Hispanic or Latino ?

Question

I don't want to offend anyone, and if I do , please forgive me. I have said hispanic for the majority of my life, but recenty I have heard more people saying Latino. I was wondering if one was more appropiate. Which one is perferred? Is it like Black and African American? Do people really even care?

Answer 1

Most people don't really care. Those that do are usually a bit more sensitive to these issues and would rather be called by their ethnic heritage, such as Mexican, Honduran, Cuban, etc. These people think they're so different from the other, but in the end, they're only a mix of Indian and European, with some people having African heritage......just like everyone else.

Answer 2

Some people are very sensitive about these labels, and some don't really care. I'm one of those who really don't care. I've been called Mexican, Mexican-American, Hispanic, and Latino.....it doesn't bother me. The thing that bothers me is when people make racist and ignorant comments about us...or about any ethnicity for the matter.

Answer 3

Yup, some ppl care.

The word Latina/Latino came about cuz of ppl being proud of their roots. Thus, showing it with a flare of the Spanish accent when its pronounced.

The word Hispanic's origin is from Spain. White ppl in America misuse it to put Spanish speaking ppl everywhere in one catergory.

The confusion exists only in America

Answer 4

i don't care either. its just a label here in the US.

I think if you go to Asia or Middle East, you won't find the hispanic or latino label there in the census.

Answer 5

it doesnt matter. u can call us either. i really dont care.

Answer 6

Hispanic (Castilian Hispano, Portuguese Hispânico, Catalan: Hispà, from Latin Hispānus, adjective from Hispānia, the Roman name for the Iberian Peninsula) is a term that historically denoted relation to the ancient Hispania and its peoples. However, when the modern day country of Spain was created in the 15th century, it inherited the term, and thus, since then, Hispanic is also related to Spain, its people and its culture. In this process, Portugal was excluded from the term, despite the fact that the territory that nowadays covers was also in the former Hispania[1]. Instead of Hispanic, Portugal adopted the word Lusitanic for the same purposes (in reference to the former Roman province of Lusitania, which was a part Hispania; ultimately, regarding to the Lusitanians, one of the first Indo-European tribes to settle Europe). With the expansion of the Spanish Empire, the peoples from Spain spread all over the world, creating new colonies and giving place to the Hispanophone. This expansion was mainly concentrated in the Americas, especially in what is called the Hispanic America, which comprises all those countries from the Americas that once belonged to the Spanish Empire and where the Spanish influence is still present (Brazil not being included since when it was discovered by the Portugueses, the sepparation between the terms Hispanic regarding to Spain and Lusitanic regarding to Portugal was already effective). These countries, inherited the strong cultural and ancestral legacy of the Spaniards, and in consequence, their peoples and their cultures are also considered as Hispanic. Nowadays, the peoples from Hispanic America who live in the United States have developed their own identity with an unquestionable Hispanic substrate, and are also considered Hispanic


[edit] Etymology
Etymologically, the term Hispano/Hispanic is derived from Hispania (whose meaning and derivation is uncertain), the name given by the Romans to the entire Iberian Peninsula — modern-day Spain and Portugal — during the period of the Roman Republic. In the modern era, however, Hispanic/Hispano has usually only been applied to Spain and things related to it, while a derivation from or relation to Portugal and its people (including Brazil and Portuguese-speaking Brazilians) is normally denominated Luso/Lusitanic.

In Spanish, the word "Hispano" is also used as the first element of compounds referring to Spain and the Spanish, rather like the way Anglo is used in compounds referring to England and the English. Thus, the Spanish-American War in Spanish is known as Guerra Hispano-Estadounidense, the "Spanish-German Treaty" is Tratado Hispano-Alemán, and "Spanish America" is Hispanoamérica.

The usage of Hispanic as an ethnic indicator in the United States is believed to have come into mainstream prominence following its inclusion in a question in the 1980 U.S. Census, which asked people to voluntarily identify if they were of "Spanish/Hispanic origin or descent".[4]


[edit] Synonyms and antonyms
Often the term "Hispanic" is used synonymously with the word "Latino", and frequently with "Latin" as well, as they are used in the U.S. Even though the terms may sometimes overlap in meaning, they are not completely synonymous.

