Do Hispanic, Latino and Chicano Mean The Same Thing?

Given the many countries and cultures to which Americans broadly labeled as "Hispanic" trace their ancestry, it's not surprising that there are not only several adjectives to refer to them, but also several opinions about which is the most correct term.

The etymology of the word "Hispanic" traces back to the Latin word "hispania," an adjective applied to people who lived on the Iberian Peninsula, including what is now called Spain. Though the word was used by English speakers to describe people from Spanish-speaking countries as early as 1889, the U.S. government can take part of the credit (or blame) for bringing it into widespread use in the United States.

According to Los Angeles Times editor Frank del Olmo, the U.S. Census Bureau began using the term in the 1970s because it found it had undercounted people of Latin American extraction because of the variety of terms they used to describe themselves. It's now commonly used by most government agencies -- hence "Hispanic American Heritage Month."

One technical flaw in the Census Bureau's catch-all term is the fact that, etymologically, Hispanic doesn't apply to people from Portuguese-speaking countries like Brazil, but the Bureau chooses to overlook that in its official definition and applies the term to all people from South America.

At one time, "Latin" was used to describe a person from a country that used one of the Romance languages -- Spanish, French Portuguese and Italian -- because the root of those languages is Latin. "Latino," the Spanish word for "Latin," and its feminine form, "Latina," are now broadly applied to people from Spanish- or Portuguese-speaking countries.

"Chicano" applies only to Mexican-Americans. It is not correctly applied to people from other Spanish-speaking countries or people who live in Mexico. According to the American Heritage Dictionary, the literary and political movements of the 1960s and 1970s among Mexican-Americans established the word as a term of ethnic pride. American Heritage warns, however, that it remains a word with strong political associations and may not be considered an appropriate alternative to Mexican-American by some.

American Heritage also points out that choice of terms frequently varies regionally, with people in California often preferring Latino or Latina while those in Florida and Texas favor Hispanic.