Reimagine the Hispanic History of the USA

with Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America

The USA has a Hispanic Past and Hispanic Future. Indeed, the USA is a Latin American country. Moreover, Anglo-America was not formed as an independent republic, but in imitation of the Spanish Empire.

These three statements are drawn from my history book recommendation this week: Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States (2015).

This initial post in my World History Tour of World Powers explores the USA. How can we reimagine the USA’s role in the world by learning more about its mixed or even ‘multipolar’ Hispanic or Latino past?

A change of perspective is especially timely following Donald Trump’s recent statements on American ambitions across the Americas. As I noted in last Saturday’s post, “The old world history is dying and the new world history struggles to be born”, his statements exposed an old narrative of USA history that was challenged by the Mexican President, Claudia Scheinbaum. She pointed to the map of the territory of North America at the time of its founding. It was called “America Mexicana.”

The ignorance of Trump’s bluster is widely shared. As Felipe Fernández-Armesto writes in Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

“even well-educated, amiable, open-minded people in the United States do not realize that their country has a Hispanic past as well as a Hispanic future.”

But events over recent years highlight the importance of the Hispanic History of the United States: migration, tensions over Mexican cartels, changes in Latino voting patterns, and conflicts with Mexico, Venezuela, Panama and Latin BRICS states. Donald Trump’s 2025 Inauguration address signalled that ignorance of the Hispanic threads of American history is deeply entrenched. By reading this book, you can be better informed.

Felipe Fernández-Armesto, Our America: A Hispanic History of the United States

The common story of the USA is the westward progression of the Puritan Fathers and Founding Thirteen Colonies. Fernández-Armesto reveals that this story follows one row of the threads in the fabric of the USA. There was a warp that combined with this weft to make American history. It is the Hispanic settlement from South to North. Our America changes your perspective on the history of the United States by narrating the stories that come from the South. They are the stories from America Mexicana, not the Founding Fathers and Westward Frontier Spirit.

Our America reinterprets American history by emphasizing the often-overlooked Hispanic influence on the nation's past, present, and future. The book challenges the traditional east-to-west narrative of U.S.A.’s history, instead proposing a south-to-north perspective that highlights the significant role of Hispanic cultures in shaping the American experience.

Fernández-Armesto divides his narrative into three main parts, covering the colonial era, the 19th century, and what he terms "Hispanic counter-colonization" from the 20th century. Each section reveals how Hispanic influences have been integral to the American story.

In the colonial era, the early Spanish presence in North America predated English settlements. Fernández-Armesto notes the first colonised domain of the USA today was Puerto Rico in 1505. It still is not a fully-fledged state. The establishment of St. Augustine in Florida in 1565, nearly half a century before Jamestown, extended this early Hispanic footprint. The Spanish missions in California, beginning with San Diego de Alcalá in 1769, further illustrate the extensive reach of Hispanic colonization across what would become the United States.

The 19th century saw significant territorial changes that brought Hispanic populations under the control of an expanding USA, as part of ‘Greater Europe’ (see my video, The Race Against Time | Global Empires 1830 to 1880 | When Western Globalisation Began). The Mexican-American War (1846-1848) and the subsequent Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo in 1848 resulted in Mexico ceding nearly half its territory to the United States, including California, Nevada, Utah, and parts of Arizona, New Mexico, and Colorado. This event not only reshaped the map but also incorporated a substantial Hispanic population into the U.S.A. Colonisation or de facto control of Philippines, Cuba, Panama and other Central American states in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century were part of Teddy Roosevelt’s American Greatness.

Fernández-Armesto's concept of "Hispanic counter-colonization" in the modern era is exemplified by the Bracero Program (1942-1964), which brought millions of Mexican workers to the U.S.A. The Chicano Movement of the 1960s and 1970s led to the growing assertion of Hispanic identity and rights within American society. He concludes the book with a brilliant challenge to Samuel Huntington’s interpretation of American culture as White, Anglo-Saxon and Protestant. It is a must-read, especially after Emmanuel Todd’s reassertion of the Protestant Ethic.

