Latino vs Hispanic
The National Park Service theme study "American Latinos and the Making of the United States" was over a year in development. The idea was launched at a forum held in La Paz, California on June 16, 2011. Shortly after, the National Park System Advisory Board constituted the American Latino Scholars Expert Panel.
One decision, perhaps controversial one, was to use the term Latino instead of Hispanic in the study's title, and to include the Spanish settlement and colonization of the Americas as an important part of what we refer to as Latino history. In doing so, the panel did not aim either to homogenize the many identities of the groups that today are called Latino or to dismiss the fact that there has never been a single descriptive category for all as the persistence of Chicano, Boricua, Cuban, Nuevomexicano, and Hispanic amply underscore.
Rather, the panel chose Latino for two main reasons. By alluding to Latin America (or latinoamérica in Spanish), the term punctuates the experience of peoples living in the Americas rather than Europe. In addition, unlike Hispanic, which relates to "Hispania" or the Hispanic peninsula, Latino in its current meaning is a category that officially emerged in the U.S. during the 20th century in response to the dramatic increase of Latin American–descended people in its national territory.
At another level, the term calls attention to the fact that Latino communities have significantly diversified over time and begun to settle beyond their traditional enclaves, producing new pan–Latino realities. The fastest growing Mexican communities today, for instance, are in the south and southeastern U.S., areas where few Latinos settled before.
While most Cuban Americans still live in Florida and remain the majority of Latinos in Miami, Puerto Ricans are by far the largest number in Central Florida and nearly half of Miami's Latinos are non–Cubans. Conversely, New York, long a Puerto Rican stronghold, is projected to be a Mexican majority Latino city by 2040. And there are now more Salvadorans living in the US than Cubans or Dominicans, for decades the third and fourth largest Latino group respectively.
In other words, within the context of this theme study, "Latino" is less a marker of a single cultural or ethnic identity than a concept. This concept refers to a long historical process through which those perceived as Hispanic and/or Latino were thought of as a different kind of people—politically, culturally, and racially—than the truly "American." The conjoining of the terms Latino and history thus facilitates a more complex telling of the American story.
It also enables us to view Latinos comparatively and to investigate the ways that Latino history is also American history in the broader hemispheric sense. Ultimately, Latino history is American history with an accent—on the experiences and geographies extensively shaped by the Spanish Empire in the Americas and by the rise of the U.S. as a global power beginning in the 19th century.
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