Talk:Hispanic America

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This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 13 January 2020 and 9 May 2020. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): PedroGallegos84.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 23:29, 16 January 2022 (UTC)

A map would be a nice addition

SamEV 20:02, 4 November 2006 (UTC)

New name

"Hispanic America" is the modern name for "Spanish America", isn't it? If so, it's odd that Spain should be part of it, as Spain is not in America. But it's obvious that a new understanding of the term has come about, which includes Spain. Anyone disagree? SamEV 03:22, 9 March 2007 (UTC)

I think, that the term "Hispanic America" defined not only a group of countrys with a comoun lenguages and culture but also a geografic localization. Reason why Spain should be excluded.--Lokesssea 11:26, 26 April 2007 (UTC)

i think that Hispanic America is a group of countries that share language, ideologies, etc. I vote to not exclude it.--161.111.106.66 17:58, 26 April 2007

Well, then we should call to hispanic-america, hispanic-countries. You can see the Hispanic America definition in other world wikipedia.--Lokesssea 09:47, 27 April 2007 (UTC)

Granted I'm coming to this conversation two years after it seems to have died down, but the use of "Hispanic America" sounded odd to me, when I started using and editing Wikipedia. I had only seen "Spanish America," granted usually in the history books I deal with; but I have never seen "Hispanic America" anywhere, except here in Wikipedia. (Unfortunately or fortunately—depending on how conservative one is about the evolution of language—the coining of neologisms is something I've noticed a lot here in Wikipedia. Some day Wikipedia will be cited frequently in the etymologies of future words.) Often a little research would have clarified the issue, and since many of my students do rely heavily on Wikipedia, I'm interested maintaining a bit of conformity with standard usage. In light of this, I've looked up the terms in several dictionaries ranging from the large, heavy editions to the popular pocket-book type and placed them in the article as a footnote. I've also respected the original editorial choice and left "Hispanic America" as the main term used in the article, although I would strongly recommend changing it and the article's title to Spanish America. I would like to see consensus on this, though, before taking such a move.TriniMuñoz (talk) 04:08, 2 April 2009 (UTC)

I too was deferring to the choice others had made, in regards both to including Spain and to the title. I actually find the exclusion of Spain to be best. As to the title, I'm ambivalent. SamEV (talk) 20:19, 3 March 2010 (UTC)

"Hispanoamérica" is not a word in Spanish. (Y26Z3 (talk) 23:07, 15 May 2012 (UTC))

Like TriniMuñoz, I too am coming to this discussion years after it seems to have died down, but I bring possibly new resources for making a decision. Also like Trini, I find "Hispanic America" odd-sounding and have only found "Spanish America" in my reading. The new resource I refer to is the Google Books Ngram Viewer <https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Spanish+America%2CHispanic+America&year_start=1900&year_end=2009&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CSpanish%20America%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CHispanic%20America%3B%2Cc0>, based on usage in literally millions of published books. In these texts, in the last few decades, "Spanish America" has outnumbered "Hispanic America" approximately 10 to 1. Meanwhile, in an at-large Google search, I find "Spanish America" outnumbers "Hispanic America" by "merely" 2 to 1. Wikipedia's policy is that it "prefers to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources." I sympathize with citizens in the present-day Spanish-speaking republics who may feel that "Spanish America" seems to imply they are still possessions of Spain, but this is the conventional term according to Wikipedia's definition, and I'm asking for someone who knows how to edit _article titles_ to make the correction. Kotabatubara (talk) 14:50, 5 April 2015 (UTC)