Throughout the book, Fernández-Armesto invites readers to reconsider common narratives of American identity.

"The United States began not as an offspring of Britain, but as a continuation of Spanish America."

This perspective underscores the book's central theme: the United States has always been, in part, a Hispanic nation. Our America invites you to reimagine America with the history of this multipolar nation.

How Myths Make History in America

A secondary theme of Our America is how myths and stories from literature guide action in history. Pilgrim’s Progress and Manifest Destiny may be the archetypes of the WASP history of the USA. But other myths and Hispanic stories also shaped its history, such as the realm of Queen Calafia, which is the story California is named after.

History and myths work both ways. Our America shows how the literary and cinematic superhero character El Zorro was created from accounts of guerrilla fighters and rebels like Joaquin Murrieta. These social bandits in Texas and California in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century responded to waves of WASP American dispossession of Latinos. It was the same era when the South entrenched Jim Crow ‘apartheid’ states in the USA. From this distress, El Zorro emerged as the first superhero in American culture, when the movie industry was looking for myths. Fernández-Armesto comments:

“It is to me a delicious irony that a great line of American superheroes, with their lone trajectories, their alienating experiences, the disguises that place them outside society, and the astonishing dexterity with which they stun evildoers, goes back to a prototype who was a legend of anti-US resistance.”

Hollywood’s main cultural export today - Marvel and superhero movies - was born in its Hispanic History.

Learn from Hispanic American history & literature

American high culture also has deep Hispanic roots. The author who wrote the famous line - “Those who do not learn from history are condemned to repeat it” - was Georges Santayana (1863 – 1952). He was a Hispanic American philosopher.

In my Nobel Archive I tell several stories of Hispanic-American winners of the Nobel Prize in Literature who had an ambivalent relationship with the USA, including

• 1990 Octavio Paz (1914–1998) Mexico

• 1956 Juan Ramón Jiménez, Spain

Let me share one brief story. Jiménez fled Spain after the Spanish Civil War and travelled between Puerto Rico, Cuba and the Eastern USA, until finally settling after the Second World War in Puerto Rico. Like many writers, he served his host country during the war. But Ramón found America an uncultured place that pretended to the prestige of a new world power. In one prose poem, he wrote:

“I had always thought perhaps there would be no poets at all in New York. What I had never suspected was that there would be so many bad ones.”

If you cannot get a copy of Our America, then you can watch my interview with Felipe Fernández-Armesto - see below. We discuss the Hispanic story of the USA from about the 56:00 mark.

If you only have ten minutes, then watch this interview from 2014 with journalist, Tanzina Vega (who these days has joined me on substack). Felipe conveys the main themes, and comments on current day politics in a way that remains strikingly relevant.

If you have more time and curiosity, you may also wish to read his earlier, The Americas: A Hemispheric History (2006)

Learn more in deep dives & slow reads

Towards the end of his book, Fernández-Armesto makes the provocative statement that the USA is a Latin American country. Wednesday’s deep dive (for paid subscribers) will dive deeper into this theme.

It is especially timely in the context of Donald’s Trump’s rhetoric and history in his 2025 Inauguration Speech. As I discovered through Felipe’s book, the famous term “Manifest Destiny” indeed has its origins in nineteenth century Anglo-Americans’ reluctance to share the hemisphere with Latin America.

Paid subscribers will also get full access to my Slow Read guide to Olga Tokarczuk, The Books of Jacob. It is in its own way a story of the tragedy of a country and civilization, Poland and Europe, that turned its back on the many strands of its culture and lost sight of the plurality of its people. It turns out the Slow Read echoes the themes of my World History Tour of the USA.

• My guide to the characters of the novel, Books of Jacob | Slow read | Who's Who, which is out now

• My introduction to the historical context of the story comes out on Monday 27/1.

• The weekly chapter by chapter posts begin on 2 February.