Latino means: from Latin America. Latin America refers mostly to everything below the United States of America, include the Caribbean.
Hispanic means: from a country whose primary language is Spanish. But not every country in Latin America speaks Spanish primarily.
—Terry Blas
I’m Latino. I’m Hispanic. And They’re Different, So I Drew a Comic to Explain.
” Latin America refers mostly to everything below the United States of America, include the Caribbean.”
‘Everything’? I think that Jamaica wouldn’t really be called ‘Latin America’, even though it did have a Spanish-ruled period. I doubt few would call most Jamaicans ‘Latino’, anyway. And the same goes for the rest of the Caribbean Commonwealth countries.
Or is this a matter of language interpretation – “refers mostly to everything below…” to me means “most of the time, ‘Latin America’ means everything below…”, and perhaps he meant “refers to nearly everything below …”?
Well, maybe we should. It would be nice to have some hard rules and not just go with our gut. But it does come from a cartoonist, so we aren’t talking about a terribly deep discussion of the topic. I just thought it was an interesting rule of thumb. Check out the cartoon if you haven’t.
Hard rule – Latin America is everything south of the USA in a country where the last colonial power was a Romance language-speaking, ie mainly Latin-derived, one. This includes French speaking places like Haiti, as well as Spanish and Portuguese, but not British or Dutch, and actually ties to the word ‘Latin’.
Good stab at it. I think most people from the DR consider themselves Latino — not sure about Haitians. The important thing is that we address people the way they choose to be addressed. “African-American” isn’t strictly accurate; more recent voluntary arrivals from Africa aren’t included with descendants of kidnapped slaves. But it’s a term you can use in conversation that won’t make anyone feel degraded, so it works.
I liked the cartoon a lot — but I want to know more about the gay Hispanic Mormon missionary!