Wikipedia
Isleño (, pl. isleños) is the Spanish word meaning " islander." The term was applied to the Canary Islanders to distinguish them from Spanish mainlanders known as " peninsulars" . The Isleños are the inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and by extension the descendants of Canarian settlers and emigrants to present-day Louisiana, Texas, Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, Puerto Rico, and other parts of the Americas. In these places, the name, which formerly referred to a general category of people, now refers to the specific cultural identity of Canary Islanders or their descendants throughout Latin America and in Louisiana, where they are still called Isleños or los Isleños. Another name for Canary Islander in English is "Canarian." In Spanish, an alternative is Canario or Isleño Canario.
The term Isleño is still used in Latin America, at least in those countries which had large Canarian populations, to distinguish a Canary Islander from a peninsulare (continental Spaniard). By the early 19th century there were more people of Canarian extraction in the Americas than in the Canary Islands themselves, and the number of descendants of those first immigrants is exponentially larger than the number who originally migrated. The Americas were the destination of most Canarian immigrants, from their discovery by Europeans in the 15th century until the 20th century, when substantial numbers went to the Spanish colonies of Ifni, Western Sahara and Equatorial Guinea in Africa during the first half of the century. Beginning in the 1970s, they began to emigrate to other European countries, although emigration to the Americas did not end until the early 1980s.
The cultures of Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico, Venezuela, and Uruguay partially have all been influenced by Canarian culture, as have the dialects of Spanish spoken in all but Uruguay. Although almost all descendants of Canary Islanders who emigrated to the Americas from the 16th to the 20th century are incorporated socially and culturally within the larger populations, there remain a few communities that have preserved at least some their ancestors' Canarian culture, as in Louisiana, San Antonio in Texas, Hatillo, Puerto Rico San Carlos de Tenerife (now a neighborhood of Santo Domingo) in the Dominican Republic and San Borondón in Peru.