This is true.  There is a long-standing Spanish-speaking population in
the Southwest, especially Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona that long
predates Anglo domination of those areas.  That Hispanic settlement is
in the neighborhood of 350 to 400 years old, so you are certainly right
your implication that Spanish has been spoken much longer than English
in parts of what is now the United States.  To consider the descendents
of these early settlers to be interlopers, immigrants, or in any way not
as fully American citizens as anyone else is not only historically
ignorant but insultingly jingoist.  Of course, it fits in very nicely
with the Disneyesque Alamo myth (a little irony again).

Herb

Stahlke, Herbert F.W. wrote:

>Omar,
>
>Note my posting to Jose on irony.  I'd go with 500 years.  600 seems a
>stretch.
>  
>
My parents are in New Mexico. It was one of the first areas of European 
settlement in North America. The locals still speak a peculiar kind of 
Spanish, or so I have been told. Not everyone who speaks Spanish is a 
"wet back". People in the Southwest seem to understand this.

Omar

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