Latin@ or Hispanic: Does It Make a Difference?
By Ivonne García

As a Puerto Rican born in the United States but raised in Puerto Rico, I hadn’t thought of myself as a Latina or Hispanic until I came to the States to study in the 1970s. Then, I found that I had an identity other than my nationality, an identity which tied me to other people whose histories, ethnicities and cultural legacies included the experience of Spanish colonization and U.S. expansionism and imperialism.

Now that I have lived for more than 15 years in the United States, I identify myself as a Puerto Rican and a Latina, but not generally as Hispanic. In the past, like some of those interviewed for this special issue, I have been turned off by organizations, activities and events that utilized the term Hispanic over Latin@. That’s because Hispanic privileges the Spanish heritage but ignores the equally (if not more) important cultural, racial and national legacies we share from Africa, the indigenous populations in this hemisphere, the Asian presence, and the contributions of non-Spanish European groups such as Corsicans, Italians and the Irish, to name a few.

Hispanic was a term adopted by the U.S. Census in the 1970s to catalogue the Spanish-speaking populations in the United States, and is simply inadequate to encapsulate the racial, ethnic, linguistic, national and social variety that makes up the populations of Latin@s in this country and around the world. Still, Latin@ is equally contested for others, precisely because it proposes to place the Spanish legacy on the same footing as other racial, ethnic, national, linguistic and class identity markers. As participants suggested at a panel on “What’s in a Name?” last year, Latin@ is a self-chosen term, which also serves as a political tool for collective organization as we struggle to improve the social conditions of our populations in this and in our native or ancestral countries.

But does what we call ourselves make so much of a difference, or, as Shakespeare famously asked, is this too much ado about nothing? I believe that the names we give ourselves, and the names others give us, matter greatly. Interestingly, the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), the dictionary of record for the English language, has very specific definitions (that is, definitions proposed by Anglos) for the terms Hispanic and Latin@s.

Under Hispanic, the OED proposes as its main definition: “Pertaining to Spain or its people; esp. pertaining to ancient Spain,” and notes that the first use of “Hispanicall” is found in 1584, as in the “Hispanicall inquisition.” Later, in the nineteenth century, the OED notes usages of “Hispanicisms” and “Hispanisms” in several sources. The second meaning accepted by the OED for Hispanic refers to “Spanish-speaking, esp. applied to someone of Latin-American descent living in the United States.” The first reference to that secondary definition that the OED found is from 1974. For Latino, the OED states: “A Latin-American inhabitant of the United States,” and finds its first usage in 1946. For the OED, then, Hispanic is directly related to Spain, while Latino refers only to Latin Americans. I think there are many of us who would take issue with those definitions, especially the latter one.

The OED has its own culturally specific view, as we all do. But if I have learned one thing about names it is that while they do matter, they should not become a source of disunity among us. Whether we call ourselves Latin@, Puerto Rican, Boricua, Nuyorican, Chican@, Mexican-American, Mexican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Ecuadorean, or Hispanic, we’re all, in many ways, in the same politically disenfranchised, economically deprived and struggle-ridden boat.

Further, those of us who have access to the privilege of a higher education should not be looking for reasons to squabble among ourselves. That’s especially important because we’re the minority within the minority. Sobering statistics from the U.S. Census on educational attainment show that only 18 percent of Hispanics 25 years or older pursue some college, compared to 26 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Meanwhile, only 11 percent of Hispanics attain a bachelor’s degree or more compared to 29 percent of non-Hispanic whites. Latin@ scholars have called our attention to the fact that there are more imprisoned Latin@s in the United States than Latin@s with advanced educational degrees, such as a Ph.D. That’s why we Latin@s should focus on that which unites us and empowers us to fight together to improve the lives of our peoples in the United States and abroad, and to help build a more egalitarian and more culturally inclusive society in this country.

When you’re ready to make that life-long commitment, it doesn’t much matter whether you call yourself Latin@ or Hispanic.