It is not the role of Wikipedia to engineer changes in language usage, but rather to report on matters as they are, using conventional language and terms as they are most often understood by readers of, in this case, English. As I noted above (5 April 2015), the area that this article is about is called "Spanish America" by the vast majority of sources. "Hispanic America" is a late-comer to the scene and has never competed with "Spanish America" for frequency. The H-word seems to be a well-intentioned effort to avoid implying that Spanish America is still a possession of Spain. Well, language usage and logic are two different things. English-speakers know that "Spanish America" refers to a group of independent countries; no one is deceived by this term into thinking they are possessions of Spain. No one thinks that British Columbia is British. The French Quarter of New Orleans doesn't belong to France. English-speakers (and others) understand that "Latin America" does not include French-speaking Canada—even though, yes, French is derived from Latin—and no one is deceived by that conventional term. "Hispanic America" may be an overly-literal attempt to translate "Hispanoamérica" (which is indeed a word in Spanish, if this article's brother-article in the Spanish-language Wikipedia is to be trusted). In addition, the term "Hispanic America" is potentially deceptive to English-speaking readers in the U.S., because (1) many Americans—oops, U.S. citizens—use the term "America" for just their country (remember, usage and logic are different things), and (2) the term "Hispanic" is used prominently by the U.S. Census Bureau to refer to U.S. residents of Spanish heritage; meanwhile, Spanish-speakers in other countries are rarely described as "Hispanic". Illogical? Yes. But it's the reality of usage. You may wish that users of the term "Spanish America" were including Spanish-speaking parts of the U.S., but generally they are not. You may wish that "Latin America" included Quebec, but it does not. With all due respect, citizenship in a Spanish-speaking region does not qualify one to say what that region should be called in English. Residents of London have no right to tell Spanish-speakers to stop saying "Londres". I will repeat: Wikipedia "prefers to use the name that is most frequently used to refer to the subject in English-language reliable sources." Kotabatubara (talk) 17:38, 2 August 2015 (UTC)

The term "Spanish America" appears at 12 times the frequency (according to the Google Ngram Viewer) of "Hispanic America" in books published 2010-2019. Kotabatubara (talk) 15:30, 22 September 2022 (UTC)

WTF ARE SPAIN HERE??

WTF ARE SPAIN HERE??

Good question!!! Now Spain shifted from Europe to south America. I am going to correct it.89.181.175.187 12:01, 28 July 2007 (UTC)

When I first read that "Ibero-America" included Spain, I thought "Wikipedia, have you lost your mind?!" Millions of Spaniards would be flabbergasted to learn that they were part of a hyphenated America. Well, they are not. The noun "Ibero-America" refers only to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking republics of the Western Hemisphere. The problem is in the adjective "Ibero-American": in the vast majority of instances, it also refers only those republics; but in the name of one organization, the Organization of Ibero-American States, it means Iberian states (Spain and Portugal, but not Andorra) and linguistically related states in the Americas. Compare: The fact that we can speak of Sino-American diplomatic relations does not mean there is a place called Sino-America that includes China. Kotabatubara (talk) 18:50, 21 March 2017 (UTC)

Wrong article!

Guys, Latin America is named like that due to the latin origin of the languages spoken there. (i'm from Argentina and i study anthropology, most linguistics). Spanish, Portuguese and French are all romance languages, so according to this same root, all the countries IN AMERICA (noooooooo Spain, it's in EUROPE!) that spoke this latin languages, are included in what it's known today as "Latin America". Canada, despite of having a very important portion of it's nation that speaks fluent french as their native language, is not commonly included into this category although it should be, since french it's a Latin language and Canada it's located in America. Now, Spanish America or Hispanoamérica (in Spanish), means something else. This category includes all the countries which where part of the colonial Spanish Empire and in which, today, spanish is the official spoken language.

Hispanics in the United States - requested move

Hello everyone. There is at present a discussion going on at Hispanics in the United States, due to the request that the page be moved to Hispanic Americans. Would you like to comment please? Thank you. The Ogre 18:05, 4 December 2007 (UTC)

Xray, please bring to talk

any issue you have with the current version. We'll take them on one by one here. SamEV (talk) 21:54, 20 June 2008 (UTC)

Expansion

I'm going to be attempting expansion by translating content from the Spanish Wikipedia. The stuff on cities will be coming over promptly, the rest will take more work. Any help would be appreciated. Zazaban (talk) 20:01, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

That'll do for today. I kinda sped through the translation, so it might not be perfect english, but I'll fix it a bit over time. Zazaban (talk) 20:33, 23 January 2010 (UTC)

Puerto Rico

Resolved

Puerto Rico was listed as a "country" when it clearly isn't (maybe just not yet). I have removed it from the tables. Some other solution might be found. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 ^{> haneʼ} 22:13, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Puerto Rico is a country, though not a sovereign independent nation-state. Restoring PR on the article. Salut, --IANVS (talk | cont) 22:20, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Source? Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 ^{> haneʼ} 22:35, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Puerto Rico belongs on this list. "Country" doesn't necessarily mean "sovereign state". Not to mention that PR has certain features of sovereign states, notably sports citizenship. Furthermore, this article already indicates that PR is a US territory. What more can you want? SamEV (talk) 22:44, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

A "Country Code" from http://www.census.gov is enough? --IANVS (talk | cont) 22:50, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Well, then I have to wonder why Puerto Rico is listed, but not, for example, the United States Virgin Islands which is ~8% Hispanic... It seems cherry-picked (for a reason I cannot see) Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 ^{> haneʼ} 22:48, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

US Virgin Islands are not listed for the same reason the US are not listed. They are not an historical hispanic country. --IANVS (talk | cont) 22:52, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

OK. Fair enough, it makes sense now. Country-code + Historcilly hispanic. Thank you. Choyoołʼįįhí:Seb az86556 ^{> haneʼ} 22:53, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

One table too many?

