Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: Community and Cultural Diversity in Contemporary America

by Daniel D. Arreola (Editor)

Hispanics/Latinos are the largest ethnic minority in the United States—but they are far from being a homogenous group. Mexican Americans in the Southwest have roots that extend back four centuries, while Dominicans and Salvadorans are very recent immigrants. Cuban Americans in South Florida have very different occupational achievements, employment levels, and income from immigrant Guatemalans who work in the poultry industry in Virginia. In fact, the only characteristic shared by all Hispanics/Latinos in the United States is birth or ancestry in a Spanish-speaking country. In this book, sixteen geographers and two sociologists map the regional and cultural diversity of the Hispanic/Latino population of the United States. They report on Hispanic communities in all sections of the country, showing how factors such as people's country/culture of origin, length of time in the United States, and relations with non-Hispanic society have interacted to create a wide variety of Hispanic communities. Identifying larger trends, they also discuss the common characteristics of three types of Hispanic communities—those that have always been predominantly Hispanic, those that have become Anglo-dominated, and those in which Hispanics are just becoming a significant portion of the population.

344 pages, Paperback

First published November 1, 2004

About the author

Daniel D. Arreola received the Ph. D. in Cultural Geography from the University of California at Los Angeles. He was born and raised in Los Angeles, California, and he has lived and taught in three of the four American states that line the U.S.-Mexico border. He has published extensively in scholarly journals and in book chapters on topics relating to the cultural geography of the Mexican-American borderlands. He is the author of The Mexican Border Cities: Landscape Anatomy and Place Personality (University of Arizona Press, 1993), Tejano South Texas: A Mexican American Cultural Province (University of Texas Press, 2002) and Hispanic Spaces, Latino Places: A Geography of Regional and Cultural Diversity (forthcoming, University of Texas Press). He is also a Senior Consultant for World Geography, a new high school textbook (McDougal Littell, 2003).

Arreola serves on the editorial boards for several leading geography journals, an international cross-cultural architecture journal, and he is a contributing editor to the Hispanic Division of the Library of Congress. He is a past-president of the Association of Pacific Coast Geographers. Presently, he is a Professor in the Department of Geography and an Affiliate Faculty with the Center for Latin American Studies at Arizona State University.