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Hispanic (Spanish: Hispano; Portuguese: Hispânico; Latin Hispānus, adjective from
Hispānia, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula) is a term that historically denoted relation to the ancient Hispania and its
peoples.
Historical Background
Prior to the marriage of Queen Isabella of Castile
and King Ferdinand of Aragon in 1469 the four
Christian kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula, the kingdom of Portugal, the Crown of Aragon, the Crown of Castile and the kingdom of Navarre were
collectively referred to as Hispania, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula. This usage, in
medieval times, appears to have originated in provençal and appears to be first documented at
the end of the 11th century. Indeed, in the Council of Constance the four kingdoms
shared one vote. Hello
Portugal adopted the word "Lusitanic" in reference to the
Lusitanians, one of the first Indo-European
tribes to settle in Europe from which later on derived the name of the Roman province of Lusitania, which was a part of Roman province of
Hispania. The expansion of the Spanish Empire between
1492 to 1898 brought thousands of Spanish migrants to new lands they had conquered, creating a large settlement that strech all
over the world and producing several multiracial populations.
During the 1970's, the United States Government defined the term "Hispanic" to identify Latin
American individuals living in the U.S.[1]
The term Hispanic
Etymology
Etymologically, the term "Hispanic" is derived from Hispania, the name given by the Romans to the Iberian Peninsula (present-day Spain, Portugal, Andorra and Gibraltar) during the
period of the Roman Republic. Hispanics has traditionaly been applied to Spain, Latin
America and to the countries that were part of the Spanish Empire. Some people use the term "Hispanic" in relation to Portugal
and its people (including Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Brazilians, however most
Portuguese and Brazilians are referred to as Luso/Lusophone.
Synonyms and antonyms
The term "Hispanic" is used synonymously along with the word "Latino" or "Latin" to identify
the people living with in the Spanish Empire. The word may also refer to it's language and cultural heritage.
The term "Latin" may refer to the conception of Latin America as a region, a word that was
introduced by the French people in the 1860s during their brief occupation of Mexico. The
issue was closely connected to the introduction of French positivism into the region's intellectual circles. [2] The French may have invented the word "Latin" to identify themselves and
other continental European Romance speaking nations, which was aimed to exclude their
English and Dutch colonial rivals in the Americas.
The confusion that arises between both terms is due to a misuse of the English meanings in the United States. The term
"Latino" is a shortened version of the noun "Latinoamericano", meaning Latin American. In the Spanish language version, the word
"Latín" is the name of the language used by the ancient Romans, while "Latino" is the name
given to the people who spoke the language. This means that "Latino" in Spanish is not confined solely to "Hispanics" and "Latin
Americans", but also included such European peoples including Italians, French,
Romanians and Portuguese.
Historical usage of the term
The languages of Spain. As can be seen in the map,
Spain has more languages than just the
Spanish. In addition, the old
Hispania also included
Portugal, so historically the
Portuguese can be
considered as a Hispanic language, although if we consider Hispanic as a synonym of
Spain, the map
shows the current
Spanish languages (simplified).
Spain's various subcultures coexist in Spain's provinces, and each one has its own traditions, and idiosyncracies. Some even have their own language, all of them along the dialectal continuum of Romance languages, with the
exception of the Basque language. As it is used today, the term Hispanic, however, often
refers only to cultural or ancestral background related to
Castilian-speaking Spain. This resulted from the former dictator, Fransisco Franco's
attempts to remove any signs of the sub-nations that today comprise Spain. The existence of multiple distinct cultures in Spain
allows an analogy to be drawn to the United Kingdom. Using the term Hispanic for someone
of Spanish descent would then be expected to be equivalent to using Briton to describe someone
descending from some part of the United Kingdom. Cultures within the United Kingdom, such as Anglo, Scottish and Welsh, would
then correspond in this analogy to cultures within Spain such as Castilian,
Catalan and Basque among others. It is a subtle,
yet important, distinction. In other countries, this distinction between the sub-nations that compose the country (for instance,
English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, Cornish, etc.) and the supra-nation that includes them (the United Kingdom) has been clear. In Spain, however, the politically
dominant territory (Castile) has often been taken to be equivalent to the
supra-nation (Spain). This has the effect of subordinating the role of other cultures within Spain
in constituting the national identity of Spain.
