Quote:
Originally Posted by Capsicum
Would you consider anywhere in the US with historical Spanish-speaking communities going back to when it was either Mexico or New Spain, to have such Spanish speakers be a quasi charter or co-charter group?
Or would the US only have Anglo settlers as the sole charter group?
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That's a tuffy.
I don't feel strongly either way about that but my sense is that all the Spanish place names and the current high number of Spanish speakers especially in the SW US gives a somewhat misleading picture of how historically entrenched all of that is.
In much of that region the original Europeans to go there were Spanish or Mexican but there was very little societal organization and population beyond an archipelago of isolated missions.
Organized education in Spanish for example never existed virtually anywhere in what is today the southwestern U.S., not even in South Texas which is a long-established Hispanic majority region. (Contrary to most other areas of the southwest which were controlled by Spain or Mexico, but sparsely populated. A lot of these areas have lots of Hispanics today, but they actually came after the anglos.)
In fact, one of the arguments made in the Texas Declaration of Independence (made by anglos of course) to justify independence from Mexico was that the Mexicans had never even set up the slightest education system for the area’s population, and as such was proof of their neglect of the place.
You only really had any level of true settlement and societal organization (including a handful of schools) in a very small part of north-central New Mexico around Santa Fe.
Another thing is that families who are Spanish-dominant intergenerationally going back to the Spanish or Mexican eras are extremely rare. The vast majority of people are assimilated and if bilingual they speak Spanish as a second language at best.
So basically it's the long-established who are assimilated and the newcomers from Mexico or other parts of Latin American "replace them" (so to speak) as Spanish speakers, and even outnumber them in most cases. To the point where the numbers and percentages of Hispanics and Spanish speakers in the SW US are higher today than they've ever been in the past 100-150 years. This is almost entirely due to immigration as opposed to the dynamism or re-awakening of the locals who are descended from the region's first Spanish-Mexican settlers.
Finally, I am not really sure that outside of a tiny minority that very many Hispanic Americans dream of Aztlan or reconquista or of making these regions Spanish speaking areas. Yes, millions of people in the US do spend much, most of all their day speaking in Spanish. But that's because *they can*, not usually because there is a political motivation or statement behind it. I am pretty sure that every single Hispanic American parent will tell you that they want their kids to succeed - as Americans. It's not really about their kids being pioneers in some kind of conspiracy to take over the SW US or South Florida. Of course, there are bumps along the way in their integration - I fully recognize this aspect of the dynamic.
Anyway, I suppose this makes it sound like I am taking the anglo side of the argument, but really none of this is up to me to decide.
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Eh, I had to quote this twice. "to the ones who this matters"? and "is not their space"?
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