Not all Hispanics are brown people. A little blue eyed blond boy from Argentina is just as Hispanic as Salma Hayek.
Actually, I am pretty sure it is. I saw a commercial for Red Lobster earlier today that, if I’m not mistaken, did advertise some special on crab legs.
ETA: no, actually it seems that RL discontinued the endless crab legs back in 2003. It was a big hit with customers, naturally, but a profit loss for the company, and several high-ups including, I believe, the CEO himself, lost their jobs after the debacle.
Well if you look in the dictionary, one of the definitions of “hispanic” is “latin american,” which can be read to refer to a set of countries.
And as another poster points out, there are plenty of people with blond hair and blue eyes who could be considered “hispanic” by some definitions. Heck, a lot of people would consider Alberto Fujimori to be hispanic.
I’ve always been told that Latino is better. And so what if it’s a book term? It seems to be the least offensive.
In my experience, if you don’t try to affect an accent when you use it, you will not come off as offensive to anyone, unless you are stupid enough to use it on a relatively sensitive person who is not Latino.
And some are just shits!
And little blue eyed blond boys from Brazil are just as German as…
BTW, now that we’ve established that not all brown people are illegal immigrants, is it still okay to assume that all illegal immigrants are brown people? And what the hell are all these multi-hued swans doing on my desk?
Nothing, nothing. Sleep with the lights on.
One of these is not like the others. I can get behind the idea that using a particular race or ethnicity to perpetuate a negative stereotype is stupid and offensive. But I think the misuse of illegal kind of undermines your point here because it’s just sort of a trend in language. I think it just sort of waters down your point here to throw a grammar thing in there with the rest of it and put it on the same level.
I’m in Philly, where Puerto Rican gente have a long history and Mexicans are establishing a strong beachhead. I think of Hispanic as referring to Caribbeans and Latino as referring to those with roots in México, Guatemala, Central and South America.
Nouns get verbed, verbs get nouned, adjectives get nouned, etc., we’re all used to that. The objection here is not grammatical but political or, if you will, semantic: It makes no sense for a person to be illegal. A drug can’t be illegal either, strictly speaking, it can only be illegal to possess or use or sell it; but the usage “illegal drug” is harmless, drugs can’t be insulted or oppressed or marginalized or anything; the usage “illegal alien” is not quite so harmless.
That is new to me.
All Hispanics are Latino, but not all Latinos are Hispanic. And there is no definition by which somebody from Latin-America is not a Latino, regardless of ethnicity or appearance.
MG
Latina
What about a Spaniard? Aren’t they a non-Latino Hispanic?
If I were the arbiter of these things, they would. They speak Spanish after all. However it seems that a lot of Spanish-speaking folks disagree on this point.
There is no way to get 20 (more or less) countries to agree on anything, let alone people hailing from those countries and transplanted into another culture.
Heh.
Absolutely true. What’s a guagua? 
A baby used for mass transportation?
Is it anything like a henfur?
I’m afraid I don’t really see the distinction here nor do I gather how you get this distinction from the usage in the OP. If it is correct to say that a particular person is has entered the country illegally and it is understood that refering to such a person as illegal is shorthand for that, other than grammatical objections I don’t see how it is harmless. I could see it being potentially harmful if it is used as a way to stereotype (eg, “illegals are lazy moochers”) or as the defining characteristic in cases where it isn’t meaningful or if it is used incorrectly to apply to another group, like in the OP conflating Hispanic and Illegal. However, when referencing immigration, I can’t see offense there.
But even still, it still seems nitpicky to me to draw draw a distinction, as the vast majority of people understand what it means, the problem is with assuming that all immigrants, or even just immigrants of a particular race, are necessarily here illegally, but I don’t think that’s something that the usage of illegal, correctly or not, will have an affect on how the government or the people at large will react to them
Good lord, I can’t believe how disgusting this quote is. It includes references to Red Lobster and Utah!
I would say that “illegal aliens” need to be marginalized, i.e. they should be denied employment, denied non-emergency social services, and deported.
And yet it’s true.
It depends how you define the words “hispanic” and “latino.” If you define “hispanic” to include folks from Spain, and “latino” to mean people of latin American descent, then there would exist hispanics who are not latino.