Hispanic Identity

What is a name? It is a word or terminology that identifies a person, a place or anything. It is an identification of anything (thefreedictionary.com) but how can we confuse ourselves when it comes to naming names? Some people have misconception about naming names. Let us have a good example of it. Many people identify people from South America or Latin America as “Hispanics or Latinos/as. But, is this appropriate? What about the people from Spain, Portugal, Mexico, Venezuela? Just to name a few. Many people could not distinguish them properly but call them “Hispanics or Latinos”. There is a big misinterpretation regarding this terminology.

Let us identify the word “Latino” and “Hispanics here. “Latin is a name of the tribe group in Italy and their language is also called Latin. This tribe lives in Latium, capital city of Rome”. When Rome occupied The Iberian Peninsula and Romans take control and named it as Hispania (Figueroa, 1995). The Romans thrived there for many centuries, thus leaving behind the legacy of language, culture, and most of all, religion, which bonded Hispania to the “Latin” world to this day.

This civilization existed many centuries already. “In order to identify the non- Anglo American from Anglo American, they made up a term “Latino/a” to identify them. The French America, Portuguese America, and Spanish America, should become one and thus, differentiate it from Anglo America. The term “Amerique Latine” was born. The French successfully incorporated this group into one and term is easy to understand and contradict with Anglo-Saxon” (Gracia, 2000, p 4).