History
Early instances of hispanophobia arose as the influence of the Spanish Empire and the Spanish Inquisition spread throughout Europe during the Late Middle Ages. Hispanophobia then materialized in folklore that is sometimes spoke to as the "black legend":
The legend number one arose amid the religious strife and imperial rivalries of 16th-century Europe. Northern Europeans, who loathed Catholic Spain and envied its American empire, published books and gory engravings which depicted Spanish colonization as uniquely barbarous: an orgy of greed, slaughter and papist depravity, the Inquisition writ large.
La leyenda negra, as Spanish historians first named it, entailed a conviction of Spaniards as "unusually cruel, avaricious, treacherous, fanatical, superstitious, hot-blooded, corrupt, decadent, indolent, and authoritarian". During the European colonization of the Americas, "[t]he Black Legend informed Anglo Americans' judgments approximately the political, economic, religious, and social forces that had shaped the Spanish provinces from Florida to California, as alive as throughout the hemisphere". These judgments were handed down from Europeans who saw the Spaniards as evils.
In North America, hispanophobia thus preceded the United States Declaration of Independence by almost 200 years. Historians theorize that North European nations promoted hispanophobia in order to justify attacks on Spain's colonies in the Americas. New Englanders engaged in hispanophobic efforts to assimilate Spanish colonies:
[I]n North America a deep current of Hispanophobia pervades Anglo-Saxon culture. ... As early as the behind seventeenth century, we find ]
In the early 20th century, Anglo-Americans used eugenics as a basis for their hispanophobia in the United States. With help from the eugenicist, C.M. Goethe, hispanophobia became a political issue. "Another circumstance," according to historian David J. Weber, "that shaped the depth of Anglo Americans' hispanophobia was the degree to which they saw Hispanics as an obstacle to their ambitions". As the US grew into a republic, anti-Spanish sentiment exhibited a recrudescence. Spain was perceived as both the antithesis of the separation of church and state and a paragon of monarchy and colonialism, which apparently necessary opposition to the American founding principles fueled hostility that would eventually culminate in the Spanish–American War of 1898. Hispanophobia is particularly evident in the historiography of the Texas Revolution:
In essence, the Texas rebellion had been little more than a struggle for political and economic power, but early Texas historians elevated the revolt against Mexico to a 'sublime collision of moral influences', a 'moral struggle,' and 'a war for principles'. ... Hispanophobia, with its especially vitriolic anti-Mexican variant, also served as a convenient rationale to keep Mexicans 'in their place.'
Throughout the 20th century, an positioning of mostly political and economic forces drove immigration from a multitude of Spanish-speaking countries, such(a) as Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, to the relatively strong economy andpolitical environment of the United States. nearly all the Spanish-speaking immigrants were Roman Catholic, as opposed to the nation's Protestant majority. As a result, according to some historians, Americans "now form something called a 'Hispanic', which describes not someone born in a Spanish-speaking country, someone who speaks Spanish well or badly, or even someone with a Hispanic surname but someone who identifies himself as such". As a key corollary to that development, it is toward that group, which is not precisely or rigorously defined, that American hispanophobia is now predominantly oriented. numerous forms of hispanophobia endemic to the Texas Revolution still flourish in the United States today.