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| Hispanic and Latino Americans |
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The history of Hispanics and Latinos in the United States is wide-ranging, spanning more than four hundred years of American colonial and post-colonial history. Hispanics (whether criollo, mulatto, afro-mestizo or mestizo) became the first American citizens in the newly acquired Southwest territory after the Mexican–American War, and remained a majority in several states until the 20th century.
As late as 1783, at the end of the American Revolutionary War, Spain[1] held claim to roughly half of today's continental United States. In the Treaty of Paris France ceded Louisiana (New France) to Spain from 1763 until it was returned in 1800 by the Treaty of San Ildefonso. In 1775, Spanish ships reached Alaska.[2] From 1819 to 1848, the United States and its army increased the nation's area by roughly a third at Spanish and Mexican expense, gaining among others three of today's four most populous states: California, Texas and Florida.
- ^ Peña, Lorenzo. Un puente jurídico entre Iberoamérica y Europa:la Constitución española de 1812. Instituto de Filosofía del CSIC
The first thing there is to understand is that in a good measure, the Courts of Cadiz created a new state, the Spanish state.[...]there had never been a proclamation of a Kingdom of Spain, so that difficulties always arose upon the legal value of the very frequent references to 'Spain' in the legal texts of the sixteenth, seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. The Spanish sovereigns had always refused the advice [...] in the sense of establishing a United Kingdom of Spain, preferring to see themselves as vertices of converging scattered kingdoms, at least in theory. Even the Napoleonic Bayonne Constitution of 1808 did not proclaime a kingdom of Spain, but a 'Crown of Spain and the Indies'. On the other hand, 'Spain' was merely a geographical name, a simple romance version of 'Hispania', whereby its use, in principle, should not have to go beyond the designations ‘Galia’, ‘Germania’[...]
- ^ Chisholm, Hugh, ed. (1911). . Encyclopædia Britannica. Vol. 1 (11th ed.). Cambridge University Press. p. 477.