Latino (masculine) and Latina (feminine) as a noun refer to people living in the United States and have cultural ties to Latin America.
[11][12] By the late 1850s, with the loss of California to Anglo-Americans or the United States, owing to the Mexican–American War, the term latino was being used in local California newspapers such as El Clamor Publico by Californios writing about America latina and Latinoamerica, and identifying themselves as latinos as the abbreviated term for their "hemispheric membership in la raza latina".
[citation needed] Sociologist Salvador Vidal‑Ortiz and literary scholar Juliana Martínez write that after the U.S. census introduced Hispanic in the 1970s, Latino emerged as "a term of resistance to the explicit colonial relations that 'Hispanic' sets between Spain and countries in Latin America".
[17]: 387 The U.S. government Office of Management and Budget (OMB) has defined Hispanic or Latino people as "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race".
[18] The U.S. census uses the ethnonym Hispanic or Latino to refer to "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race".
However, in the recent past, the term Latinos was also applied to people from the Caribbean region,[22] but those from former French, Dutch and British colonies are excluded.
[23] Whereas Latino designates someone with roots in Latin America, the term Hispanic in contrast is a demonym that includes Spaniards and other speakers of the Spanish language.
[28][30] Other federal and local government agencies and non-profit organizations include Brazilians and Portuguese in their definition of Hispanic.
Each year since 1997 the International Latino Book Award is conferred to the best achievements in Spanish or Portuguese literature at BookExpo America, the largest publishing trade show in the United States.
In practice, however, this distinction is of little significance when referring to residents of the United States, most of whom are of Latin American origin and can theoretically be called by either word.
[34][35] Since the adoption of the term by the U.S. Census Bureau[36] and its subsequent widespread use, there have been several controversies and disagreements, especially in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries.
Many Latin American scholars, journalists, and indigenous-rights organisations have objected to the mass-media use of the word Latino, pointing out that such ethnonyms are optional and should be used only to describe people involved in the practices, ideologies, and identity politics of their supporters.
Essentially, politicians, the media, and marketers find it convenient to deal with the different U.S. Spanish-speaking people under one umbrella.