A Historical Perspective on the Development of an Ethnic Minority Consciousness in the Spanish-Language Press of the Southwest

Abstract

Various scholars have treated ethnic newspapers in the United States as if they all have evolved from an immigrant press.(i) While one may accept their analysis of the functions of the ethnic press, there is a substantial and qualitative difference between newspapers that were built on an immigration base and those that developed from the experience of colonialism and racial oppression. Hispanics were subjected to “racialization”(ii) for more than a century through such doctrines as the Spanish Black Legend and Manifest Destiny during the nineteenth and early twentieth century. They were conquered and incorporated into the United States and then treated as colonial subjects as is the case of Mexicans in the Southwest and the Puerto Ricans in the Caribbean. Some were incorporated through territorial purchase as was the case of the Hispanics in Florida and Louisiana. (I would also make a case that, in many ways, Cubans and Dominicans also developed under United States domination in the twentieth century.) The subsequent migration and immigration of these peoples to the United States was often directly related to the domination of their homelands by the United States. Their immigration and subsequent cultural perspective on life in the United States, of course, has been substantially different from that of European immigrant groups. Hispanic native or ethnic minority perspective has manifested itself in the political realm, often as an attitude of entitlement to civil and political rights.