The region known as Hispanic America ( or ) and historically as Spanish America () is all the Spanish-speaking countries of the Americas. In all of these countries, Spanish is the main language - sometimes sharing official status with one or more indigenous languages (such as Guaraní, Quechua, Aymara, or Mayan) or English (in Puerto Rico), and Roman Catholicism is the predominant religion.
Hispanic America is sometimes grouped together with Brazil under the term "Ibero-America", meaning those countries in the Americas with cultural roots in the Iberian Peninsula. Hispanic America also contrasts with Latin America, which includes not only Hispanic America, but also Brazil (the former Portuguese America) and the former French colonies in the Western Hemisphere (areas that are now in either the United States or Canada are usually excluded).
History
The Spanish conquest of the Americas began in 1492, and ultimately was part of a larger historical process of world discovery, through which various European powers colonized a considerable amount of territory and peoples in the Americas, Asia, and Africa between the 15th and 20th centuries. Hispanic America became the main part of the vast Spanish Empire. Napoleon's intervention in Spain in 1808 and the consequent chaos initiated the dismemberment of the Spanish Empire, as the Hispanic American territories began their struggle for emancipation. By 1830, the only remaining Spanish American territories were the islands of Cuba and Puerto Rico, until the 1898 Spanish–American War.
The 26th of July Movement, led by Fidel Castro, seized power in Cuba on 1 January 1959, overthrowing Fulgencio Batista's pro-US government. Castro nationalized Cuba's fruit resources, driving the United Fruit Company out, and his purchase of oil from the USSR led to a deterioration of relations with the US, leading to the failed 1961 Bay of Pigs Invasion by Cuban exiles, and in 1962 the Cuban Missile Crisis almost sparked World War III. Castro's revolution was only the first of its kind in Hispanic America. Leftist governments rose to power across the region, so the United States resorted to backing coups, such as the 1954 overthrow of the popular Jacobo Arbenz Guzman in Guatemala and the ouster of Juan Bosch in 1965 in the Dominican Republic, the latter of which led to the Dominican Civil War and the US occupation of the republic that year. The United States supported coups that installed dictators in Chile, Uruguay, and other countries, and they set up the School of the Americas to train future dictators like Leopoldo Galtieri of Argentina and Manuel Noriega of Panama. Some dictators' rules led to civil wars, such as the Nicaraguan Civil War, Salvadoran Civil War, and Guatemalan Civil War in the 1970s-1990s, and the United States backed governments that used death squads to massacre villagers and priests accused of siding with leftists. These civil wars would end with the end of the Cold War, resulting in the communist guerrillas becoming legal political parties, and many of them would proceed to rule over the country, such as the Sandinistas of Nicaragua and FMLN of El Salvador.
Demographics
Countries
Largest cities
Ethnology
The population of the Hispanic America is made up of the descendants of two large ethnic groups and their combinations:
• The Indigenous peoples of the Americas, descendants of Incas, Aztecs, Mayan and others.
• Those of European ancestry, mainly Spanish, and Italian; less, French.
Unlike in the United States, there were no anti-miscegenation policies in Latin America. Though still a racially stratified society there were no significant barriers to gene flow between the three populations. As a result, admixture profiles are a reflection of the colonial populations of Africans, Europeans and Amerindians. The pattern is also sex biased in that the African and Amerindian maternal lines are found in significantly higher proportions than African or Amerindian Y chromosomal lines. This is an indication that the primary mating pattern was that of European males with Amerindian or African females. According to the study, half the White populations of the Latin American countries studied have some degree of either Native American or African admixture (MtDNA or Y chromosome). In countries such as Chile and Colombia almost the entire white population was shown to have some non-European admixture.