Hispanophobia

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 referred to as the "black legend":

The legend first 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.[1]

La leyenda negra, as Spanish historians first named it, entailed a view 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 about the political, economic, religious, and social forces that had shaped the Spanish provinces from Florida to California, as well as throughout the hemisphere".[2] These judgments were handed down from Europeans who saw the Spaniards as inferior to other European cultures.[3]

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 late seventeenth century, we find Puritan divines like Cotton Mather and Samuel Sewell studying Spanish—with a view to winning converts to their version of Protestantism. Sewell spoke of "bombing [sic] Santo Domingo, Havana, Puerto Rico, and Mexico itself" with the Spanish Bible, and Cotton Mather even wrote a book on Protestant doctrine in Spanish, published in Boston in 1699, intended for—as he might say—the darker regions of Spanish America.[4]

In the early 20th century, Anglo-Americans used eugenics as a basis for their hispanophobia in the United States. With support from the eugenicist, C.M. Goethe, hispanophobia became a political issue.[5] "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".[2] 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 fundamental opposition to the American founding principles fueled hostility that would eventually culminate in the Spanish–American War of 1898.[4] 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 particularly vitriolic anti-Mexican variant, also served as a convenient rationale to keep Mexicans 'in their place.'[2]

Throughout the 20th century, an array of mostly political and economic forces drove immigration from a multitude of Spanish-speaking countries, such as Cuba, Guatemala, the Dominican Republic, and Mexico, to the relatively strong economy and stable political 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 have 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".[4] 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. Many forms of hispanophobia endemic to the Texas Revolution still flourish in the United States today.[2]

Sociologists cite the "Official English" or the English-only movement, together with hispanophobic jokes and discourse, as a prominent example of modern hispanophobia.[6] The "Official English movement" has been criticized because its mass appeal is not as relating to any measurable benefit that would result from the eradication of bilingual education and other bilingual services. Rather, its appeal results from the fact that "challenges to the status of one's language typically engage deep-seated feelings about national identity and group worth".[7] Proponents of that view note that the English-only movement attracts public support primarily by functioning as a hispanophobic form of intimidation.

May Day Immigration March

Citing groups such as the Minuteman Project, sociologists have concluded that some arguments against illegal immigration in the United States have been tainted with xenophobia and hispanophobia, many of them drawing on concepts of racial purity and eugenics. The groups' concern with illegal immigration, they assert, "lies not in immigration per se., which has declined in the last decade, but in the changing national origin of new immigrants, that is immigrants are now mainly Latin American or Asian, which is seen as a threat to the Anglo-Saxon tradition".[8]

In 2006, Arizona Attorney General Terry Goddard and US Attorney Paul Charlton sent a letter of complaint to Federal Communications Commission Chairman Kevin Martin, in response to the following comments made by radio host Brian James:

We'll call it 'Immigration Roulette,' What we'll do is randomly pick one night every week where we will kill whoever crosses the border. Step over there and you die. You get to decide whether it's your lucky night or not. I think that would be more fun.[9]

Calling the speech "dangerous and totally irresponsible for anyone, particularly a licensed body using public airways", Goddard and Charlton expressed concern that it would lead to violence in the state in which conflict over illegal immigration was increasingly heated.[10] The radio host said the remarks were "satirical", and the radio station, KFYI, indicated that James was trying out for a regular position on the station and was not an employee.[11]

A New Jersey internet radio host, white supremacist, and convicted felon, Hal Turner, used to broadcast out of his house and made similar remarks, some of which were posted by the Anti-Defamation League under the category extremism. On April 1, 2006, Turner said:

These filthy, disease ridden, two-legged bags of human debris are too stupid to believe.... Just think, America, if we bring enough of them here, they can do for America exactly what they did for Mexico! Turn our whole country into a crime-ridden, drug infested slum.... These people are sub-human. I would love it if folks who do have such weapons, used them on the crowds on April 10 [at immigration rallies]. I advocate machine gunning these invaders to death at their rallies![12]