New Latino South, Old Latino South 

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England won the race to settle the South some 300 years ago, and the rest is history, not historia; San Juan is a city in Puerto Rico, not in Carolina del Norte. Yet as heirs of the South and Central American Spanish conquest migrate north by the millions, America continues to grapple with what Morganton's Frank Hise, who led an anti-immigration protest there in 1999, called a "culture war." For some Latinos, the discovery of Fort San Juan demonstrates that Hispanics are not the modern-day "invaders" some people label them as, but that they are partners in founding contemporary America, and have been from the beginning.

"None of us are the original ones here," says Bill Beardall-Herrera, a native Panamanian and active leader among North Carolina's Latinos. "The original ones here are the Native Americans, and who knows if they were the original ones here. Who truly were the first ones here? Who knows who the first person was?"

Lingering at a lunch table inside Morganton's Supermercado El Salvador, Costa Rican Rebeca Vasquez agrees. "The limits that the people put around the world, I don't believe in that, maybe because I'm here." That's not to say Vasquez is enamored with her Spanish ancestors and their brutal conquest of Latin America. Though she speaks Spanish and English, the languages of the European colonists, Vasquez identifies more fiercely with her Native American ancestors. Like many Latinos, she can claim not only linguistic ties to the Conquistadors but also genetic ties to Native Americans.

"We are from this continent," she says. "I feel more like American than Spanish."

University of the West Indies professor Gregory Stephens, who studied Latino immigrants as a research fellow at the University of North Carolina, said the recent surge in immigration to Southern states should open eyes to the South's Latin heritage that was buried with Fort San Juan.

"Part of the problem is just myopia," he says of resistance among Southerners to the cultural changes going on. "We have not been trained to think about (the South) as part of the Latin American world. (But) South Florida is really Latin America; it's the capital of the new Latin America."

Stephens repeats a familiar refrain among Latinos — that it wasn't too long ago that the entire US West belonged to Mexico, and that the very names of many US states, such as Arizona, California, Colorado, Florida, Nevada, New Mexico and Texas, bear the indelible mark of their Hispanic heritage. At the end of the Mexican-American War fought over dueling claims to Texas in the 1840s, the US took 40 percent of Mexico's total land area in exchange for $15 million.

It's a point Jorge Hernandez, front man of the California-based ranchero band Los Tigres del Norte, makes in song. "I didn't cross the border, the border crossed me," Hernandez sings in the group's hit "Somos Mas Americanos" (We are more American).

"I tease a lot of my American friends and say, you know, we were here first, so we're going to take over," says Beardall-Herrera. "When the people say, you know, 'Go back home,' I say, well, we are. We were here in the early 1500s, and we built a fort up here in Morganton, and if you start looking around there, there's probably a few Hispanic fellows and ladies wandering around here who may be called Smith or whatever else.

"I don't think people have really let that sink into their heads," he adds. "And now people are finding out we are now the largest minority in this country."

Nuestra América
Hispanics comprise about 13 percent of the United States population and recently overtook African Americans as the largest ethnic minority. The US West is nearly 25 percent Hispanic, while the South, anchored by Florida and Texas, is almost 12 percent Spanish-speaking, according to a 2002 Census Bureau update.

North Carolina's proportion of Latinos is about half the national average, but the state's Spanish-speaking population grew by approximately 500 percent between 1990 and 2003. Other southeastern states, such as Georgia and Arkansas, showed similar gains, leading a southern population surge the US Census Bureau predicts will help make the nation nearly 25 percent Hispanic by 2050.

No group of immigrants has arrived on US soil in such vast numbers that they could survive without learning English — without becoming "American," in the narrow sense. Recent Latino immigrants, however, are filling such vital roles in the labor force — many businesspeople say they couldn't operate without them — and arriving in such numbers as to make it prudent for employers to learn Spanish. Frequently working in all-Hispanic crews and aided by bilingual supervisors, first-generation immigrants are surviving for years, sometimes decades, without speaking a word of English, even in North Carolina, where Latinos make up less than a tenth of the population.