First American pope elected and will be known as Pope Leo XIV

What do you mean reinstate? The country was founded by the descendants of people who for the most part hated Catholicism.

Yes, but... the Spanish reached present-day New Mexico before the English reached present-day New England.

Probably meant 'reinvigorate'.

Maryland was founded as one of the original colonies as a haven for Catholics. There have always been Catholics in the US, though certainly it has been a bumpy ride; there were questions about how accepted JFK would be as the first Catholic president.

Sure, but the Spanish colonization had virtually no impact on the ethnic, political, or religious development of the United States other than some water and land rights in the Southwest.

I suppose like so many historical discussions, it depends on where you draw the starting line. Personally, I find understanding the colonization of the Americas and the emergence of the United States more effectively as a continuum that includes the Spanish, who were the dominate initial "new world" colonial power for a couple hundred years. Not to mention, who actually funded Columbus ;-). I understand this isn't the popular or common place to draw the starting line when reading US history, though. (And maybe not even a good way - just a way that I find personally more interesting.)

> original colonies as a haven for Catholics.

That didn't last thar long though. Since it was overtaken by Protestants who banned Catholicism (like it was banned in all the other colonies ) in 1689.

>Sure, but the Spanish colonization had virtually no impact on the ethnic, political, or religious development of the United States other than some water and land rights in the Southwest.

Texas, California, Florida, totally unimportant backwater states, right? No Latin American culture, ethnicity, political or religious influence to speak of.

How much Latin American representation would you say there was in the US colonies and United States before 1950?

How different would US western expansion have been had the Spanish not colonized Central America and Mexico? What would European colonization of the Americas have looked like if Spain hadn’t extracted such great wealth? How much did the Spanish American war and the resulting transfer of Cuba, Philippines, and Puerto Rico to US control change the character of US power? How do you untangle the history of New Orleans without considering Spain? And what would be the cultural character of the southwest without Spain’s influence?

You and entropicdrifter are wrong and defen is correct. Defen said "Spanish colonization had virtually no impact on the ethnic, political, or religious development of the United States", as opposed to the Western Hemisphere. He is correct.

Whether Texas or California, the land that is now the American southwest was almost completely empty before the Mexican War; about 80,000 hispanos, or about 1% of Mexico's prewar population, mostly in New Mexico and southern Colorado. They were very, very isolated, living in "islands", and were already dependent on the US, not Mexico, for trade <http://web.archive.org/web/20070517113110/http://www.pbs.org...>. The American takeover and attendant influx of settlers completely changed the region; by 1860 California alone had 380,000 people] <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Demographics_of_California#Pop...> and was a US state.

*85% of Mexican Americans today are from post-World War II immigration.* As late as 1970 <http://www.pewhispanic.org/2013/05/01/a-demographic-portrait...> there were five million people of Mexican ethnicity in the US, including one million born in Mexico. Now there are 33.7 million and 11.4 million, respectively. The number of people of Mexican ethnicity has grown by ~16X in 75 years (from ~2 million in 1940), while the US population has grown by ~2.5X. Had the Mexican-ethnic population grown by the same rate as the broader US there would be 5 million today, not 33.7.

History, even recent history, has been rewritten in peoples' minds by popular culture. Los Angeles's stupendous growth in the first half of the 20th century was driven almost entirely off of internal US migration. So many Iowans moved to LA that it was joked that southern California should be renamed "Caliowa". Almost everything we think of about the city, demographically speaking, is a post-1970 phenomenon.

According to Census estimates <http://web.archive.org/web/20080912052919/https://www.census...>, the city of Los Angeles was 7.1% Hispanic (almost all Mexican, of course) in 1940, and 15-17% in 1970. In 1990—let me repeat, two decades later—it was 39.9%. The non-Hispanic white population went from 86.3% in 1940, to 61-63% in 1970, to 37.3% in 1990. As of 2020 <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Los_Angeles#Race_and_ethnicity> the city is 46.9% Hispanic and 28.9% non-Hispanic white.

"We didn't cross the border; the border crossed us" is only true for the aforementioned hispanos. If alien space bats had rotated the contiguous US 180 degrees in 1945, all other Mexican Americans would be living in Buffalo and Portland and Boston and Rochester and Detroit. Those cities would be known as the home of Cal-Mex and Tex-Mex cuisine, not LA and El Paso and Phoenix.

I appreciate this response! Thank you.