"Hispanic" specifically refers to Spain, and to the Spanish-speaking nations of the Americas, as cultural and demographic extensions of Spain. It should be further noted that in a U.S. context, a Hispanic population consists of the people of Spain and everyone with origins in any of Spanish-speaking nations of the Americas, regardless of ancestry of the latter (including Amerindians). In the context of Spain and Latin America, a Hispanic population may consist of the people of Spain, and when regarding the inhabitants of the Hispanic America, includes only criollos, mestizos, mulattos, and others with Spanish ancestry, to the exclusion of indigenous Amerindians, unmixed descendants of black Africans and whites or other peoples from later migrations without any Spanish lineage. This distinction was established in the Spanish Empire in the 17th century, as an institutionalized system of racial and social stratification and segregation (Sistema de Castas) based on the person's heritage. However, when talking of Hispanic in a cultural and linguistic sense, even peoples without Spanish ancestry but living in the Hispanic America who have Spanish as mother tongue or as vehicular language.

In regards to the term Latin, in this context it refers to the conception of "Latin America" as a region, a concept which was introduced by the French in the 1860s when they dreamed of building an empire based in Mexico. See French intervention in Mexico. This concept of a "Latin" America was closely connected to the introduction of French positivism into the region's intellectual circles. [5] The French understood "Latin" to include themselves and other continental European Romance speaking nations, to the exclusion of their "Anglo-Saxon" colonial rivals the United States (in the Americas) and the United Kingdom, as well as, the Germanic and Scandinavian peoples (in Europe).

Latinos, meanwhile, is a contraction of "Latinoamericanos", and refers only to those from Spanish or Portuguese-speaking countries of Latin America, regardless of ancestry in all contexts. Those from French Canada are very rarely included, while those from Haiti are never. In the rare cases where they are, along with residents of French Guiana, it is with some ambiguities.

The confusion that arises is from the similarity between the words Latino and Latin, and between the concept of Hispanic and Latino. Latino is a shortened version of the noun Latinoamericano (Latin American). In the Spanish language "Latín" (Latin) is the name of the language of the Romans. This means that "Latín" is not confined solely to Hispanics, Latin Americans, or Latinos, but has always included such European peoples as the Italians, French, Romanians, Portuguese, etc.

Thus, of a group consisting of a Brazilian, a Colombian, a Mexican, a Spaniard, and a Romanian; the Brazilian, Colombian, and Mexican would all be Latinos, but not the Spaniard or the Romanian, since neither Spain nor Romania is geographically situated in Latin America. Conversely, the Colombian, Mexican and Spaniard would all be Hispanics, but not the Romanian and the Brazilian; Brazilians speak Portuguese as Brazil has evolved from the former Portuguese colony in South America. Finally, all of the above nationalities would be Latin, including the Romanian. To further clarify, a Latino is a US citizen or resident of Latin American descent or birth.

It should be noted that the categories of "Latino" and "Hispanic" are used primarily in the United States to socially differentiate people. As social categories they are not mutually exclusive and without ambiguities and cannot be seen as independent of social discrimination (socioeconomic, ethnic or racial). These terms are not in everyday usage in the Caribbean, Central or South America.

Besides "Hispanic", "Latino", and "Latin", other terms are used for more specific subsets of the Hispanic population. These terms often relate to specific countries of origin, such as "Mexican", "Mexican-American", "Cuban", "Puerto Rican" or "Dominican", etc. Other terms signify distinct cultural patterns among Hispanics which have emerged in what is now the United States, including "Chicano", "Tejano", "Nuyorican", etc.


[edit] The historical mistake
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The languages of Spain. As can be seen in the map, Spain has more languages than just the Castilian. In addition, the old Hispania also included Portugal, so historically the Portuguese can be considered as a Hispanic language, although if we consider Hispanic as a synonym of Spain, the map shows the current Spanish languages (simplified). Castilian (Spanish)

Catalan, co-official

Basque, co-official

Galician, co-official Asturian, unofficial

Aragonese, unofficial

Aranese, co-official (dialect of Occitan)
Spain is not an uniform country; various ethnicities peacefully coexist in its territories, and each one has its own culture, traditions, idiosyncracy, and some of them have their own language. However, when one talks about Hispanic, it is usual to refer to the cultural or the ancestral background related to the Castilian-speaking Spain, instead of referring, for instance, to the Catalan-speaking Spain or the Basque-speaking Spain. So, for example, analogously to the case of the United Kingdom, Hispanic would be the equivalent to Briton. Note that this is not the same as Anglo, which would be equivalent to Castilian; or Scottish and Welsh, which would be equivalent, for instance, to Catalan and Basque. This may seem a subtile difference, but it is very significant: historically, while in other countries such as the United Kingdom there has been a differentiation between the sub-nations that compose the country (English, Scottish, Welsh, Northern Irish, Cornish, etc.) and the supra-nation that engloves them (the United Kingdom), in Spain the dominant nation (Castile) has been always directly related to the supra-nation (Spain). This has provoked that while when one talks about Anglo and Briton one is aware to be talking about the historical region of England and the whole Great Britain respectively, in the case of Spain, one talks about Hispanic as a synonym of the whole country but also of the cultural identity related to the Castilian-speaking region of Castile, and thus subordinates the rest of the nationalities that exist in Spain to the predomianant one, setting them on the brink of the nullity with regard to the participation of these nationalities in the composition of the national identity of country.

