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 many use the terms interchangeably, for example, the United States Census Bureau, others maintain a distinction: Hispanic refers to people from Spanish-speaking countries (including Spain but excluding Brazil), while Latino refers people from Latin American countries (including Brazil but excluding Spain and Portugal). Spain is included in the Hispanic category, and Brazil is included in the Latino category; Portugal is excluded from both categories. Every Latin American country is included in both categories, excluding Brazil. 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.
History Hispanus was the Latin name given to a person from Hispania during Roman rule. The ancient Roman Hispania, which roughly comprised what is currently called the Iberian Peninsula, included the contemporary states of Spain, Portugal, and Andorra, and the British Overseas Territory of Gibraltar but excluding the Spanish and Portuguese overseas territories of Canary Islands, Ceuta, Melilla, Açores and Madeira. The term Hispanic was adopted by the United States government in the early 1970s during the administration of Richard Nixon after the Hispanic members of an interdepartmental Ad Hoc Committee to develop racial and ethnic definitions recommended that a universal term encompassing all Hispanic subgroups—including Central and South Americans—be adopted. As the 1970 census did not include a question on Hispanic origin on all census forms—instead relying on a sample of the population via an extended form ("Is this person's origin or descent: Mexican; Puerto Rican; Cuban; Central or South American; Other Spanish; or None of these"), the members of the committee wanted a common designation to better track the social and economic progress of the group vis-à-vis the general population. Legal scholar Laura E. Gómez notes that key members of the Mexican-American political elite with assimilationist ideologies, all of whom were middle-aged men, helped popularize the term Hispanic among the Mexican-American community, which in turn fueled both electronic and print media to use the term when referring to Mexican Americans in the 1980s. Gómez conducted a series of interviews with Mexican-American political elites on their role in promoting Hispanic and found that one of the main reasons was because it stood in contrast to Chicano identity: "The Chicano label reflected the more radical political agenda of Mexican-Americans in the 1960s and 1970s, and the politicians who call themselves Hispanic today are the harbringers of a more conservative, more accommodationist politics." Some of these elites sought to encourage cultural assimilation through Hispanic within their community and not be seen as "militant" in order to appeal to white American sensibilities, particularly in regard to separating themselves from black political consciousness. Gómez records:
Another respondent agreed with this position, contrasting his white colleagues' perceptions of the Congressional Hispanic Caucus with their perception of the Congressional Black Caucus. 'We certainly haven't been militant like the Black Caucus. We're seen as a power bloc—an ethnic power bloc striving to deal with mainstream issues.' The designation has since been used in local and federal employment, mass media, academia, and business market research. It has been used in the U.S. Census since 1980. Because of the popularity of Latino in the western portion of the United States, the government adopted this term as well in 1997, and used it in the 2000 census. Previously, Hispanic and Latino Americans were categorized as "Spanish-Americans", "Spanish-speaking Americans", or "Spanish-surnamed Americans". However:
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