Feb 01 2008
Hispanic or Latino?
Eleena over at Voices en Español has written an interesting post about the difference between the terms Hispanic and Latino. Here in the United States, most people use the terms interchangeably for people of Latin American descent, but the terms are actually very different. I used to be one of those people who use the term interchangeably, until I read this post.
Kudos to Eleena at Voices en Español for another interesting post!
Hi Zach!
Thanks for the reciprocal post. I’m still kind of conflicted about this. I hear people use both terms in the U.S. and while some people don’t care, others don’t like either term. But with the amazing diversity of ethnicities and nationalities that exists in the U.S., I think we do need one term that can describe a wide swath of people. After all we use the term “Asian” to describe anyone from China, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Japan, Taiwan, Korea, the Phillipines, etc. and “Southeast Asian” to describe people from countries like India and Pakistan and with those terms we’re referring to billions of people.
It seems that the U.S. government has opted for the term “hispanic” while the U.S. media uses both “hispanic” and “latino.” You probably noticed that the article that my post linked to was written by a reporter from Nicaragua who said in her article that she was fine with being called both “hispanic” and “latino.”
It is interesting to me though the baggage that both terms have in Spain.
Saludos.
Zach,
Sorry…but another “oops.” Can you fix the links to my blog in your post? The URL should be “spanish-podcast.com” not “spanish-podcast.org”
Thanks!
P.S. You can delete this comment as well.
Whoops! So sorry about that, it’s all fixed.
Thanks for your input!