latino

Hispanic and Latino are ethnonyms used to refer collectively to the inhabitants of the United States who are of Spanish or Latin American ancestry (see Hispanic and Latino Americans). While the terms are sometimes used interchangeably, for example, by the United States Census Bureau, Hispanic includes people with ancestry from Spain and Latin American Spanish-speaking countries, while Latino includes people from Latin American countries that were formerly colonized by Spain and Portugal.Hispanic was first used and defined by the U.S. Federal Office of Management and Budget's (OMB) Directive No. 15 in 1977, which defined Hispanic as "a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central America or South America or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race." The term was formed out of a collaboration with Mexican American political elites to encourage cultural assimilation into American society among all Hispanic/Latino peoples and move away from the anti-assimilationist politics of Chicano identity, which had gained prominence in the preceding decades through the Chicano Movement. The rise of Hispanic identity paralleled an emerging era of conservatism in the United States during the 1980s.Latino first emerged at the local level through media outlets in the early 1990s. The Los Angeles Times was one of the first major newspapers to use the term Latino instead of Hispanic. Some local panethnic institutions and Spanish-language media adopted the term for community unity and political organizing. The emergence of Latino resulted in increasing criticism over Hispanic. Many supporters of Latino argued that Hispanic was reasserting a colonial dynamic or relationship with Spain. Others argued that Hispanic failed to acknowledge mestizo culture and political struggle as well as erased the existence of Indigenous, Afro-Latin American, and Asian Latinos peoples throughout the Americas. Latino was also described as more inclusive. Latino was included along with Hispanic on the 2000 U.S. census.There remains no definitive consensus over which term should be used, which has led to the rise of Hispanic/Latino and Hispanic and Latino as categorical terms often used by government institutions and prominent organizations. The choice between the terms is frequently associated with location: persons in the Eastern United States tend to prefer Hispanic, whereas those in the West tend to prefer Latino. According to a 2011 study by the Pew Research Center, the majority (51%) of Hispanic and Latino Americans prefer to identify with their families' country of origin or nationality, while only 24% prefer the terms Hispanic or Latino. Both Hispanic and Latino are generally used to denote people living in the United States. Outside of the United States, people living in Latin American countries usually refer to themselves by the names of their respective countries of origin.

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