It’s easy to fall into the trap of seeing American history as one of English colonization. It’s what they taught me. Doing so makes it easy to forget that Imperial Spain laid claim to more land and people in the “New World” than every other European power combined. Nearly 75% of the Hemisphere we call “the Americas” speaks in Spanish tongues.

Where in the Rio Grande Valley I found armed guards and border fences, our country’s best attempt at shielding the nation from Latin Heritage, in the Caribbean I’ve found the great monetization of Meso-America. Some of Earth’s bluest waters lure beach-bounded travelers to vacation outposts within barely foreign places like Cancun MEX and the Bahamas, territorial holdings like Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, and even pieces of homeland like Miami and Key West, FL, where waking up to a Cuban grandmother who spoke no English cooking me breakfast at 5am felt closer to America’s island neighborhoods than the continental empire alongside them.