In the modern times, the Spanish and Portuguese-speaking peoples of the
New World have also adopted other cultural labels to
identify themselves. The most important of these labels is the term Latino, which stems from a contraction of latinoamericano
(Latin American)[3].
But the term Latino already has a meaning in Spanish,
which is, literally, Latin[4], and it is used to refer to all the Latin peoples, both from Europe
and the Americas. Therefore, using Latino as a contraction of
latinoamericano results in a corruption of the Spanish word of the same name.
Indeed, many of the people to whom the term Latino originally applied would no longer be identified as such under its present
usage.
The corruption of the terms Hispanic and Latino has been especially apparent in the
United States of America. In the latter parts of the 20th century, both terms went from being used as a cultural label of various cultures to being misused as a
racial label that describe mixed-race people, further confusing the meanings of the terms. The corruption of these terms has the
effect of racially grouping together the white population of Spain and Portugal with the large non white Castilian speaking
populations of Latin America, which is predominantly Amerindian. In additon, cultural and
linguistic issues related to Spaniards and Portuguese are often confused with those of
Mexicans or other Latin American people.
While some are conscious of this issue, many of the people to whom the labels Latino or Hispanic are applied are not aware of it.
As such, they often help perpetuate further misuse of these terms as racial labels instead of cultural ones, to the point that
today the term is excluding the Hispanics to whom the labels originally applied.
The Hispanics from Hispania
Hispanus, was the Latin name given to the people of Hispania, the Hispano-Romans. The Hispano-Romans were composed of people
from many different origins *tribes of Hispania. Some famous Hispanicus were Seneca the Elder,
Seneca the Younger, Lucan,
Martial, Prudentius, the Roman Emperor Trajan, the Roman
Emperor Theodosius I, the Roman Emperor
Marcus Aurelius and also Magnus Maximus and
Maximus of Hispania. The etymology of the words, Hispanic, Spanish and
Hispano-Roman, has the same Latin root name, Hispania , but the connotation of the original meaning of the root word has slightly
different meanings in the multiple derived modern English words:
- Hispano-Roman - is only used to refer to the culture and people of Hispania,
ancestors of the Portuguese and Spanish people. (historical
meaning).
- Hispanic - is used to refer to modern Spain, and to the Castilian language, and to the Spanish speaking nations of
the Americas.[2] [3]
- Spanish - is used to refer to the Castilian language, the culture and the people of Spain. (narrowing of meaning)
- Spaniard - is only used to refer to the people of Spain(narrowing of meaning).
- Hispania - - in English, as in Latin, it only refers to a province of the
Roman empire, the native land of the Hispano-Romans.
- Spain - is the name of a country, in the Iberian Peninsula.
Notice that, in History, when referring to Medieval Hispania, before the XV century, Hispanica has the same meaning as the
Iberian Peninsula has today, it was the Roman name of the peninsula that housed several Christian kingdoms. The peninsula then had two names: one of Latin origin,
Hispania, the other of Greek origin, Iberia, both referring to the same geographic region.
Portugal and Spain share one common Peninsula,
Iberian.
As said above, Spain is not a culturally homogeneous country. It is a country of contrasts and
the home to a wide range of subcultures, each one of which has its own traditions,
idiosyncrasy, and some of them have their own
language. Historically, as mentioned above, there has been a corruptions of the meaning of the term Hispanic, that has led
to great confusion and thus marginalizing the cultures that developed from the old
Hispania.
The meaning of Hispanic, refers only to the people with Spanish ancestry. This excludes the Portuguese which are always
referred as Luso or Lusitanic.
This section aims to clarify the lack of information existing on this subject through doing a brief review on the history of
Hispania and the peoples that inhabit
Spain today.
History of Hispania
Early history
-
The earliest record of hominids living in Europe has been
found in the cave of Atapuerca, in the Spanish province of Burgos, and it has become a key site for world palaeontology. Fossils found there are dated to roughly 1,000,000 years ago. The most conspicuous sign of prehistoric human settlements are the famous
paintings in the cave of Altamira, in
Cantabria, Spain, which were done ca. 15,000 BC and are regarded, along with those in Lascaux, France, as paramount instances of cave art.
