Vanilla originally came from South and Central America and the Caribbean; the first people to have cultivated vanilla evidently seem to be the Totonacs of Mexico’s East Coast. The Aztecs acquired vanilla when they conquered the Totonacs in the 15th Century; the Spanish, got it when they conquered the Aztecs.
The position of a place north or south of the equator is described
in terms of its latitude. Since we're talking about the surface of
a sphere, latitude is an angle, and its value is given in angle
measure.
Any unit of angle is fine ... degrees, radians, grads, etc., and if
you're given an angle in one unit, you can always easily change
it to a unit that you like better ... but 'degrees' has been the unit
used most often for latitude, and longitude too, practically since
the whole system was invented a few hundred years ago.
For parts of an angle smaller than a whole degree, 1/60 of a
degree (minutes) and 1/3600 of a degree (seconds) were used
traditionally for the first couple hundred years. But that ponderous,
inconvenient system is rapidly giving way now to plain old decimal
degrees, probably because those are easier for the computer to handle.
Answer:
Independence from Spain, in the case of Central America, was primarily a reshuffling of power between Peninsulares (Spaniards born in Spain) and Criollos (Spaniards born in Latin America).
Tectonic plate movement is run by convection of mantle currents.