Should wo merge these two tables? We'd even save one column, "Country" column being found in both tables. SamEV (talk) 23:25, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

I don't see how we would list the major cities in a country-table. Salut, --IANVS (talk | cont) 23:33, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you mean, but just in case I do, imagine the two tables side by side. SamEV (talk) 23:47, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

There are three colombian cities before the first uruguayan city. Should we repeat Colombia entry three times? --IANVS (talk | cont) 23:49, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

I see what you mean! I forgot that the cities table is not a capitals table!

Well, then I guess we should add two columns to the countries table, for their capitals and populations. What do you think? SamEV (talk) 23:54, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

While I'm not opposed to listing capital cities at the first table, I find the second listing useful. Maybe the displaying problems can be tackled with a new gallery format? --IANVS (talk | cont) 23:59, 17 July 2010 (UTC)

Yeah, I'm no longer proposing that we eliminate the second table. I might add the capitals one of these days, then.

I think I fixed the layout issue, but if not, give it a try. SamEV (talk) 00:07, 18 July 2010 (UTC)

Sorting of country by area is not working properly. The first two columns seem fineMatupitu (talk) 10:54, 23 September 2012 (UTC)

"were formerly"

Intro section:

Changed blatant word sequence mistake "they were formerly" to the more correct "they formerly were".

By the way, the entire article suffers from bad English. —Preceding unsigned comment added by 87.72.23.67 (talk) 07:45, 28 November 2010 (UTC)

Inclusion of USA

Why is this article limited to countries that are majority hispanic? I think that this article should also recognize other countries or regions of countries with significant Spanish populations. Otherwise it seems to suggest that the only hispanic populations worth noting are those in majority hispanic countries. Opinions?96.236.115.118 (talk) 22:29, 11 August 2011 (UTC)

It would be worth making a mention of, at the very least, New Mexico, in which Spanish is co-offical. 64.180.40.75 (talk) 23:29, 17 October 2011 (UTC)

Requested move 2 August 2015

The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

The result of the move request was: no consensus. Jenks24 (talk) 15:30, 19 August 2015 (UTC)

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Hispanic America → Spanish America – Google Books Ngram Viewer shows "Spanish America" at about 10 times the frequency of "Hispanic America"<https://books.google.com/ngrams/graph?content=Spanish+America%2CHispanic+America&year_start=1900&year_end=2009&corpus=15&smoothing=3&share=&direct_url=t1%3B%2CSpanish%20America%3B%2Cc0%3B.t1%3B%2CHispanic%20America%3B%2Cc0> Additional reasoning, by me, appears in the article's Talk page, under "New name". I understand that this request will be controversial, but I'm confident that it conforms to Wikipedia's policies. Kotabatubara (talk) 17:57, 2 August 2015 (UTC) Relisted. Jenks24 (talk) 11:16, 10 August 2015 (UTC)

• Oppose: Spanish America and Hispanic America certainly don't mean the same thing to me. As is noted in the hatnote at the top of the article Spanish America could easily refer to the Spanish colonization of the Americas and if this discussion ends in the decision to 'not move' then there should probably be a discussion about moving that redirect to Spanish colonization of the Americas, reversing the current situation. The ngram results don't have any particular validity as it is ambiguous as to what they are referring to. There is no way of knowing how many of the references to 'Spanish America' are references to Spanish speaking countries in the Americas or whether they are referring to the Spanish colonisation, or something else entirely. Certainly when I type 'Spanish America' into google most of my results are about the colonisation or about the Spanish-American war. 'Spanish America' also implies some kind of ownership by Spain of the Americas which again isn't the case. The term 'Hispanic' is typically used for peoples, countries and cultures with a historical link to Spain making it the more appropriate choice. Ebonelm (talk) 09:05, 3 August 2015 (UTC)
• Oppose on similar lines to Ebonelm's comments above. Hispanic and Spanish are by no means the same. Hispanic has additional cultural connotations. FoCuSandLeArN (talk) 23:58, 3 August 2015 (UTC)

• Favor: The searches in the Google Books Ngram Viewer and the at-large Google searches reported below all show "Spanish America" to be a more frequent term than "Hispanic America". In order to insure that the greater numbers of "Spanish" over "Hispanic" are not due to instances that refer to the Spanish colonization of the Americas or the colonial period, I have used phrases and combinations of phrases that refer to post-colonial phenomena—"republics", "nationalism", "Nobel Prize" (first awarded in 1901), and the literary boom of the 1960s and 1970s—as well as phrases that include the words "modern" and "contemporary".

