Can a Brazilian be Hispanic?
And can a Spaniard be Latino?
Who decides who is Latino or Hispanic, and who is not?
And who invented this label that now defines not only people but songs, dishes, companies and even political campaigns?
In the United States, the federal government asks citizens in the Census if they consider themselves Hispanic (or Latino, for that agency they are synonyms).
Whoever says yes is considered Hispanic and Latino, except if they later specify that they come from a country that the Census does not believe is Hispanic, such as the United Kingdom, Morocco... or Brazil or Portugal.
For the Census, Brazilians and Portuguese are not Latin, despite the fact that their language also comes from Latin and many in the United States feel part of this community, as an error in the Census itself showed.
For the Census, Spaniards are Latinos.
In the rest of the continent they are not so clear, and not because of Andrés Manuel López Obrador or Daniel Ortega, but because of one of their historical enemies: France.
Voters in Texas pledge allegiance to the American flag during a campaign event for Republican candidates Monica De La Cruz and Mayra Flores, on October 10, 2022. ALLISON DINNER / AFP via Getty Images
Latin America, where does the word come from?
The word Latin shortens the Latin American term, whose origin is not very clear: "There is a dispute between historians," says Mauricio Tenorio Trillo, professor of History at the University of Chicago, to Noticias Telemundo.
"Some believe that the Colombian José María Caicedo was the first to use the word in 1856. In any case, it is evident that Michel Chevalier, Napoleon III's minister who traveled throughout the United States, was the one who made it popular," he adds. .
"The concept of Latin America emerged as a word promoted largely by the economic-political interests of the French empire of Napoleon III" in the second half of the 19th century, as a "counterweight to the enormous influence that the United States was beginning to acquire," agrees Rubén Torres Martínez, professor at the National Autonomous University of Mexico.
Visscher map of North and South America from 1658.Sepia Times / Sepia Times/Universal Images Gro
"It is a subtle but important change from Spanish, Hispanic or Ibero-American America, to Latin America, it had (and continues to have) powerful implications for defining a field and a region," explains historian Marshall C. Eakin, of the Vandebilt University in Nashville, Tennessee.
The name matters: Latin America refers to Spain.
Ibero-America, to the Iberian Peninsula (that is, to Spain and Portugal).
Latin America, to the Latin language, among whose heirs is France.
[Record number of Latinos eligible to vote: “Their power to influence the results is real”]
"The word Latin became popular due to French advertising during its invasion of Mexico" between 1861 and 1867, explains Trillo.
"The idea was very clear: we had to create a Latin America against the Anglo-Saxon America" of the United States, he adds.
As the years went by, this Mexican historian indicates, and especially after the war between Spain and the United States in 1898, which sanctioned the replacement as the dominant power on the continent, the Latin term began to be used to distinguish "the American from the non-American."
And in the United States?
The Census included for the first time in 1930 the possibility of defining oneself as a "Mexican" race, but it was not until 1970 that it began to ask about Spanish origins in some households (20%, as a test) and, in 1980, in all of them.
In 2000 it included the Latin term for the first time.
as a synonym for Hispanic.
But for the writer and linguist Rossy Lima it is not the same.
"Hispanic began to be used in the 1970s to determine not necessarily race but language use," she says.
"I see Latino as a little more pan-ethnic," she adds, "including other linguistic and cultural realities," such as Brazil and Haiti.
"Hispanic was used long before Latin," says Trillo, "but starting in the 1990s it began to have a connotation of Hispanic imperialism. Then, greatly influenced by the political and cultural struggles of the indigenous people, it was decided that Hispanic was very close to [Christopher] Columbus and it was better to use Latin,” he adds.
"Any name is bad and any name can work," says Trillo, "but Hispanic was erased because it had that imperial connotation. Latin was not because they have not found out that it also has that connotation," he concludes, in reference to his French origin.
“What I really like about the word Latino," says Lima, "unlike Hispanic, is that it has gone through many changes.
And I feel that it is the term that most reflects our reality." "As a linguist I feel that the words that undergo these changes are the words that are used the most and with which people identify the most," adds the writer and linguist.
The 2000 United States Census also differentiated between ethnicity (Hispanic or non-Hispanic) and race (Asian, white, black, etc.).
This division is now in question: in 2023 the Census proposed asking by race or ethnicity at the same time, so that a person could choose between defining themselves as Latino and/or white, black, etc., or simply as Latino, without further ado.
To this dichotomy between race and ethnicity, and between Hispanic and Latino, a new cultural variant is now added: the term Latinx to avoid the masculine or feminine gender.
However, it remains very unknown, little used, and even hated.
In other countries on the continent, some prefer to use the suffix -e (like Latin) in search of a neutral gender (the Royal Spanish Academy, which sets the language according to the uses it detects as generalized, is not in favor).
"First I identify as Mexican," says Lima, "and then as Latinx." "I like to adopt the idea that the x is like this inclusion of other identities, not just because the term refers to the non-binary ", he concludes, "I feel that the term refers to what is indigenous."