Why hispanic is not a race

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Research Topics. Share this link:. Jeffrey S. Passel is a senior demographer at Pew Research Center. Facts are more important than ever. Most Americans say the declining share of White people in the U. Federal officials may revamp how Americans identify race, ethnicity on census and other forms. Seeking better data on Hispanics, Census Bureau may change how it asks about race. Are you a Faith and Flag Conservative? Progressive Left? Or somewhere in between?

Take our quiz to find out. Take our quiz to find out which one of our nine political typology groups is your best match. You read that right. Because Latino and Hispanic are U. Brazilians are Latino but not Hispanic.

Spaniards are Hispanic but not Latino. In other words, Hispanic refers to the language that a person speaks or that their ancestors spoke. Some Hispanic people speak Spanish, but others don't.

For this reason, people who are Hispanic may vary in their race and also where they live or originate. For example, a person from the Dominican Republic and a person from Mexico might both call themselves Hispanic because they share in common a spoken language and a legacy of Spanish colonies.

However, it is important to note there is some discussion about whether people in the Caribbean actually identify as Latino in the case of non-Spanish-speaking countries.

For example, the majority of Haitians do not identify as Latinx despite being part of Latin America. A person who is Hispanic may also be Latino, but this is not always necessarily the case. For example, a person from Spain would be Hispanic but not Latino because Spain is a Spanish-speaking country but not a Latin American country.

A person who is Latino may also be Hispanic, or not. For instance, while people from Brazil are considered Latino because Brazil is a Latin American country , they are not considered Hispanic because Brazil is a former Portuguese colony, not a Spanish one. There are also differences in usage of the terms Hispanic and Latino by geographical region.

While urban areas and those on the coasts tend to prefer Latino, rural areas in places like Texas and New Mexico are more likely to use the term Hispanic. However, there are exceptions to this tendency.

For example, the word Hispanic is generally preferred and more widely used in Florida. While the terms Hispanic and Latino have existed for centuries, it wasn't until they were introduced into the United States Census that they became more popularized.

The census is used by the government to study aspects of the population. During the s, there was a common theme of poverty and discrimination among Mexican Americans in the southwest and Puerto Ricans on the east coast of the United States.

While the government initially saw these as regional issues, the joining of the Latino communities across the nation to address these issues led to a new perspective and a new method of categorization.

Respondents could also identify their race e. The term Latino first appeared on the census as an option for ethnicity. Later, these terms were also introduced to forms of identification such as driver's licenses, birth certificates, and school registration forms.

In this way, the use of these labels serves the purpose of allowing the government to accurately categorize the changing population and to identify trends by shared cultures. Popular culture and the media have helped to connect the Hispanic and Latino communities and further popularize these groupings based on their shared experiences.

Spanish-language media such as commercials, television shows, magazines, websites, news stations, and social media accounts reflect this understanding. In general, the media appears to prefer the term Latino, likely because Hispanic tends to refer only to language, while Latino is broader and refers to people, music, and culture, etc. Moreover, it's possible that in the media, the term Latino feels more inclusive. This is especially important for the US Census Bureau and for the Office of Management and Budget OMB , the federal entity that mandates the racial and ethnic categories used in all federal survey and statistical reporting.

Getting these racial and ethnic categories right is critical because they guide policy and affect communities through federal funding allocations, congressional redistricting, state and local budgets, and data-driven business and research decisions. The term Hispanic dates back to the s and refers to Spanish cultural heritage, mostly predicated through language. The terms Latino and Latina, popularized in the early 20th century , refer to ancestry in Latin American countries.

Unlike Hispanic , the term Latino eschews Spanish ancestry, which could exclude people of Brazilian or Haitian origin. In recent years, the term Latinx has been adopted to embrace a gender-neutral alternative to Latino we chose to use Latinx in this blog post. For some Latinxs, Hispanic and Latino implicitly communicate a mix of Caucasian and Amerindian biological ancestry, also known as mestizo.

This racial self-identification applies to some, but not all, Latinxs.