No visitor to southern California can avoid noticing that this is essentially a bilingual country. All public information is written in both English and Spanish, and most police officers, ticket sellers and various types of functionaries as well as store clerks and waitstaff switch without a problem between the languages. The old place-names still used today are almost exclusively Spanish. San Diego, Santa Barbara, San Francisco and so on were all founded during the second half of the 18th century by Spanish missionaries, who were the first who dared venture into the as yet unexplored California and created missionary stations where they converted the local Indian population to Christianity.

There are a number of old Latino identities in the US, but Chicanos are probably the oldest. Their self-image is based to a large extent on how they, like African-Americans, did not immigrate and, it can be said, became Americans “against their will”. During the 19th century,...