Spain has dragged this historical mistake to the point that the peoples of the New World who began to speak Castilian when Cristopher Columbus discovered the Americas in the 15th century, instead of self-identifying themselves as peoples of Castilian cultural heritage, identified themselves as people of Hispanic heritage, using it as a synonym of the Castilian-speaking world, and hiding again the reality of those other Hispanics of non-Castilian culture, traditions, idiosyncracy, and language.

In addition, the Castilian-speaking peoples of the New World also adopted other cultural labels to identify themselves, such as the term Latino, which results into a corruption of the Castilian word of the same name [6], meaning, mainly, the Latin language or someone from Latium, or someone whose mother tongue is a Romance language (a language which derives from the Latin), and which, since it is used as a cultural label to identify almost exclusively the peoples of Castilian cultural or ancestral heritage in the Americas, has become alienating [7] for other peoples who also speak Romance languages in other parts of the World [8] (including those in Spain who were already alienated by the monopolization of the term Hispanic by the Castilian-speaking peoples).

The third era of this historical mistake is happening nowadays in the United States of America, where since the late 20th century the terms Hispanic and Latino have broken the cultural label to become an ethnic label, thus not only perpetuating but increasing the alienation, not only of the non-Castilian hispanics from Spain (through the term Hispanic) and the other Latin peoples from the rest of the World, including those non-Castilian Spaniards (through the term Latino), but also reaching the same Castilian-speaking peoples of the Peninsula, because this time, the acceptance of the term Hispanic as an ethnic label implies the identification of the same Castilian-speaking Spaniards with the large majority of Castilian-speaking peoples of Amerindian and South American ethnicity. In this context, the Castilian-speaking peoples of Spain have become a minority, like once were the non-Castilian peoples of the Iberian Peninsula in front of the Castilians, and thus, many cultural and linguistic issues relating the Spaniards are often confused and mixed with those relating to Mexicans and other Hispanic American peoples.

Today, although some people not only from the Hispanophone but also from other parts of the World are conscious of these issues, they are still very few in front of the, although young, deep-rooted tradition that the terms Hispanic and Latino have generated among the Amerindian and South American community, mainly in the United States of America. In great part, this affection to these terms is due to three main reasons:

The historical exclusion from the term Hispanic of the non-Castilian-speaking peoples of Spain, which was carried out by the Castilian-speaking peoples of Spain.
Therefore, the ignorance and manipulation has always surrounded the term Hispanic, and the thing has gone so far that it has become an ethnic label which has marginalized the same Castilian-speaking peoples of Spain.
The ignorance inherent to the low-class South Americans and Amerindians (the so-called Latinos) which has helped not only to perpetuate the bad usage of the terms but also to increase it and to spread it over the Americas, reaching the United States of America and joining a short point of view with regard to these issues in this country and, again, colliding with the ignorance that surrounds the true origin of the terms Hispanic and Latino, facts that have lead to the appearance of the ethnic label.
Nowadays, the same reasons that have provoked all this ignorance and confusion around the words Hispanic and Latino are still prevailing, and the so-called Latinos, among other people from all over the World, especially in the United States, keep the bad usage of the terms and, paradoxally, many of them support the ethnic label that surrounds these words, considering themselves as people of a different race, as Hispanics or Latinos, and thus establishing a common link among them, but at the same time, excluding and alienating more and more the other Hispanics from Spain (both the Castilian and the non-Castilian-speaking) and also the Latin peoples from the rest of the World.


[edit] The Hispanics from Hispania
As said before, Spain is not an uniform country but a land of contrasts and the home to a wide range of ethnicities and nationalities, each one of which has its own culture, traditions, idiosyncracy, and some of them have their own language. Historically, due to the historical mistake mentioned above, there has been a confusion regarding to the real meaning of Hispanic, which has been used for centuries as a synonym for all that related to the Castilian-speaking world, marginalizing the rest of cultures that developed from the old Hispania.