Modern humans in the form of Cro-Magnons began arriving in
the Iberian Peninsula from north of the Pyrenees
some 35,000 years ago. This genetically
homogenous wave of population (characterized by the M173 mutation in the
Y chromosome), developed the M343 mutation, giving rise to
the R1b Haplogroup, which still dominant in
modern Portuguese and Spanish populations
(especially in the Basques). Meanwhile the Neanderthals became extinct; their last refuge was today's Portugal or
Gibraltar around 28,000 BC. Far later, some
12,000 years ago, an interstadial deglaciation
called the Allerød Oscillation occurred, weakening the rigorous conditions of the
last ice age. This also ended the Upper
Palaeolithic period, beginning the Mesolithic. The populations sheltered in
Iberia, descendants of the Cro-Magnon, given the
deglaciation, migrated and recolonized all of Western Europe, thus spreading the R1b Haplogroup populations (still dominat, in variant degrees, from Iberia to Scandinavia). Due to this fact, nowadays the genetical origins of most Europeans can be traced back to the Iberian
Peninsula.
Pre-Roman times
-
Pre-Roman population of the Iberian Peninsula.
The earliest urban culture documented in the Iberian Peninsula, is that of the
semi-mythical southern city of Tartessos, which dates back to much before the 1,100 BC. However, the Tartessians were not the only ones: apart from them,
the whole of the Iberian Peninsula was inhabited by other non-Indo-European peoples (Aquitanians and other
Proto-Basques, Iberians, Turdetani, Cynetes or Conii and others), by Indo-European peoples
(Proto-Celtics, Celtics and Lusitanians,and Iberians), There are some historians that try to dilute
the Celtic population of Spain by refering that population as Celt-Iberians. However, today this theory is rejected by the
Spanish-Celts, who proudly celebrate their Celtic heritage.
Far later, the seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and
Carthaginians began to settle along the Mediterranean coast. Around 1,100 BC, Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cádiz) near Tartessos. In the
9th century BC the first Greek colonies,
such as Emporion (modern Empúries, in Catalonia), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the East
of the Peninsula, leaving the southern coast to the Phoenicians. The Greeks are responsible for the name Iberia, apparently after the river Iber (Ebro in Spanish). In the 6th century BC the Carthaginians arrived in Iberia while struggling first with the
Greeks and shortly after with the Romans for
control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (Latin name of modern day Cartagena).
Roman Hispania
-
In 218 BC, the Romans disembarked in Emporion due to the break out of the Second Punic War, which
confronted Rome and Carthage, and thus started the
Conquest of Hispania, which would end in 17
BC. However, the Roman control of Hispania would
last much longer, until the beginnings of the 5th century, when Germanic tribes from the Northern Europe began to invade the
Peninsula.
Barbarian invasions and Visigothic Kingdom
-
At the beginnings of the 5th century, the Visigoths,
the Suevi (Quadi and Marcomanni) and the Buri, invaded the Peninsula and settled permanently. Others, like the Vandals
(Silingi and Hasdingi) and Alans were also present, before moving on to North Africa. Many words of
Germanic origin entered into the Latin that was spoken in Hispania by those times, and were then transmitted to the Romance
Languages that originated in the Peninsula during the Dark Ages, such as the Spanish, the Portuguese or the Catalan, and many more entered through
other avenues (often French) in the ensuing centuries[5]. The Visigoths established a Christian Kingdom that existed alongside the moors.
Muslim Occupation
-
The Umayyad occupation of parts of Hispania (711–718) commenced when an army of the Umayyad
Caliphate consisting largely of Moors, occupied Visigothic Christian Hispania
(Portugal and Spain) in the year 711. Under the authority of the
Umayyad caliph at Damascus, and led by the Berber general Tariq ibn
Ziyad, they landed at Gibraltar on April 30 and
worked their way northward. Tariq's forces were joined the next year by those of his superior, the Emir Musa ibn Nusair. During the eight-year campaign, many parts of the
Iberian Peninsula was brought under Moorish occupation
save for areas in the northwest (Galicia and Asturias)
and largely Basque regions in the Pyrenees. The occupied
territory, under the name al-Andalus, became part of the expanding Umayyad empire. The occupiers subsequently moved northeast across the Pyrenees, but were defeated by the
Frank Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. Moorish control of French territory ended in 975. Meanwhile, the Christian
Kingdoms of the Iberian Peninsula began theReconquista, or reconquest, of the
Peninsula with Pelayo of Asturias' victory at the Battle of Covadonga in 722. The Reconquista itself was a war that took 800 years to conclude.