In Ngram searches, "Spanish" outnumbers "Hispanic" in the blanks of

• "__ American republics"

• "__ American nationalism" (zero instances of "Hispanic American nationalism" found in the Viewer)

• "modern __ America"

• "modern __ American" (no instances of "modern Hispanic American")

• "contemporary __ America" (no instances of "contemporary Hispanic America")

• "contemporary __ American"

Following are the results of searches for the same phrases by Google at large ("k" = 1000 hits):

Phrase	"Spanish"	"Hispanic"
"__ American republics"	50k	14.7k
"__ American nationalism"	21.4k	2 (sic, not 2k)
"modern __ America"	12.4k	2.35k
"modern __ American"	38.7k	8.31k
"contemporary __ America"	35.4k	0.823k
"contemporary __ American"	45.1k	6.97k
"Nobel Prize" / "__ America"	28.4k	16.9k
"Nobel Prize" / "__ American literature"	13k	11.8k
"boom in __ American literature"	5.73k	2 (sic, not 2k)

"Spanish America" doesn't imply Spanish ownership any more than "British Columbia" implies British ownership of that Canadian province. The Spanish name for the island shared by Haiti and the Dominican Republic is "la Isla Española", and Spanish-speakers evidently don't feel threatened by implications of Spanish ownership. Wikipedia policy is to conform with usage, not to try to make language perfectly logical.

A search in Wikipedia for Hispanic Americans redirects to Hispanic and Latino Americans, defined there as "all persons in the United States [my emphasis] who self-identify as Hispanic or Latino whether fully or partially". See my comment about the ambiguity of "Hispanic", thanks to the U.S. Census Bureau, in Talk/"New name".

My request for a Move is based on verifiable data of usage, not on unsupported assertions of personal preference. I don't see any counter-arguments that are supported by evidence. Kotabatubara (talk) 14:26, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Unfortunately that’s not how searching on the internet works. As I stated before, ngrams while often very useful are flawed in this case due to the variety of different contexts that could be being found. Only by actually looking at the content of pages found in regular google searches is in any context likely to be found.

Take your Nobel Prize example, if I do a regular google search for "Nobel Prize Spanish America" the pages that I see are just about people who have won the Nobel Prize for Literature for work which has been written in Spanish. There are no references to 'Spanish America' on these pages, occasionally Latin America appears, the 'America' part being the reason the page has been listed. I get lists of Nobel Prize winners by their place of birth but no references to 'Spanish America'. When I type in "Nobel Prize Hispanic America" the links are almost identical. The only reason why the number of overall hits is higher with 'Spanish' is because Spanish is a language while 'Hispanic' is not.

Your other examples have similar flaws, the nationalism example fails because in Spain there is a thing called Spanish Nationalism that has nothing to do with the Americas, when links are created not all the search terms will be found so the word American will often be ignored. But in particular due to the Spanish Civil War will produce lots of hits while Hispanic nationalism will produce less. Interestingly when I look at the pages, Spanish American Nationalism usually produces pages about the Spanish Civil War or the Spanish American War. Typing in Hispanic American Nationalism produces lots of links to Pan-Americanism and Latin American Nationalism.

Numbers don't tell the full story you have to actually examine the content. The word 'Spanish' has so many varied uses that it will always produce a much higher hit count but most of the hits will be unrelated. Either you really don't understand how hit counts are calculated or you have done a very poor job of trying to deceive us. Ebonelm (talk) 15:42, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

Let's try to keep this conversation civil. I am not trying to deceive anyone.

In a Google search you can use quotation marks to indicate that a phrase is not to be broken into its individual words. If line (1) below were used for a Google search, it would net any page that has those four words anywhere on it, and yes, that would include some irrelevant pages. But my search was as in line (2), netting only pages with both the phrases "Nobel Prize" and "Spanish America", and omitting pages where "Spanish" and "America" appear only separately. On the pages of my hits, "Spanish America" refers to a place—not to a language, a people, or a culture—and it is not "Spanish" in one of its "many varied uses". As you might expect, the search with line (3) finds zero hits, since no page has the four words in direct succession.

