Hispanic American

The immigrants who have come from Central and South America are a diverse population that has not been closely studied. Indeed, most government statistics treat its members collectively as “other” and rarely differentiate between them by nationality.
Yet people from Chile and Costa Rica have little in common other than their hemisphere of origin and the Spanish language, if that. Not all Central and South Americans have Spanish as their native tongue; for example, immigrants from Brazil speak
Portuguese, immigrants from French Guyana speak French, and those from Suriname speak Dutch.
Many of the nations of Central and South America have a complex system of placing people into myriad racial groups. African slaves were brought to almost all of these countries, and these people of African descent, in varying degrees, have intermarried with each other or with indigenous peoples, as well as with the European colonists. Rather than placing people in two or three distinct racial groupings, these societies describe skin color in a continuum from light to dark in what is called a color gradient. A color gradient is the placement of people along a continuum from light to dark skin color rather than in distinct racial groupings by skin color. The presence of color gradients is yet another reminder of the social construction of race.
Terms such as mestizo Hondurans, mulatto Colombians, or African Panamanians reflect this continuum of a color gradient.
Added to language diversity and the color gradient are social class distinctions, religious differences, urban-versus-rural backgrounds, and differences in dialect even among those speaking the same language. We can understand historians Ann Orlov and Reed Ueda’s (1980:212) conclusion that “social relations among Central and
South American ethnic groups in the United States defy generalization.” Central and
South Americans do not form, nor should they be expected to form, a cohesive group, nor do they naturally form coalitions with Cuban Americans, Mexican Americans, or Puerto Ricans.