Latin America’s Historical Label.

According to the research provided on the How Latin Became Latino in the U.S. page , historically, where did the labels “Latin” & “Latin American” come from

Origins of the label “Latin America”

From “Latin America: What’s in a Name” by Thomas H. Holloway, in A Companion to Latin American History. (Waltham, MA: Wiley/Blackwell, 2008).

“Historically, the first use of the term Latin America has been traced only as far back as the 1850s.  It did not originate within the region, but again from outside, as part of a movement called “pan-Latinism” that emerged in French intellectual circles, and more particularly in the writings of Michel Chevalier (1806-79). A contemporary of Alexis de Tocqueville who traveled in Mexico and the United States during the late 1830s, Chevalier contrasted the “Latin” peoples of the Americas with the “Anglo-Saxon” peoples (Phelan 1968; Ardao 1980, 1993).  From those beginnings, by the time of Napoleon III’s rise to power in 1852 pan-Latinism had developed as a cultural project extending to those nations whose culture supposedly derived from neo-Latin language communities (commonly called Romance languages in English).  Starting as a term for historically derived “Latin” culture groups, L’Amerique Latine then became a place on the map.  Napoleon III was particularly interested in using the concept to help justify his intrusion into Mexican politics that led to the imposition of Archduke Maximilian as Emperor of Mexico, 1864-67.  While France had largely lost out in the global imperial rivalries of the previous two centuries, it still retained considerable prestige in the world of culture, language, and ideas (McGuinness 2003).  Being included in the pan-Latin cultural sphere was attractive to some intellectuals of Spanish America, and use of the label Latin America began to spread haltingly around the region, where it competed as a term with Spanish America (where Spanish is the dominant language), Ibero-America (including Brazil but presumably not French-speaking areas), and other sub-regional terms such as Andean America (which stretches geographically from Venezuela to Chile, but which more usually is thought of as including Colombia, Ecuador, Peru, and Bolivia), or the Southern Cone (Chile, Argentina, Paraguay, and Uruguay) (Rojas Mix 1991).

Not until the middle of the 20th century did the label Latin America achieve widespread and largely unquestioned currency in public as well as academic and intellectual discourse, both in the region (Marras 1992) and outside of it.  With the establishment of the Economic Commission for Latin America (ECLA, later adding Caribbean to become ECLAC) under United Nations auspices in 1948, the term became consolidated in policy circles, with political overtones challenging U.S. hegemony but largely devoid of the rivalries of culture, language, and “race” of earlier times (Reid 1978).  The 1960s saw the continent-wide Latin American literary “boom” and the near-universal adoption of “Latin American Studies” by English-language universities in the U.S., Great Britain, and Canada.  This trend began with the establishment of the Conference on Latin American History in 1927 and was consolidated with the organization of the interdisciplinary Latin American Studies Association in 1967.  Despite the widespread and largely unproblematic use of the term in the main languages of the western hemisphere since that era, regional variations remain: In Brazil América Latina is commonly assumed to refer to what in the United States is called Spanish America, i.e., “Latin America” minus Brazil.

While discussing the spontaneous creation of such collective labels, we need to recognize that the terms “Latino” or “Latina/o” now widespread in the United States have no basis in any specific nation or sub-region in Latin America.  Like the latter term, from which it is derived linguistically, Latina/o is an invented term of convenience—a neologism built on a neologism (Oboler 1995; Gracia 1999; Oboler & González 2005; Dzidzienyo & Oboler, 2005).  Whatever their origins, Latino or Latina/o have largely replaced the older “Hispanic” or Hispanic American” within the United States, although that English-derived term, problematic on several counts, lingers in library subject classifications.”

[Prof. Espinoza’s Note: Special thanks to Dr. Rudy Acuña for the insight on how to unpack the history of the word “Latino.”]

What is the Office of Budget & Management?

The Office of Management & Budget (OMB) is an agency of the Executive Branch of the United States.Links to an external site.

Under its “Statistical Programs and Standards,”Links to an external site. the OMB follows “Directives and Standards” for Federal “statistical activities.”

This includes Directive No. 15: Standards for Maintaining, Collecting, and Presenting Federal Data on Race and EthnicityLinks to an external site..

The linked document above includes “Revisions to the Standards for the Classification of Federal Data on Race,” which were announced and instituted on October 30, 1997.

In this announcement from 1997, the U.S. Federal Government formally introduced and implemented the panethnic label “Latino” in usage for official purposes. 

By the 2000s, U.S. companies and corporations followed these standards in how they categorized people and conducted business. 

This link will take you to the U.S. Census Bureau page where the categories of race and ethnicity employed by the U.S. Federal government are explained in relation to the OMB.