Reconquista and the New World
-
The Reconquista (English: Reconquest) was the seven and a half century long war by
which the Christian kingdoms of northern Hispania (modern Portugal and Spain) squeezed
out, from the Iberian peninsula, the Muslim
Moorishoccupation of Al-Andalus. The Umayyad occupation of
parts of Hispania, which existed along side the ChristianVisigoths, occurred during the early
8th century. Almost immediately, in 718, Pelayo of Asturias, a noble Visigoth, lead the fight to push out
the Moors in the Asturias and establishes the Kingdom of Asturias. In 722, King Pelayo defeated a large force sent by Emir Munuza to
annihilate him at the Battle of Covadonga. He then lead an alliance of
Asturian and Cantabrian mountaineers in the counter-offensive
against the Muslims beginning what is know as La
Reconquista.
In 1236, the last Muslim occupation, which was in
Granada under Mohammed ibn Alhamar, was subjugated
by the Catholic King Ferdinand III of Castile, and thus Granada became a vassal state of the Christian kingdom for the next 250 years. On January 2 1492, the last Moorish leader of the
Moors, Abu 'abd Allah Muhammad XII (also known as Boabdil of Granada), was expelled from the Peninsula by Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs. This resulted in a Roman Catholic
Iberian Peninsula. Navarre remained separate until 1512
when the united kingdoms were ruled under one monarch. The Portuguese Reconquista had already culminated in 1249 with the subjugation of
Algarve by Afonso III.It was not until the 1800
that the united kingdoms were called Spain.
In 1492, the same year that Boabdil of Granada
surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs and the Expulsion of some of the Jews from Spain,
Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas,
inaugurating an age of Spanish colonization of the continent.
Notice that the Portuguese colonial expansion, which would give rise to
the Portuguese Empire (namely Brazil), had began in
1415.
Modern day peoples of Hispania
-
The modern day people that live in the region of ancient Hispania are the Portuguese,
Spanish, Andorra and Gibraltar people only. Historically, the modern country of Spain was formed by the accretion of
several independent Iberian kingdoms through dynastic inheritance, conquest and the
will of the local elites. These kingdoms had their own personalities and borders.
Since the beginning of the transition to democracy in Spain, after
the Francisco Franco dictatorship, there have been many movements towards more autonomy
in certain regions of the country in order to achieve full independence in some cases and to get their own autonomous community
in others.
Today, it is a fact that there does not exist something as straightforward as just one Castilian-Spanish identity for the
whole country. Many Spanish citizens feel no conflict in recognizing their several Spanish identities at the same time.
This section aims to describe the different subcultures that exist today in Spain and that have
systematically and historically been forgotten by the Castilian-speaking Spain, to
the detriment of the cultural richness of the country.
Aragonese
-
The Aragonese are a subculture or
nation living in the historical region of Aragon, in northeastern Spain. The original language of the region is
Aragonese, although now it is only natively spoken in the northern part of the
province of Huesca, in the Pyrenees.
Aranese
-
The Valley of Aran (Aranese: Val d'Aran, Catalan: Vall d'Aran) is a small shire (620.47
km²) in the northwestern part of Catalonia. It is
the source of the Garonne, and one of the highest valleys of the Pyrenees. Most of the valley constitutes the only Catalan territory on the
north face of the Pyrenees, hence the only part of Catalonia
whose waters drain into the Atlantic Ocean. The region is characterized by an
Atlantic climate, due to its peculiar orientation, which is different from other valleys in the
area.
The Valley of Aran has 7,130 inhabitants (as of 1996), which constitute a separate group from
the Catalans. About 5,000 of them speak the Aranese
language (aranés in Occitan/Gascon/Aranese), a variety of the Pyrenean Gascon (a dialect
of the Occitan language). The Aranese is one
of the three co-official languages of the Valley of Aran, along with Catalan and Castilian.
Asturians
-
The Asturians are a subculture or
nation living in the historical region of the Principality of Asturias, in the north of Spain. The original language of the
region is Asturian, as well as Eonavian
(transitional to Galician) in the border region with Galicia.
