The meaning of the term "latino"

by Giuseppe DeSicilia

Almost everyone who lives in America has most definitely heard the term "Latino", or has heard of "Latin music". If you look on a Census sheet, you see a box titled "Hispanic/Latino". If you have cable or satellite television, there are channel packages titled "Latino Max". If you see a Mexican family on television, they are called a "Latino" family. The truth is, the term "Latino" is a term as politically incorrect as calling Native Americans "Indian".

Where does the term Latino come from? Obviously it means a Latin person. To be Latin, don't you have to speak Latin? The Latin language originated in Roma, Italia (Rome, Italy) a few thousand years ago. It was inspired by early Italic and Celtic languages from the north, was refined with Greek words, but it was spoken as a language in Italy. Eventually Latin spread through the Mediterranean area, each country brutally destroying it, creating their own versions of its words, adding their own words, and eventually forming the modern day romance languages, such as Italian, Romanian, French, and Spanish/Portuguese.

Now you may ask "If the Italians were the original peoples who spoke Latin, wouldn't Italian be the closest language to Latin?" The answer is yes. Italian's father was known as a barbaric form of Latin spoken by the lowbrow people. It later evolved into the Italian language.

Now what someone might ask is "So if the Italians invented the Latin language, wouldn't Italian people be Latino? The Census bureau doesn't seem to agree, or at least isn't in touch historically. Their definition of Latin is someone whose racial background comes from Mexico/South America. Why is that? Since Spaniards came from Spain, somehow Spaniards taught the Maya/Aztec/Inca natives how to speak Spanish. The Spaniards came to Mexico/South America looking for gold in the age of exploration, and while they enforced their culture into the natives as they raped and mutilated them, they accidentally formed Mestizos, half native half European people. After a couple hundred years of mixing into the Native South Americans, Mexicans, Brazilians and other modern cultures were formed. But that still doesn't explain why they are called Latino, does it?

The truth of the matter is, there is no true reason why they are called Latino. The obvious reason would be that since Spanish was a romance language formed from Latin, they must be Latin too? No, that doesn't make any sense. Italians are the ones who created the Latin language, not the Spaniards. Latin is a dead language, and there is and never was such thing as Latinos. If there were, Italians would be them. It is as gross of an ignorant description as calling Native Americans "Indians". Why weren't people from India called Indians a couple of hundred years ago? That is another story altogether.

The term Latino is one of those racial categories that the government makes up because they do not know how to categorize native south Americans because they already gave Native Americans that title, so they make up a category based on what language they speak, and not what race they are. Imagine seeing these boxes on that census sheet: White, Black, Asian, and Jewish. A few people would get angry with that. Jewish is not a race, it is a religion, just as the term Hispanic/Latino is not a race, it is a language preference that isn't Latin to begin with.