Term | Definition |
caudillos | a latin american military dictator |
conquistadors | name for the Spanish explorers who claimed land in the Americas for Spanish |
cultural convergence | the contact and interaction of one culture with another |
pampas | a grasslands region in Argentina and Uruguay |
cays | a small low island or coral reef |
coral | the rocklike skeletons of tiny sea animals |
physical characteristics | |
physical processes | |
natural hazards | |
tropical storms | |
hurricanes | |
climates | |
geographic tools | |
economic activities | |
mestizos | |
mulattoes | |
patterns of settlement | |
migration | |
cultures | |
plateau | an area of high, flat land |
peninsula | a strip of land that juts out into an ocean |
irrigation | the watering of farmland with water drawn from reservoirs or rivers |
sinkhole | a hole formed when limestone is dissolved, causing the land above to collapse |
hacienda | a large Spanish-owned estate in the Americas,often run as a farm or a cattle ranch |
land redistribution | a policy by which land is taken from those who own large amounts and redistributed to those who have little or none |
ejido | farmland owned collectively by members of a rural community |
subsistence farming | farming that provides only enough for the needs of a family or a village |
latifundio | a large commercial farm owned by a private indicidual |
cash crop | a farm crop grown for sale and profit |
migrant worker | a worker who travels from place to place, working where extra help is needed to cultivate or harvest crops |
nafta | North American Free Trade Agreement, which phased out trade barriers among the United States, Canada, and Mexico |
maquiladora | a factory in Mexico, along the United States border, that assemble goods for export |