The Hispanics of the United States have historically received
little attention from either the Spanish government or Spanish
society. This lack of relevance or presence of Hispanics in the
Spanish mind is not strange, for the simple reason that their
profile in the US was, until very recently, relatively
undefined. And this was so even though significant numbers of
Latin Americans have been settling in the US since the middle of
the last century –what Carlos Fuentes has called ‘the silent
reconquest’–. Only in this last decade has the perception –and
the scale– of things Hispanic begun to change. It was when
Clinton was re-elected in 1996 that electoral analysts began
examining with new eyes a group that did not seem to previously
exist in its own right. Until that year it had been –if
anything– a negative reference in electoral campaigns where the
promise of a hard line in dealing with Hispanic immigrants was a
factor designed to attract the conservative Republican vote. The
change of century and millennium