This paper studies the history and progress of Latinos in American society. Latino and Hispanic peoples are the fastest growing minority in the United States. Experts predict that in five years they will become the nation's largest minority group, outnumbering African-Americans. Many of their ancestors came to the New World before the ancestors of the nation's founders, yet history and social forces have made them America's newest minority and given them some of the greatest challenges to confront any racial or ethnic group trying to become part of the great American melting pot. Although Latinos are often viewed as a single group, in fact they include individuals from a wide range of backgrounds, cultures, and circumstances, bound together by a common language (which many no longer speak) and a common religion (which many no longer practice). Nevertheless, they remain linked by their commonalities, rather than divided by their differences, and they share a common future within American society.
The discovery of the New World by European explorers brought waves of speculators, settlers, adventurers, freedom-seekers, entrepreneurs, opportunists, and involuntary immigrants to the shores of the Americas. Although some European powers, including the French, the Dutch, the Germans, the Portuguese, and others, managed to carve out significant land claims, only two nations were able to exert lasting control over territories vast enough to mold new societies on the continents. The British domination of the northern hemisphere eventually resulted in the foundation of the world's first great democracy, while Spanish conquests established a New World version of European feudalism that continues to affect South and Central America long after the fall of the Spanish empire.
L. H. Gann and Peter J. Duignan (1986) write, "At the beginning of the nineteenth century, the United States was a bourgeois country without a feudal past. Much...