The (Re)Rise of Spain

The United States' relationship with the nations to our South has long fascinated me. By using "America" as the universal shorthand name of our nation, we make clear how insignificant we consider the 20 nations to our south, each of which could just as easily be called "America".

America is not a country; it is a hemisphere. The United States is largely a legacy of England. France's legacy in the new world has been relegated to Quebec and isolated parts of Louisiana. Portugal's legacy lies in the rising behemoth of Brazil. But Spain's legacy in the new world dwarfs that of England, France, or Portugal. And it is growing.

It was the king and queen of Spain, after all, who financed and sponsored the European discovery of the New World. And while England founded what would become the dominant nation in the Americas (and eventually, the World), it is Spain's influence which runs deeper and wider.

Spain and England both have obvious linguistic legacies in the Western Hemisphere. Most people on our half of the world speak either Spanish or English (or both). But Spain's legacy runs deeper, and it is uniquely "American".

The tragedy of the "discovery" of the Americas was the near-extinction of Native Americans, which was accomplished by germs far more often than by guns. But in the Spanish sphere of the Americas, unlike in the English sphere, the Native Americans survived in a sense.

Most Spanish speakers in the Americas today are descendants of the offspring of European Spaniards and Native Americans, which is why most of them are not "white". Most English speakers, on the other hand, are "white".

In North America, there was relatively little mixing between Europeans and Native Americans. So when Native Americans died, they disappeared. But in the central and southern parts of the hemisphere, there was mass mixing between the cultures.

So today, in the United States, 70% of the students in my classrooms have the complexion of Native Americans and speak Spanish as a first language. There simply is no equivalent in the English spheres. Most of my Spanish-speaking students are from the Dominican Republic, on the island of Hispaniola, where Columbus landed on Spanish ships in 1492.

500 years on, it appears that the Americas are, linguistically and ethnically, far more Spanish and Native American than they are English. As time passes and demographics inexorably create a "new" reality, the Americas will be dominated by the (diluted) blood of the natives and the language of the original conquerors.