What does it mean to be Hispanic?
As Americans celebrate Hispanic Heritage Month, we thought it would be interesting—and helpful—to explain the term, Hispanic. Here in the US there are many terms to describe people from Spanish-speaking regions, and it can be confusing. So, let’s explain the difference between Hispanic, Latino, Spanish and LatinX.
Following an extremely (long) voyage, on October 12 of 1492, at around 2 in the morning, Cristoforo Colombo (or, as he is known in English, Christopher Columbus) spotted land from his lookout spot on the now-famous ship, the Pinta. The Genoan explorer who convinced the Catholic Monarchs of Spain, Queen Isabella I of Castille and King Ferdinand II of Aragon, Queen Isabella to allow him to sail west and search for a sea route to India. They had promised a lifetime pension to whoever first spotted land, so on 12 October, he claimed the
lifetime pension when he documented that he had seen lights on the night of October 11. The small island they spotted was the Bahamas. They went on to explore northern Cuba and
then Hispaniola (today, Haiti and the Dominican Republic).
One of Columbus’ first actions was to capture some of the people who he found on the island of Guanahani, today likely the island of San Salvador, and take them as his captives, ordering them to help him find gold. He found no hidden city of gold and spices on that voyage, but he was so convincing in his descriptions of things he had not seen that the Catholic Monarchs financed subsequent expeditions for him, and for many other explorers who, quite quickly, went from being explorers to being conquerors. This is the story that most school children are taught in Latin America.
As it pertains to etymology, what happened on October 12, 1492 wound up expanding upon the definition of a term that is still in used today: Hispanic. The term Hispanic comes from the Latin term Hispanicus, which means person from Hispania, the Latin term for Spain. Spain claimed Cuba and the island of Hispaniola as its own, and, only 40 years later, Spain had spread through the New World, claiming Mexico, Guatemala, Honduras, Panama, Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, and a dozen other lands that today are independent countries. The term Hispanic is now recognized as a naming convention that describes anyone who descends from a Spanish-speaking country.
Interestingly, when Columbus began the conquest of the New World, Europe went into a panic. First, he didn’t do Spain any favors because, upon returning to Europe, he decided to make a stop in Portugal to tell the Portuguese monarch what he had found, presumably because Portugal had snubbed Columbus’ request for ships and this was Columbus’ way of saying ‘I told you so!’ Portugal, the naval power at that time, was threatened by the thought that Spain had found a faster path to India than sailing around Africa. So, King John and the Spanish monarchs negotiated the Treaty of Tordesillas, which set a line upon the map and claimed that everything west of the line belonged to Spain, and everything east of it belonged to Portugal. This eventually gave Portugal the right to plant its flag in what is today known as Brazil. Modern-day Brazilians, like the Portuguese of old, did not speak Spanish, and therefore do not consider themselves part of the “Hispanic” family.
They do, however, fall into a different category: Latino. Latinos are individuals who are from any of the countries in Latin America. Therefore, not every Latino is Hispanic (they don’t all speak Spanish), and not every Hispanic is Latino (because people from Spain are considered Hispanic).
Let’s return to Cristoforo Colombo, who was described as a Spanish sailor. Spanish is a word that people, particularly in the US, will utilize interchangeably with Hispanic, but they are two very different things. Spanish can mean either Castillian (the language) or a person from Spain. Someone from Mexico may speak Spanish but that person would not be Spanish, just as someone from the United States may speak English but they are not English.
All three terms—Spanish, Hispanic and Latino--are related to cultural origin. One can be dark-skinned and be Hispanic, just as someone else can be light-skinned and be Hispanic. The key thing binding them together is that they would both be from a Spanish-speaking country, or territory (we see you, Puerto Rico). None of the terms have anything to do with race.
But Latino does have something to do with gender. Spanish and Portuguese (like so many other languages) are gendered languages. They use the term Latino as the default to represent people, both male and female, who are descendants from Latin
America. In the early 2000s, the term, LatinX emerged to represent those who fall outside of the male-female gender binary, giving a voice to the queer community of Latin America. LatinX has seen a rise in popularity in the English-speaking world as a gender-neutral term but it also has the inadvertent effect of insisting that Latinos use a term that does not agree with the basic syntax of their languages. About 1 in 4 US Hispanics have heard of the term, but LatinX is only used by 3% of US Hispanics. Feel free to use the term, but know that the English language already has a non-gendered term for Latinos: Latin Americans. That works, too.
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