American Hispanics

In 1950 the population of the United States included fewer than four million resident "Hispanics" - that is, people originating from Spanish-speaking countries. By the mid 1980s this number had increased to 17.6 million and was still rising fast. In some parts of the United States, especially in the South and West, it became more common to hear Spanish being spoken on the streets than English.

About 60 percent of the United States' resident Hispanics came originally from Mexico. The remainder came from other Latin American countries, such as Cuba and Colombia. The newcomers' usual reasons for coming were the same as those of earlier immigrants from Europe - to escape from poverty or political persecution in their homelands.

The increase in the number of Hispanics was partly the result of an important change in the American immigration system. The old immigration laws, which dated back to the 1920s, had favored Europeans. But in 1965 a new law said that what would count in the future was who applied first.

The result was a big increase in immigration from non-European countries. By the 1980s the United States was officially accepting 270,000 newcomers a year. Forty percent of these were coming from Asia and another forty percent from Latin America.

Many other immigrants entered the United States without permission. In 1985 the government estimated that the country had between two and ten million of these illegal immigrants, half a million of whom had arrived in the previous year. Many were Hispanics, who had waded across the shallow Rio Grande River that formed the border between the United States and Mexico. For obvious reasons, people who entered the United States in this way were called "wetbacks."

Bryn O'Callaghan: An illustrated history of the USA; Longman, Harlow, 1990/1996, page 130