4 ms·
If I go to a party and there's a bunch of people from Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, and a few other places, I might say "yeah, I went to this party, and there
by davidw 7y ago
If I go to a party and there's a bunch of people from Germany, Italy, Spain, Norway, and a few other places, I might say "yeah, I went to this party, and there were a bunch of Europeans there". It might be similarly be convenient to have a broad term for (mostly) Spanish speaking people from a somewhat ill-defined area of the Americas as a matter of convenience...?
If I'm talking about someone like my friend from Guadalajara, yes, then 'Mexican' is more specific.
- umanwizard 7y agoIf you wanted to avoid offending people who dislike the term "Latino", I think you could just say "people from Latin America" which AFAIK absolutely nobody objects to. Interestingly I think there is a parallel to this: there’s no widely-used term in English to refer to white, English-speaking people from the US, UK, Australia, Canada and New Zealand. People in those countries just think of each other as foreigners and don’t spend a lot of time talking about their group as a whole. But there is a widely-used term in France (and probably other European countries) for this group: anglo-saxon. Which is only used very rarely in the US unless you are talking about the actual medieval Anglo-Saxon tribes. To me this feels similar to how people in the US are much more likely to describe people as “Latino” than people from Latin America are.