“So Far from God, so Close to the United States”: The Roots of Hispanic Homogenization

GIVEN THE DIVERSITY OF THE VARIOUS POPULATION GROUPS both in Latin America and in the United States, how did the culturally homogeneous representations of people identified as Hispanics become commonplace among scholars, government agencies, the media, and the public at large in this country? Popular reasoning about the origin of the term Hispanic usually locates it within the legacy of the Spanish conquest and colonization of the New World. ¹ After all, the justification goes, Spanish colonial rule lasted for over three centuries, certainly long enough for the social, ethnic, linguistic, racial, and national experiences of the populations of Latin America and the Caribbean to establish a homogeneous heritage.