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Originally Posted by morsecode  Geez, and what should I be called? zambo, criollo, mulato, mestizo, of course none of them would work because I'm tri-racial, so what should I call myself?...and let me ask you something, is someone from Madrid more latin than someone from Andalucia? taking into account that the Andalucian probably has darker skin because of the mixing with North-Africans that took place for 800 years, and maybe Roma people, so they are not white-white, just kinda white. Or an Andalucian is less latin than a white Argentinian whose only mix was Spanish and Italian?
And by the way lots of "latin south-americans" have more affinity to Spain because that was the only culture that was left, sure there may be pockets of West African and Amerindian culture (and more Amerindian in Bolivia, Peru, etc.) or at least Spanish and Portuguese culture is the vastly predominant one in Southamerica, even the music of my region comes from flamenco, because of the Andalucian conquistadores that came.
And locomiax, relax, it's just a damn word, I bet that the preoccupation of cataloging human beings "correctly" led to myths of superiority and inferiority amongst people, all people. |
The "problem" with labelling ethnicities is that, as you pointed in your andalusian example, almost the entire planet is mixed. But there are geopolitical and geographical separations. Therefore I would propose that we call ourselves from the country we are from, to begin with, and the planet to end with
.
Andalusians are part of Spain, so they are "latin" if we consider latin countries as a whole: Portugal, Spain, parts of France, parts of Switzerland (Ticino and Swiss-romande), Italy and Romania.
It is not about creating a fuzz about something we cannot possibly change, now. But I think locomiax is trying to point out that if
most of a person's heritage (ethnic and cultural) is not from the european "latin" countries, then is not correct to autodenominate themselves "latin".
IMO:
-Latin should be left for history books to denominate the ancient people from the italian peninsula.
-Hispanic should be only for people from the geographical zone known in roman times as Hispaniae or whose heritage is in majority from there.