Julio Marzán | J. A. Marzán

Seventies “Hispanics,” identifying with Latin American emergence and increasing immigration to the U.S., adopted the epithet latino, soon written as Latino. Media fast-tracked, English Latino would eventually tilt presidential elections, advocate national programs, and protest policies, with native and immigrant subgroups presumed homogeneous. Enunciated identically as latino and presumed to be latino or its exact translation, “Latino” proved to be a transliteration that since its coining started diverging from latino.

Latino became the political mask of unity over discrete subgroups; its primary agenda identity politics as a racialized, brown consciousness divested of its Hispanic cultural history. In contrast, latino retains its Spanish transracial semantics, invoking an hispano cultural history. Nationally Latino represents the entire Hispanic demographic while not all subgroups identify as racialized Latinos. Latino is defined by immediate sociopolitical issues yet when needed invokes the hispanpo cultural history it presumably disowns. Intellectual inconsistency and semantic amorphousness make Latino a confusing epithet that subverts both speech and scholarship. Collective critical thinking on its semantic dysfunction, deferring to solidarity, is displaced with politically correct but circumventing tweaks, creating Latino/a, Latin@, Latinx. On the other hand, Latino exists because its time had come, expressing an aspiration for a more participatory identity in a multicultural America.