Latino: what does it mean?
What does it mean to be Latino, who are they, and where does the term come from?
Latinos: definition
The Dictionary of the Spanish Language defines the word “Latino” as: native of Latium, a region of Italy; pertaining or related to the peoples of Latium, or to the cities with Latin rights; pertaining or related to Latin, or characteristic of it. Latin grammar; pertaining or related to the Latin Church. Latin rites; from any of the peoples who speak languages derived from Latin. Within these definitions, it is not very clear why Brazilians, Spaniards, Argentinians, Salvadorans, Mexicans born in the United States, are “Latinos.”
So, where does this label come from that defines people, songs, cuisine, businesses, political campaigns, and even genes? It’s a complex, long, and unclear history. For example, the federal government of the United States conducted a census asking if people considered themselves Hispanic or Latino (synonyms for the government) but did not take into account people who identified as Hispanic and Latino if they also specified that they came from non-Hispanic countries, according to the census, such as the United Kingdom, Morocco, Brazil, or Portugal, especially the last two whose language also comes from Latin, making them Latinos.
Origins of Latino name
It is said that Latino and Latina originate from Ancient Rome, with origins in the French term “Amérique latine,” coined in the mid-19th century during the Second Mexican Empire to identify areas of America colonized by Romance-speaking peoples, used to show affinity with French allies during the Mexican Empire, also known as the Mexican intervention.
In other words, since the late 1850s, after the Mexican-American War, the use of the term Latino was used in local newspapers in California that wrote about Central and South America. Over the years, the idea of Latino and Hispanic is generally used to designate people living in the United States who do not speak English, although now it is used even if they do. Of course, this becomes more complex when Spaniards are introduced as Hispanic but not as Latino.
According to the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) of the US government, Hispanics or Latinos are “persons of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.”
Sometimes the term Latino is used for people of Spanish-speaking descent, including Brazil, and people from the Caribbean, as long as they were not French, Dutch, or British colonies. However, nowadays, there are people who identify from Latin America and call themselves Latino, such as people from Haiti and French Guiana.
Furthermore, the idea of being Latino or Hispanic does not refer to a race; a Latino can be white, black, African American, from an Asian family but born in Peru, or even European Caucasians who are Puerto Rican, Cuban, Dominican.
All these considerations, strange and complicated in many cases, make the use of the term Latino still debated, despite its growing popularity; there have been controversies and disagreements, especially in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries.
This has been complex and especially discussed by academics, journalists, and “Latino” rights organizations, who have opposed the use of the word Latino in the media, mainly because the use in the US serves to encompass “everyone else,” those who are not “descendants” of British, Caucasians, by the way, “Caucasian” is already considered an obsolete racial term, as it is now said “of European descent.”
