♤ Latin America is generally understood to consist of the entire continent of South America in addition to Mexico, Central America, and the islands of the Caribbean whose inhabitants speak a Romance language.

♤ The peoples of this large area shared the experience of conquest and colonization by the Spaniards and Portuguese from the late 15th through the 18th Century as well as movements of independence from Spain and Portugal in the early 19th century.

♤ Since the Spanish and Portuguese element looms so large in the history of the region, it is sometimes proposed that Iberoamerica would be a better term than Latin America.

♤ Lesser Antilles, long arc of small islands in the Caribbean Sea extending in a north-south direction from the Virgin Islands to Grenada. A number of other islands—Trinidad and Tobago, off the northeastern coast of Venezuela, and the east-west island chain from Margarita Island to Aruba, off the northern coast of Venezuela—are physiographically part of the South American continental shelf but are usually included in definitions of the Lesser Antilles.

♤ The Greater Antilles is a grouping of the larger islands in the Caribbean Sea: Cuba, Hispaniola (containing Haiti and the Dominican Republic), Puerto Rico, Jamaica, and the Cayman Islands.