Historically, this has not affected the Portugueses because, instead, the modern day Portugal is in what anciently was known as Hispania (in part of the Roman provinces of Lusitania and Gallaecia), it has been a sepparate country from Spain for centuries and has fully developed its national identity. Therefore, while the word Hispanic has always been used to describe all that related to Spain, the word Luso or Lusitanic has played the same role for Portugal. But, on the contrary, this situation of Castilian supremacy has really affected those nationalities that, from inside Spain have played a crucial role in the construction of the country and the Hispanophone from the stereotype of Hispanic, when while they were in fact from Spain and the old Hispania, they were not of Castilian heritage or language.

This section aims to clarify the lack of information existing on this subject through doing a brief review on the history of Hispania and the peoples that inhabit Spain nowadays.


[edit] History of Hispania

[edit] Early history
Main articles: Prehistoric Spain and Prehistoric Portugal
The earliest record of hominids living in Europe has been found in the cave of Atapuerca, in the Spanish province of Burgos, and it has become a key site for world palaeontology. Fossils found there are dated to roughly 1,000,000 years ago. The most conspicuous sign of prehistoric human settlements are the famous paintings in the cave of Altamira, in Cantabria, Spain, which were done ca. 15,000 BC and are regarded, along with those in Lascaux, France, as paramount instances of cave art.

Modern humans in the form of Cro-Magnons began arriving in the Iberian Peninsula from north of the Pyrenees some 35,000 years ago. This genetically homogenous wave of population (characterized by the M173 mutation in the Y chromosome), developed the M343 mutation, giving rise to the R1b Haplogroup, which still dominant in modern Portuguese and Spanish populations (especially in the Basques). Meanwhile the Neanderthals became extinct; their last refuge was today's Portugal or Gibraltar around 28,000 BC. Far later, some 12,000 years ago, an interstadial deglaciation called the Allerød Oscillation occurred, weakening the rigorous conditions of the last ice age. This also ended the Upper Palaeolithic period, beginning the Mesolithic. The populations sheltered in Iberia, descendants of the Cro-Magnon, given the deglaciation, migrated and recolonized all of Western Europe, thus spreading the R1b Haplogroup populations (still dominat, in variant degrees, from Iberia to Scandinavia). This is called by some people "The first Spanish Empire" (the Spanish Empire being the second), due to the fact that those ancient Iberians settled all over Europe, and thus nowadays the genetical origins of most Europeans can be tracked back to the Iberian Peninsula.


[edit] Pre-roman times
Main articles: Pre-Roman peoples of the Iberian Peninsula and Pre-Roman Portugal
The earliest urban culture documented in the Iberian Peninsula, is that of the semi-mythical southern city of Tartessos, which dates back to much before the 1,100 BC. However, the Tartessians were not the only ones: apart from them, the whole of the Iberian Peninsula was inhabited by other non-Indo-European peoples (Aquitanians and other Proto-Basques, Iberians, Turdetani, Cynetes or Conii and others), by Indo-European peoples (Proto-Celtics, Celtics and Lusitanians, mainly) and by a mix of both (Celtiberians, a mix of Celts and Iberians).

Far later, the seafaring Phoenicians, Greeks and Carthaginians began to settle along the Mediterranean coast. Around 1,100 BC, Phoenician merchants founded the trading colony of Gadir or Gades (modern day Cádiz) near Tartessos. In the 9th century BC the first Greek colonies, such as Emporion (modern Empúries, in Catalonia), were founded along the Mediterranean coast on the East of the Peninsula, leaving the southern coast to the Phoenicians. The Greeks are responsible for the name Iberia, apparently after the river Iber (Ebro in Castilian). In the 6th century BC the Carthaginians arrived in Iberia while struggling first with the Greeks and shortly after with the Romans for control of the Western Mediterranean. Their most important colony was Carthago Nova (Latin name of modern day Cartagena).


[edit] Roman Hispania
Main articles: Conquest of Hispania and Hispania
In 218 BC, the Romans disembarked in Emporion due to the break out of the Second Punic War, which confronted Rome and Carthage, and thus started the Conquest of Hispania, which would end in 17 BC. However, the Roman control of Hispania would last much longer, until the beginnings of the 5th century, when Germanic tribes from the Northern Europe began to invade the Peninsula.


[edit] Barbarian invasions and Visigothic Kingdom
Main articles: Migration period, Spain in the Middle Ages, and Visigoths
At the beginnings of the 5th century, the Visigoths, the Suevi (Quadi and Marcomanni) and the Buri, invaded the Peninsula and settled permanently. Others, like the Vandals (Silingi and Hasdingi), were also present, before moving on to North Africa. Many words of Germanic origin entered into the Vulgar Latin that was spoken in Hispania by those times, and were then transmitted to the Romance Languages that originated in the Peninsula during the Dark Ages, such as the Castilian, the Portuguese or the Catalan, and many more entered through other avenues (often French) in the ensuing centuries[9]. The Visigoths established a Christian Kingdom that lasted until the arrival of the moors at the beginnings of the 8th century.


