Hispanic/Latino Culture

At my understanding, the term Hispanic is wrongly used when referring to a race. Being Hispanic is, of course, to belong to an ethnic group, but it is much more than that. It is not about the color of your skin or your hair, but about culture, tradition, and manners. All started with the Spanish and Portuguese colonization of South and Central America. From Europe came the adventurous men, full of ambitions and courage. These attributes blended with the strength and energy of African slaves and the Native Americans, and this mixture led to the born of this new culture that we called Hispanic.

Immigration has always been an issue in the United States, which is often portrayed as harmful and as major threat to American culture. As a result, various anti immigration policies have been aimed against immigrants in order to prevent and preserve the miscegenation of American culture, such as English only policies. Among the largest minority groups in the U.S, are Latinos who currently compose of 15% of the U.S population (Delgado and Stefancic 3). Unfortunately, Latinos have been accused of taking American benefits, jobs, and have wrongfully been depicted as a result of not assimilating to American culture. Latinos are often accused of resisting assimilation, but what has failed to be acknowledged is that there are obstacles set in

Immigration of Latinos has long caused cultural conflict, especially when it comes to the illegal immigration of Latinos. Unfortunately, the issue has long been debated and there seems to be no clear cut answer on how to resolve the problem. Many Americans often overlook the struggles that Latinos endure and place stereotypes upon this group of people that are untrue. Furthermore, most Americans are misinformed or uninformed about the other side of this hot issue. The purpose of this essay is to give the reader a better understanding of Latino immigration from a cultural perspective and what these immigrants, both legal and illegal experience when relocating to a new country as well as a brief discussion on the issue of immigration reform.

Hispanics or Latinos are defined as a people of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish speaking culture. This term “Hispanics” was created by the U.S. federal government in the early 1970’s to refer to Americans born in a Spanish speaking nation or with ancestry to Spanish territories. Hispanics people are vibrant, socializing, and fun loving people. Among various facts associated to this culture is that they have a deep sense of involvement in their family traditions and cultures.

Latinos rather than Hispanic-Americans will be used in this entry since the former term is considered as more inclusive. Latinos refer to people living in the United States, who originally were from Spanish- and Portuguese speaking countries in Latin America as well as Spain and Portugal. The term Hispanics refers to people from Spanish speaking countries, which would encompass Latin America (except for Brazil where Portuguese is the predominant language) and Spain. “Hispanic” is a term used in the United States, which originated in 1980 with the U.S. Census Bureau. This term is not used in Latin America and Spain.

´ El Dia De Los Muertos.’ Mexicans have many unusual traditions that they celebrate. Mexicans eat a lot of different foods, for example, most Mexicans eat menudo pozole, and tamales. That's all part of Mexican culture. For fun, most Mexicans like playing soccer. Read furthermore, to Mexican culture.

Currently within the United States one of the fastest growing minority population (Schwartz & Scott, 2012) is the Latinos. In 2010 Census Bureau Brief ( Ennis, Rois-Vargas, & Albert, 2011) it stated how an estimated 15 million Latino individuals were living within the United States, which is approximately about 16% of the entire U.S. population. There is one big problem with addressing the Latino population, and that is the family patterns are either misrepresented or not properly understood, due to the label of Hispanic and Latinos being placed together. These two groups may share the same spoken language of Spanish and have similar cultural ancestry but the diversity among Hispanic and Latinos (Schwartz & Scott, 2012) make generalizations about their lifestyles difficult. The term Hispanic came to be used in the 1970’s by government officials (cdc.gov, 2011) in trying to provide a diverse label on this population that had connections to speaking Spanish and the Spanish culture. Latino became more of a termed to be used when distinguishing between Mexican (Hispanics) and Latinos who descendants from Latin America such as Cuba and Puerto Rico.

