This term has multiple meanings:

• it is used by ethnographers to refer to Mesoamerica extended to include its peripheral culture sub-areas, such as northeast and northwest Mexico, the Caribbean coast of Central America, and the Isthmus of Panama. Middle America is in this way distinguished from the core Mesoamerican zone and includes all the cultures south of the United States to the borders of Columbia. The local Spanish language term is 'Midamérica'.
• Middle America (U.S.)
• as an obsolete term for Mesoamerica