[edit] Al-Andalus
Main articles: Umayyad conquest of Hispania and Al-Andalus
The Umayyad conquest of Hispania (711–718) commenced when an army of the Umayyad Caliphate consisting largely of Moors, the Muslim inhabitants of Northwest Africa, invaded Visigothic Christian Hispania (Portugal and Spain) in the year 711. Under the authority of the Umayyad caliph at Damascus, and led by the Berber general Tariq ibn Ziyad, they landed at Gibraltar on April 30 and worked their way northward. Tariq's forces were joined the next year by those of his superior, the Emir Musa ibn Nusair. During the eight-year campaign, most of the Iberian Peninsula was brought under Muslim occupation save for small areas in the northwest (Galicia and Asturias) and largely Basque regions in the Pyrenees. The conquered territory, under the Arabic name al-Andalus, became part of the expanding Umayyad empire. The invaders subsequently moved northeast across the Pyrenees, but were defeated by the Frank Charles Martel at the Battle of Tours in 732. Muslim control of French territory was intermittent and ended in 975. Meanwhile, the Christian Reconquista, or reconquest, of the Iberian Peninsula began with Pelayo of Asturias' victory at the Battle of Covadonga in 722.


[edit] Reconquista and the New World
Main articles: Reconquista, Spanish colonization of the Americas, and Spanish Empire
The Reconquista (English: Reconquest) was the seven and a half century long process by which the Christian kingdoms of northern Hispania (modern Portugal and Spain) conquered the Iberian peninsula from the Muslim Moorish states of Al-Andalus. The Umayyad conquest of Hispania from the Visigoths occurred during the early 8th century. Almost immediately, in 718, Pelayo of Asturias, a noble Visigoth, leads the fight against the Moors in the Asturias and establishes the Kingdom of Asturias. In 722, King Pelayo defeats a large force sent by Emir Munuza to annihilate him at the Battle of Covadonga. He then leads an alliance of Asturian and Cantabrian mountaineers in the counter-offensive against the Muslims beginning what will be called La Reconquista.

In 1236 the last Muslim stronghold of Granada under Mohammed ibn Alhamar was subjugated by Ferdinand III of Castile, and Granada became a vassal state of the Christian kingdom for the next 250 years. On January 2, 1492, the last Muslim ruler, Abu 'abd Allah Muhammad XII (also known as Boabdil of Granada), surrendered to Ferdinand and Isabella, the Catholic Monarchs. This resulted in the creation of united Roman Catholic nation encompassing most of modern day Spain. Navarre remained separate until 1512. The Portuguese Reconquista had already culminated in 1249 with the subjugation of Algarve by Afonso III.

In 1492, the same year that Boabdil of Granada surrendered to the Catholic Monarchs and the Jews were expulsed from Spain, Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas, inaugurating an age of Spanish conquest and colonization of the continent, a process that would last for centuris and from which the new Hispanics would appear. Notice that the Portuguese colonial expansion, wich would give rise to the Portuguese Empire (namely Brazil), had began in 1415.


[edit] Modern day peoples of Hispania
Main article: Nationalities in Spain
Historically, the modern country of Spain was formed by the accretion of several independent Iberian realms through dynastic inheritance, conquest and the will of the local elites. These realms had their own personalities and borders. Portugal, an independent country since the 12th century, was the only of the Iberian realms not to be absorbed into the Spanish kingdom.

Since the reign of the Catholic Monarchs, there has been a process of uniformization by the central authorities. Simultaneously, this uniformization has been repelled by some of the local elites that formed their own national consciences based on traditional, historical, linguistical and cultural traits.

The dynamics between centralization and decentralization is one of the forces in the history of the latest centuries. Since the beginning of the transition to democracy in Spain, after the Francisco Franco dictatorship, there have been many movements towards more autonomy in certain regions of the country in order to achieve full independence in some cases and to get their own autonomous community in others.

It is a fact that it does not exist something so straightforward as just one Spanish nationality for the whole country nowadays. Many Spanish citizens feel no conflict in having several national identities at the same time.

This section aims to describe the different peoples that exist nowadays in Spain and that have systematically and historically been forgotten by the Castilian-speaking Spain, to the detriment of the cultural richness of the country and the term Hispanic, but that have still played a crucial role in the composition of the Hispanophone, though at expenses, in many cases, of their national identity.


You were not being racist for sure i know cause im latino(dominican).