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The richness of Latin American culture is the product of many influences, including: Spanish and Portuguese culture, owing to the region's history of colonization, settlement and continued immigration from Spain and Portugal. All the core elements of Latin American culture are of Iberian origin, which is ultimately related to Western culture.
In another definition, Latin America designates the set of countries in the Americas where a Romance language (a language derived from Latin) predominates: Spanish, Portuguese, or French. Thus, it includes Mexico; most of Central and South America; and in the Caribbean, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, and Haiti.
The culture of South America draws on diverse cultural traditions. These include the native cultures of the peoples that inhabited the continents prior to the arrival of the Europeans; European cultures, brought mainly by the Spanish, the Portuguese and the French; African cultures, whose presence derives from a long history of New World slavery; and the United States, particularly via mass ...
The Porrúa Dictionary defines cholo, as used in the Americas, as a civilized Native American or a half-breed or mestizo of a European father and Native American mother. The word has historically been used along the borderland as a derogatory term to mean lower class Mexican migrants, and in the rest of Latin America to mean an acculturating ...
Latino and Latina as a noun refer to people living in the United States and have cultural ties to Latin America. As an adjective , the terms refer to things as having ties with Latin America. The term Hispanic usually includes Spaniards whereas Latino as a noun often does not.
Latin American countries (green) in the Americas. Latin America (Spanish: América Latina or Latinoamérica; Portuguese: América Latina; French: Amérique latine) is the region of the Americas where Romance languages (i.e., those derived from Latin)—particularly Spanish and Portuguese, as well as French—are primarily spoken.
Latin America is the area south of the Rio Grande, excluding Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Guyana, Suriname and other English speaking countries. There are several definitions of Latin America, but all of them define a huge expanse of geography with an incalculable amount of different customs. However, some generalizations can be made:
The idea that a part of the Americas has a cultural or racial affinity with all Romance cultures can be traced back to the 1830s, in particular in the writing of the French Saint-Simonian Michel Chevalier, who postulated that this part of the Americas were inhabited by people of a "Latin race," and that it could, therefore, ally itself with "Latin Europe" in a struggle with "Teutonic Europe ...