Columnist Hal Rothman: On how the Las Vegas Valley will inevitably become a predominantly Spanish-speaking community

Hal Rothman is a professor of History at UNLV. His column appears Sunday.

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Feliz Navidad. If you don't know what that means, you had better find out.

The most significant demographic change in Las Vegas in the past 15 years is neither the emergence of a retirement community nor the growth of a transplanted upper-middle-class. It is, wholeheartedly and without a doubt, the remarkable growth of the Spanish-surnamed population.

No group of people has become more visible in recent years in Las Vegas than Latinos. They have come from everywhere, from East Los Angeles and now South Central, increasingly Latino instead of African American.

They leave Mexico in droves, fleeing the poverty of the cities and oppression of the highlands. Middle-class people from Nicaragua, Salvador, Guatemala and Panama come, fleeing the anarchic and often lethal dangers of life in societies with private armies and rampant poverty, where riding in limousines surrounded by armed escorts makes you a target. Filipinos arrive in an ever-growing stream. We have even imported the show that Fidel Castro does not want you to see.