Yesterday, Carlos Lozada published an interesting article in the Washington Post asking the question, “Who is Latino?” In response to the increasing attention given to Latinos’ political influence, he wonders about the definition of Latino and asks a really important question about the underpinnings of ethnicity and ethnic identity. He says,

Is being Latino a matter of geography, as simple as where you or your ancestors came from? Is it the language you speak or how well you speak it? Is it some common culture? Or is it just a vaguely brown complexion and a last name ending in “a,” “o” or “z”? Politicians build Latino-voter-outreach operations, businesses launch marketing campaigns to attract Hispanic “super-consumers,” yet depending on whom you ask — politicians, academics, journalists, activists, researchers or pollsters — contradictory definitions and interpretations emerge.

He cites public opinion research showing that many Latinos identify more strongly with their country of origin than with the term “Latino” or “Hispanic” and rightly notes that both terms (Latino and Hispanic) are U.S. inventions that are not widely used in Latin America.

Given all of this, it is worth pondering: who is Latino? Do we require some biological marker of ethnic heritage? No way — the diversity of racial and ethnic backgrounds of individuals who live in Latin American and immigrate to the U.S. make this idea a non-starter. What about Spanish-speaking ability? Well, this is also problematized by the number of second- and third-generation Latinos who do not speak Spanish. Maybe we just need to focus on geographic origins — anyone whose family of origin is from a country south of the U.S. But then how do we categorize individuals from countries south of the U.S. that don’t speak Spanish, like Belize (English), Guyana (English), French Guyana (French), Suriname (Dutch), and Brazil (Portuguese)?

In the end, all of our efforts at searching for necessary and sufficient features of the category of Latino will prove unsatisfying, as there will always be exceptions to any definitions we attempt to create. For me, the bottom line for any ethnic identity is that we can only rely on self-identification. Individuals who self-identify as Latino are therefore Latino, end of story. This approach, which is being used by the U.S. Census Bureau recognizes the prior attempts at establishing “true” or “objective” indices of ethnic heritage were absolute failures, because they were rooted in a biological and essentialist view of race and ethnicity.