Origin of Everything

When I say the word "Latino," the first thing to pop into your head is probably, well, people from Latin America-- places like Mexico, Columbia, Venezuela, and so on, right?

But where exactly did the history of the word come from, and has it always meant people from Central and South America and the Caribbean?

Today, we're getting into just that.

It's an adventure that will take us into some pretty unexpected places and just might leave you with a deeper understanding of the word Latino and how a word so firmly tied to geography and identity today started out pretty vague.

[upbeat music] The first stop in our journey to the root of the word Latino takes us to Italy, of all places, or at least you and I would call it Italy today.

Back then, from around 500 BCE, it was Latium, and the people from there spoke Latin.

With me so far?

So, let's book a trip to some neighboring territories now.

The term "romance languages" refers to languages like Spanish, Portuguese, French, Italian, and Romanian, and that's because they all hail back to ancient Rome, the heart of Latium.

The Roman Empire, through conquests, spread Latin to these lands where they eventually grew into the languages we recognize today.

For our purposes, we're going to focus on the former Roman province of Espania, or modern-day Spain, where they speak, well, Spanish.

It's that one little connection, Latium to Latin to Spanish, that ended up playing a key role in shaping how we understand the word Latino today.

See, the definition Latino as a person either living in Latin America or a person of Latin American descent is very recent.

Because of Spanish and Portuguese colonization, most people south of the United States border ended up speaking one of those two romance languages, but classifying them all together under a cohesive identity wasn't a thought that occurred to most people-- that is until bureaucracy got involved.

Up until the 1970s, Mexican Americans, Cubans, and Puerto Ricans in the United States were counted in the same category as Irish and Italian Americans in the census.

It was activists who noticed the disparity in poverty rates among the former groups compared to the latter, and lobbied to be separated for them in the census to help collect data and address the unique needs of those communities.

But we're still not quite to Latino yet, because the word they chose was "Hispanic."

Hispanic relies on linguistic heritage to group people together, and it's still used today.

But there are problems inherent of the term that, given the history we've covered so far, you might be able to guess.

Hispanic includes Spain but excludes Brazil where the predominant language is Portuguese.

It was the French economist Michel Chevalier who first used the term "Latin America" in the 1850s while traveling the Americas as a way to distinguish what he felt were Latin peoples from Anglo-Saxon peoples.

This idea helped legitimize French colonial activities in Latin America.

As historian Dr. Juan Francisco Martinez wrote, "France began talking about Amerique Latine as a way "of distinguishing between those areas of the Americas "originally colonized by Europeans of Latin descent and those colonized by people from northern Europe."

But it wasn't just Europeans who found use for the idea of Latin America.

Chilean poet and sociologist Francisco Bilbao co-opted the term in the mid-1800s as a way to form a cohesive identity and resistance against what he saw as North American aggression.

The idea of manifest destiny was in full swing then, and the U.S. was expanding further southward, annexing the northern half of Mexico following the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo.

Bilbao saw Latin America as an anti-imperialist idea, but Latin America is way more complicated than just lumping everyone together.

What we now know as Latin America was and still is home to hundreds and hundreds of Indigenous cultures who saw themselves as independent from one another.

And later, when African populations were introduced, most often without their consent, most of these groups were excluded from the nascent notions of a Latin America.

But nonetheless, the concept survived, and today we're left with the word Latino, an imperfect word that encompasses a wide swath of experiences, races, cultures, religions, and languages.

If it doesn't sound terribly stable, well, that's because it isn't, and the debate roars on over what term, if any, best encapsulates such a broad collection of disparate groups.

It was here that an alternative presented itself: Latino.

It became an alluring option for people who weren't too comfortable with the word Hispanic for its intimate connection with colonial Spain.

In the year 2000, the census added Latino as an option for the first time, though not without controversy.

Indeed, arguments over Hispanic and Latinos stretch back quite a ways.

For example, in 1918, Jaurelio Espinosa, the editor of "Hispania," an academic journal that still lives on today, argued that using the term "Latin America" over "Spanish America" was ridiculous.

"As editor of 'Hispania,' "I most earnestly beg of all contributors and advertisers "to use always the old, traditional and correct terms, "Spanish America, Spanish American.

What objections could anyone have against this procedure?"

It might pain Espinosa if he were to learn that Spanish America and Spanish American have largely died out and seem outdated to us today.

But the same might be true of the words we use in the present.

We have words like Chicano that mean people of Mexican descent living in the United States, and Afro-Latino to describe people of African descent living in or with a connection to Latin America.

We even have words left over from European colonial caste systems like Mestizo to describe someone of mixed Indigenous and European descent.

And not to mention all the Indigenous cultures that continue to survive and thrive in Latin America today, who might define themselves differently and indeed in entirely different languages than Europeans or Latin Americans would.

So, in these cases, they might prefer not to be called Latino.

It's no easy task to cover all of these people, and, in fact, it might be impossible.

And if that's the case, well, what do we do?

It's important to remember that language is a living, breathing thing, and the word Latino isn't done evolving.

Just look at the word "Latinx," for example.

The X in place of an O is meant to encompass non-binary people, as well as challenge the default masculinity of the term.

Spanish is a gendered language, after all.

The term was coined in the early aughts, but came into wider use after 2016.

Despite being hotly debated and even despised by some, the word was inducted into the Miriam Webster dictionary in 2018 and has grown more popular, especially among activist groups.

It just goes to show us that for as long as there have been people and spoken languages, there's also been debate over what words should mean, who they should include, and who they might exclude.

Identity is a complicated thing, but as we've seen in this journey from ancient Rome to Latin America, it's usually at the end of the day, all interconnected.