Hispanic immigration to the United States has been much more extensive than is generally recognized. Spaniards settled the Caribbean islands and Mexico more than a century before the English settled Jamestown in 1607. The earliest Hispanic settlers within the area of the United States were those who settled Saint Augustine, Florida, on the eastern end of the continent in 1565 and New Mexico, on the western end, in 1598. The Spanish colonial period represents only the beginning.
Immigration continues to this day as hundreds of thousands of Mexicans, Central Americans, and South Americans, as well as Cubans, Puerto Ricans, and others from the Caribbean islands continue to come to the United States. Many of them could ultimately trace their roots through those American countries to Spain. Others would find that their roots beyond those countries are not Spanish but Native American, French, German, Eastern European, Italian, African, and Portuguese. For just as the United States has been a melting pot, so have been the countries of Central and South America.
Before the end of the colonial period (around 1820), an estimated 12 million Spaniards emigrated, primarily to Mexico and Central and South America. The immigration that followed in the next century, however, was considerably greater. Of a total of 54 million people who emigrated from Europe to the American continents between 1820 and 1920, 20 million went to Latin America-primarily to Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, and Uruguay. Large numbers of them came from Italy, Spain, and Portugal. The flow of immigration did not stop with the Great Depression. From 1946 to 1957, 1.75 million immigrants traveled to Latin America, primarily from Italy and Spain. Spanish immigration was not, of course, entirely to Latin America. Many Spanish, among them large numbers of Galicians, Basques, and Andalucians, went directly to the United States. Still others never reached the Americas and found themselves settling in Australia...