Thirty years ago the then US President Richard Nixon identified his country's Spanish-speaking people as a political force. Today there are some 40 million Hispanics whose votes are determining not just the presidential candidates, but the winner in this year's race to the White House

In this most remarkable political year, the United States could end up with its first woman president or its first African-American president. But this is also the year that could see a presidential election decided by Hispanics, as the Spanish-speaking  people of the US are known.

Most Americans conceive of Hispanics as people whose presence gets told by numbers. There are now 40 million American Hispanics. And our numbers keep growing. North Carolina is the fastest-growing Hispanic state. Chicago has become a major Hispanic metropolis. California is the largest Hispanic state in the Union. By 2040, one in three Americans will be a Hispanic ... and so on. Beyond such tallies, however, neither Republicans nor Democrats seem to comprehend what Hispanics mean to America.

It was a Republican President, Richard Nixon, in 1971, who assigned Hispanics a category. Hispanics were placed somewhere between "white" and "black" on the demographic chart. But the most remarkable thing about Hispanics is that we are an ethnic group - people united not by race but by culture - a culture that is, among many other things, Catholic at its roots. But in a country where identity is blood (white blood, black blood), how else could America understand the Hispanic except by reference to race?

Within a decade of Nixon's labelling, Hispanics were portrayed as the new third race in America. Through the 1980s, the US Census Bureau was predicting that Hispanics were destined to "replace" African Americans as the country's "largest minority". This oxymoron was, of course, utter nonsense, insofar as many Hispanics are black.

The prediction nonetheless set up a competition between blacks and Hispanics. African Americans began to see Hispanics as a threat to their place within the American racial dialectic. African Americans had seen it all before. Since the Irish came to the country in the nineteenth century, the typical pattern for immigrant groups was to advance by distinguishing themselves from blacks. The competition grew most intense where it was economic. At the hotel hiring-office or the construction worksite, Hispanic newcomers, particularly those who had arrived illegally, were willing to undercut working-class wages and to work with Third-World fury.

Latin America, from where the vast majority of Hispanics herald, has for centuries been more candid and open to the idea of racial mix than the US. In the United States, the idea of mixture was rendered an impossibility under the "one-drop" theory (by which African blood was determinative).

Seventy per cent of Hispanics in the US are from Mexico and therefore most are mestizo - a racial mix of the European, the African  and the New World Indian. Consequently most Hispanics would have understood Barack Obama if he had introduced himself as a man (like them) of mixture. The son of a mother from Kansas (whom he describes as having had "lily-white skin") and a Kenyan father, Mr Obama used his remarkable biography - his childhood in Indonesia and Hawaii, his father's Muslim faith - to portray himself as a man able to unite disparate populations and cultures. But Mr Obama was also desperate to prove to African Americans that he was one of them. He has portrayed himself as an "African American" and white liberals have seen him as nothing more or less than that - "America's first serious black candidate for President" (the one-drop theory).

After the South Carolina primary in January, Hillary Clinton's husband, the former President, tried to minimise the popularity of Barack Obama among African Americans - a constituency that Bill Clinton had come to assume as his own during his presidency. Mr Clinton portrayed Mr Obama as principally (and only) a candidate of black America. This has been part of the common assumption lately that Hispanics, as rivals to African Americans, will turn to Hillary Clinton. And for months the Clinton campaign has focused special attention on Hispanics - flattering them, praising them, promising universal health care and improved education.

This week, on "Super Tuesday", which saw primary elections in 24 states, the Clinton strategy seemed to pay off. While African Americans voted for Mr Obama in overwhelming numbers, a majority of Hispanics (a crucial majority in California and in south-western states such as Arizona and New Mexico) voted for Mrs Clinton.

Mr Obama's support among Hispanics improved among voters younger than 40. But, from older Hispanic women, Mrs Clinton received nearly two-thirds of the vote. White women voted for Mrs Clinton in overwhelming numbers as well. So what political analysts are pondering was whether the Hispanic vote represented a familiarity with the Clinton name and record or whether support for Hillary Clinton over Barack Obama was sad evidence of a continuing Hispanic feud with African Americans.

Eight years ago, when he was elected President, I wrote an editorial essay in The New York Times in which I predicted that George W. Bush would become our "first Hispanic President". Mr Bush speaks passable Spanish; two of his brothers are married to Mexicans; as Governor of Texas he often praised the contributions of Hispanics to America; and he seemed easy with the proximity of Mexico. And so it was that, as President, Mr Bush sought to provide a path towards citizenship for the 12 million illegal immigrants in the US.

What intervened, of course, was 9/11. President Bush ended up being out-manoeuvred by the shrill, nativist flank of his own party. What began as reasonable anxiety about the threat to "national security" posed by a largely ungoverned border ended as xenophobic hysteria.

The nearness of Catholic Latin America has long been a source of anxiety to Protestant America. Many Americans continue to see Latin America as a lawless place. The illegal worker becomes proof of this, despite the fact that Americans have solicited and hired illegal Latin American labour for more than a century.

As Catholics and also, increasingly these days, as converts to evangelical Protestantism, Hispanics are cultural conservatives on issues such as abortion and gay marriage - issues so dear to today's Republican Party. But many Hispanics came to hear the attack against illegal immigrants as an attack on all Hispanics, so the last years of the Bush administration have seen an exodus of Hispanics from the Republican Party. 

Before the Republicans indulged in anti-Hispanic xenophobia, I would have said that we Hispanics were too varied, too different to form a unified political front. What unites the Cuban anti-Communist in Miami with the leftist Mexican student in Sacramento? What unites the Guatemalan Indian who arrived in the US just yesterday with the New Mexican who traces his ancestry to the sixteenth century? Suddenly, the Republicans have managed to turn Hispanic voters into a Hispanic vote, which isn't necessarily going their way.

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