• (1) Nobel Prize Spanish America
• (2) "Nobel Prize" "Spanish America"
• (3) "Nobel Prize Spanish America"

Kotabatubara (talk) 18:17, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

The table below shows the numbers of Google hits on pages with either "Spanish America" or "Hispanic America" plus the name of one of twelve 20th-century authors from that region. The authors were chosen for their relative modernity, so as not to include pages referring to "literally Spanish" America, namely the colonial empire. These twelve are all the names I tested: I did not "cherry-pick" these data. For two authors—Neruda and Vargas Llosa—"Hispanic America" accounted for slightly over half of the hits. For two others—Borges and Octavio Paz—"Spanish America" rated slightly over half. The remaining eight names favored "Spanish America" at percentages ranging from 67% to 92%.

Name	"Spanish America"	"Hispanic America"	Ratio, S/H
Borges	20,200	16,100	56/44
Cabrera Infante	4,460	376	92/8
Carpentier	22,700	6,440	78/22
Cortázar	17,200	5,620	75/25
García Márquez	39,100	10,500	79/21
Huidobro	3,580	1,350	73/27
Juan Rulfo	10,400	5,060	67/33
Lugones	7,480	1,460	84/16
Neruda	10,300	12,000	46/54
Octavio Paz	8,840	8,090	52/48
Sábato	3,180	480	87/13
Vargas Llosa	9,720	10,600	48/52

Where is the contrary evidence? Kotabatubara (talk) 16:03, 14 August 2015 (UTC)

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The above discussion is preserved as an archive of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on this talk page or in a move review. No further edits should be made to this section.

"América española"

I am restoring "América española" as one of the Spanish renditions of this article's title because that term is used at least equally, or slightly more than, "América hispana". It is erroneous to believe that "América española" refers only to the period of Spain's colonial empire, as I show with data below. No matter how much one may read colonial implications into the phrase, and no matter how much one may resent the fact, the fact is that the phrase "América española" is widely used by Spanish-language sources to refer collectively to the present-day Spanish-speaking republics. It is not appropriate for Wikipedia to suppress that fact. I am currently having discussions about the English phrase "Spanish America" in connection with a request to rename this article, because "Spanish America" is used more frequently than "Hispanic America" in English for this topic. In support of that request, I gave figures on how often each of the two names appears on web pages with the names of a dozen 20th-century authors from the region. Here below, I list the same names and the frequencies with which they appear on web pages with either "América española" or "América hispana". In all twelve cases, "española" outnumbers "hispana", with its percentages of pages ranging from 52% to 66%; it's not a drastic imbalance, but it favors "española" in every case. As before, I did not "cherry-pick" these data: these twelve are the only names I tested. These results are not based on my personal taste, but rather on hard data.

Name	"América española"	"América hispana"	Ratio, española/hispana
Borges	25.2k	19.5k	56/44
Cabrera Infante	2.27k	1.82k	56/44
Carpentier	7.82k	6.17k	56/44
Cortázar	11.6k	7.83k	60/40
García Márquez	12.6k	11.6k	52/48
Huidobro	8.19k	4.63k	64/36
Juan Rulfo	3.97k	3.25k	55/45
Lugones	8.32k	4.98k	63/37
Neruda	21.6k	11.2k	66/34
Octavio Paz	9.93k	7.61k	57/43
Sábato	4.51k	3.09k	59/41
Vargas Llosa	10.5k	9.34k	53/47

Kotabatubara (talk) 14:02, 18 August 2015 (UTC)

Please refresh the page

This page is bad because the population of Spanish America grew and not 377 million (and the GDP is lower than added up to this year), plus Throw in more sections as ethnography in this nation divided because there are approximately 140 million whites. --Derekitou (talk) 00:50, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

French america?

French America belongs to Latin America is not alone (his in the last section that French America).--Derekitou (talk) 01:01, 25 September 2015 (UTC)

Inaccurate map

Please see commons:File talk:Spanish speakers in the Americas (orthographic projection).svg#Inaccurate and dubious. Thanks! Nosferattus (talk) 15:56, 21 September 2021 (UTC)

Since no one has responded, I went ahead and removed the map for now. Nosferattus (talk) 23:21, 22 September 2021 (UTC)