The study highlighted how the viewpoints Latinos hold on subject matters such as immigration, abortion, self-identification, family relations, vary based on which generation they pertain to and the degree of assimilation they have undergone. A common trend pointed out in the study was that the more assimilated a Latino was, the more likely they were to hold conservative views on immigration, despite the fact that their grandparents were immigrants. The 2005 study found that those believing that, “’immigrants to the

Immigrating to a new country is difficult. One of the largest groups of immigrants that migrate to the United States are the Hispanics. There are approximately 11.7 million immigrants in the United States as of January 2010, and the amount continues to increase at a rapid rate (Warren, 2013). On average there are approximately 300,000 Hispanic immigrants entering the United States each year (Warren, 2013). Hispanics come from all Latin America including Mexico, the islands of the Caribbean, Cuba, and Puerto Rico, Central and South America (Warren, 2013). The United States has represented liberty and freedom to these individuals, and they often make critical decisions and take chances in the hope of a better future. Individuals often, leave their home country in hopes of a new beginning. The aim of this paper is to provide an extensive research on the current literature on immigration and acculturation among the Hispanic population.

According to Huntington, unlike previous immigrants, Hispanics wish to retain a dual culture. This presents them with the culture clash of two varying views on culture as well as education. There are several factors that have made this culture of immigrants assimilations’ so much different than the past immigrants that America has so fondly welcomed with open arms. These include contiguity, scale illegality regional concentration, persistence and historical presence.

The culture I choose to explore is the Hispanic culture. I choose this culture because many of the people I work with and many of my friends identify with the Hispanic culture and I feel it would be interesting to know more about a culture that is so relevant to my life. A few of the big things in Hispanic culture that I found interesting are language, traditions and food. Hispanic refers to a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture.

The Hispanic community accounts for the largest minority in the United States. The United States Census Bureau reported as of July 2006, the percentage of Hispanics in the nation had grown to 15. This percentage excludes the 3.9 million Puerto Ricans whom call America their home. This number puts the United States ranking third worldwide for largest Hispanic populations, with Mexico and Colombia holding the first and second ranking respectively (Pew Hispanic Center, 2009). The Hispanic community is diverse in itself, although non-Hispanics may have panethnic views of the group as simply Latino or Hispanic, this group is made up of Mexican Americans, Puerto

The only racial group that the United States Census calculates and measured as in individual group is the Latino/Hispanic culture. According to the U.S. Census, a Latino/Hispanic individual can be of several nationalities. When we talk about cultural class, we must realize there are a lot of variables that may contribute to the racial group that can stump some individuals on what is deemed to be a Hispanic individual or something distinctive. Around the time period of the twentieth century the census gave the authorization to classify the Hispanic culture within the United States Census. The terminology of Latino/Hispanic has produced a lot of misunderstanding throughout society. In the Forties, our current President Theodore Roosevelt made a contract in which we had made agreements with Mexico. In spite of this, when three migrants were not permitted residency because they were not Caucasian, the president avoided the bylaw and calculated Hispanics and Mexicans as Caucasians, in so doing permitting access and residency to the United States. In the year 2000, Hispanic was thought to be several races. Some of the Hispanic cultures or Subcultures that fall into this category are the Cuban's, Puerto Rican's, central and South American's, Dominican,

A diverse minority group of Latino and Spanish-speaking peoples has played an important part of what it means to be American and what it means to be a citizen in the United States today. Moving into the future, in order to analyze the trajectory that this group is in, we must first understand the group’s history in the United States and in territories that would become the United States. In addition, we must look at the origins of the most recent wave of Latino immigration in order to understand their current effect on American society and the intersection between both minority and majority groups. Finally, we get to the apex of this investigation: what lies in the future for Latino Americans in the United States? Although Latino

The United States of America is considered a melting pot of heritages and nationalities from all around the world. There is no official language, and no one culture all citizens abide by. Despite the fact that everyone in this country is different from one another, there is still a constant uniform citizen that has a more favorable position. This citizen is white, English-speaking, and somehow always in the front of the public sphere. In the recent years, there has been an increasingly dominant Latino presence in America. Their strength in numbers challenges there being a poster American citizen, and that that citizen will remain white. When working to assimilate to America’s “culture,” Lations seem to believe that there is one America, within which people speak a singular language and experience one culture. The pressure to assimilate stems from the white citizens of the country feeling threatened when there is a new culture and language, which they do not understand. As a result they feel personally threatened by the people who can speak both Spanish and English, and their response response involves marginalization and the obvious exclusion of Latino groups in the United States. There is a phenomenon, cultural citizenship, where Latinos perform their cultural practices to stretch their identity into the states, and practice their right to be authentic members of their community.