- Danielle Bainbridge: Origin of Everything
was made possible in part
by a grant from Anne Ray Foundation,
a Margaret A. Cargill philanthropy.
And by contributions to your PBS station
from viewers like you.
Thank you.
When I say the word "Latino,"
the first thing to pop into your head
is probably, well, people from Latin America.
Places like Mexico, Colombia, 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.
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The first stop in our journey to the route 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 conquest,
spread Latin to these lands, where they eventually grew
into the languages we recognize today.
For our purposes,
we're gonna focus on the former Roman province
of Hispania, 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 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 from 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 to 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 American Latine
"as a way of distinguishing between those areas
"of the Americas originally colonized
"by Europeans of Latin descent
and those colonized by peoples 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 are 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 wars 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 "Latino"
stretch back quite a ways.
For example, in 1918, Aurelio 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 nonbinary 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 Merriam-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.
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