Sor Juana Inês de la Cruz – 17th century feminist writer and thinker. © 2020 A&E Television Networks, LLC. In 1954, a decade after Mendez was turned away from the whites-only elementary school, the United States Supreme Court ruled that all school segregation based on race was unconstitutional in Brown v. Board of Education. But the case accomplished much more than that. Our little subgroup of the community created that. Hispanic/Latino Americans make up a diverse group that includes people of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South and Central American, and other Spanish cultures, and all races. Though both the state of California and the city of Los Angeles apologized for repatriation in the early 2000s, the deportations have largely faded from public memory. In 1851, for example, a mob of vigilantes accused Josefa Segovia of murdering a white man. Before 1980, those of Latin American descent were considered Spanish-speaking, having Spanish origin or white on the census. Around one third of Los Angeles’ Mexican population left the country, as did a third of Texas’ Mexican-born population. As fears about jobs and the economy spread, the United States forcibly removed up to 2 million people of Mexican descent from the country—up to 60 percent of whom were American citizens. At the time, white miners begrudged former Mexicans a share of the wealth yielded by Californian mines—and sometimes enacted vigilante justice. Capt. There are a few possibilities about how the word came to be. The U.S. is the fifth largest Hispanic country in the world. But if you see something that doesn't look right, click here to contact us! The first time the federal government used the word Hispanic in a census was 1980. “Mexicans are inferior in personal hygiene, ability and in their economic outlook,” said one official. While Hispanic may have utility, the term has been criticized for highlighting Spain, which colonized much of Latin America. Yet, as long as there have been people from Latin American countries living in the United States, there have been words to describe them. Most Asian Americans historically lived in the western United States. In 1911, a mob of over 100 people hanged a 14-year-old boy, Antonio Gómez, after he was arrested for murder. While it’s now common to use umbrella terms to categorize those with ties to more than 20 Latin American countries, these words haven’t always fostered a sense of community among the people they’re supposed to describe. For example, a popular bumper sticker declaring, “Don’t Call Me Hispanic, I’m Cuban!” circulated in Miami during the early 1990s, according to Mora. “Latino is short for Latino Americano,” he says. But though Latinos are the country’s largest minority, anti-Latino prejudice is still common. After a fake trial, they marched her through the streets and lynched her. In the United States, Hispanics are the largest minority (there are more Hispanics in the U.S. than in any other country, except Mexico!). Sometimes, private employers drove their employees to the border and kicked them out. In the United States the terms "Hispanic" and "Latino" (or "Latina" for a woman; sometimes written as “Latinx” to be gender-neutral) were adopted in an attempt to loosely group immigrants and their descendants who hail from this part of the world. In 2014, Hispanics and Latinos accounted for 16.1 percent of the 146.3 million employed people in the United States. Hispanic or Latino ethnicity is defined as being "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race." From the 1970s to the 1990s, as feminists protested, they would X out words ending in “OS” to “visually… reject the notion that the default is the masculine,” Bowles says. (Credit: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty Images). According to the 2010 Census, Hispanics accounted for more than half of the growth in United States population between 2000 and 2010. For those who fall outside the gender binary, this word fails to represent them, which is where the gender neutral “Latinx” comes into play. Zoot Suit Riots. Twice a week we compile our most fascinating features and deliver them straight to you. When deportations finally ended around 1936, up to 2 million Mexican-Americans had been “repatriated.” (Because many of the repatriation attempts were informal or conducted by private companies, it is nearly impossible to quantify the exact number of people who were deported.) California (7.9 million) alone … “Because the word was in regular use at that time,” Bowles says, “it was kind of this way of reclaiming the slur and using it for a political Latinx identity.”. He argued that the policy trampled on Latino children’s Constitutional rights. The latter frustrated Mexican-American activists because they had no data to prove that their communities needed resources for programs, such as job training. An Historic Overview of Latino Immigration and the Demographic Transformation of the United States David G. Gutiérrez. Grace Flores-Hughes, who claims to have come up with the term Hispanic for the Census, pictured at her Alexandria home in 2003. Even children became the victims of this violence. When Carol Torres, a 14-year-old Latino girl, took the stand, she immediately proved that Mexican-American students in the district could and did speak English. Many only provided vocational classes or did not offer a full 12 years of instruction. The state with the largest Hispanic and Latino population overall is California with over 14 million Hispanics and Latinos. She was awarded a Presidential Medal of Freedom in 2010—and now, two Los Angeles-area schools are named after her parents. Thanks to Mendez v. Westminster School District, California officially ended all segregation in its schools. Euphemistically referred to as “repatriations,” the removals were anything but voluntary. Mendez, who was eight when the lawsuits began, later told reporters that she thought her parents were fighting for her right to attend a school with a nice playground. With 66,000 Latinos turning 18 every single month, that force is vast enough to transform the political balance of our governments. The term Latino gradually re-emerged in English, appearing in books and even in a 1970 White House diary entry by Claudia “Lady Bird” Johnson. “White people did not make up Latinx,” he says. In 1931, police officers grabbed Mexican-Americans in the area, many of them U.S. citizens, and shoved them into waiting vans. Much like the other words used to describe those of Latin American descent, Latinx has faced some pushback—from arguments that it’s difficult to pronounce to the Real Academia Española, the institution tasked with maintaining the consistency of the Spanish language, saying it’s unnecessary. Some light-skinned Mexican-Americans attempted to pass themselves off as Spanish, not Mexican, in an attempt to evade enforcement. They are the ones who used the word. Yara Simón is a Nicaraguan-Cuban-American journalist and author. The United States has had a pretty complicated history with different racial groups. By the 1940s, as many as 80 percent of Latino children in places like Orange County, California attended separate schools. But though mob brutality eventually quelled, hatred of Spanish-speaking Americans did not. Hispanic refers to those from Spain and other Spanish-speaking countries, which excludes Brazilians. A Brief History of Latino Voting Rights Since the 1960s Culture While 1980 marked a milestone, this pan-ethnic term didn’t really catch on until about the 1990s. But though the bright tourist destination teems with visitors, few realize it was once the site of a terrifying raid. Among them was Sylvia Mendez, a young girl who was turned away from an all-white school in the county. In other cases, local governments cut off relief, raided gathering places or offered free train fare to Mexico. Rather than let him serve time in jail, townspeople lynched him and dragged his body through the streets of Thorndale, Texas. However, as Mora explains, it’s possible that Hispanic was in use before then. Others were attacked on suspicion of fraternizing with white women or insulting white people. The word existed long before the 1960s. Grace Flores-Hughes, who worked as a secretary in what was then known as the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, has said she coined the term. What Happened: In the 1940s, tensions in California rose between Chicanos and the … In 1980, with a population of 14.8 million, Hispanics made up just 6.5% of the total U.S. population. Soon, they spread into cities, too. The majority of the U.S. population is Mexican American, followed in size by Central and South Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cuban Americans. Anti-Latino sentiment grew along with immigration. Hispanic population is much younger than the rest of the country, less educated, less wealthy, with a very large immigrant component, of no less than two dozen national origins and of every race, with a longer life expectancy than their fellow Americans, and geographica Before activists, the media and government officials worked to group these identities into one, they were seen as separate. “If you think about nicknames, Spanish nicknames, if you’re Ignacio, you’re called ‘Nacho.’ Graciela, you’re called ‘Chela.’ It’s possible that that could be some type of hypocorism behind the change from mexicano to Chicano—a playful kind of thing.”.