Basques
-
The US census classifies Spanish Basques as Western European non Hispanic, code
007 (see 2000 US Census ethnicity).
The Territory of the Basque Country (Basque: Euskal Herria, Castilian: País Vasco or
Vascongadas) is a cultural region in the western Pyrenees that spans the border between
France and Spain, extending down to the coast of the
Bay of Biscay. It corresponds more or less with the homeland of the Basque people and language. In Spain, the Basque Country is an autonomous
community with the status of historical region, the capital of which is Vitoria-Gasteiz (Vitoria is the
Castilian name, while Gasteiz is
Basque). It is part of the larger Basque speaking lands mentioned above.
The Basques (Basque: Euskaldunak, Castilian:
Vascos) are the people who inhabit the Basque Country. The name Basque derives from Medieval French and ultimately from the ancient tribe of the Vascones,[6] described by
Strabo as living south of the western Pyrenees and north of the
Ebro River, in modern day Navarre and northern Aragon. This name, of unknown etymology, was extended in late Antiquity
and the early Middle Ages to cover all Basque-speaking people on either side of the
Pyrenees.
The Basque language is spoken by about 1,000,000 people along the Territory of the Basque Country. It is an isolate language, which means that it is different to any other known language, and it has been spoken
by the inhabitants of the region, in any of its present or early variants, for thousands of years.
Canary Islanders
-
The Canarians are a subculture or nation living in the
archipelago of the Canary Islands (an
autonomous community of Spain), near the
coast of Western Africa. The language of the region is the habla
canaria (Castilian for Canary speech) or the dialecto canario (Castilian for Canarian dialect), a
distinctive dialect of Castilian spoken in the islands.
The islands were conquered by Castilians at the beginnings of the 15th century, who subdued the original Guanche population. After
subsequent settlement by Spaniards and other European peoples, mainly Portuguese, the remaining Guanches were gradually absorbed by the
settlers and their culture almost totally disappeared.
Historically, large groups of Canary islanders have emigrated and settled all over the New
World as early as the 15th century, mainly in Venezuela, Uruguay, Cuba and Puerto Rico, as well as parts of Texas when Texas was still a part of the Spanish Empire. For example, settlers from the Canary Islands
founded San Antonio, Texas in 1731, when it was a
Spanish colony (see Spanish Texas), one hundred
years before the first Anglo-Saxon immigrants arrived to the region, fleeing the
religious prosecution in Europe and looking for a better life. Louisiana was also settled by large groups of Canary Islanders, and
today, their descendants still live in the region. They are called Isleños (Castilian for Islanders), and they have kept the traditional culture of the Canary Islands and still speak the Canarian dialect[7].
Castilians
-
Castile is a historical region of
Spain that comprises the territories of the former Crown of
Castile (the conjunction of the Kingdom of Castile and the Kingdom of León) in the north, and the southern area reconquered from the Moors during the Reconquista. Castile's name is thought to mean land or
region of castles, in reference to the castles built in the area.
Because the kingdom of Castile (later Crown of
Castile) kept on expanding through most of its history, it's difficult to fix the exact boundaries of the historical region of Castile. For example, the provinces of León, Salamanca and Zamora, which correspond to the former
Kingdom of León, may or may not be included (see the Leonese below).
The Castilian people are the inhabitants of the historical region of Castile. Through the Reconquista,
their kingdom spread outside the historical region of Castile all over the Iberian
Peninsula, reaching the southern Spanish regions of
Extremadura, Andalusia, Murcia and the Canary Islands. After this, since the
15th century, through the Spanish
colonization of the Americas, the kingdom and its people also spread over the New
World, bringing with them not only their language but also traits of their
culture, traditions and idiosyncracy.
The Spanish language, often called castellano (Castilian) in Spanish, is the
native language of the Castilians. It originated in the Cordillera Cantábrica and the upper Ebro valley, in northern Spain,
during the 8th and 9th centuries AD. After the
Reconquista, the Castilian was brought to the
south and almost entirely replaced the languages that were spoken. However, in this process the Castilian also acquired strong influences from these languages that it gradually absorbed. During the
Spanish colonization of the Americas, the Castilain was the dominant language in
