Wednesday, January 04, 2017

Latino definition gets more confusing

At least for me... as I've just discovered that the US House of Representatives considers people of Basque ancestry to be "Latinos"
They raise the total Latinos in Congress to 38, according to numbers kept by NALEO. NALEO's numbers can differ from those kept by the House gallery, whose tally includes members of Portuguese and Basque descent.
Read the article here.


I've got enough of an issue with Portuguese descent being considered "Latinos" - I can grudgingly understand someone of Portuguese decent from Brazil (and thus of Latin American geographic ancestry) being labeled Latino, but someone raised in Rhode Island with great grandparents who came from Portugal in the 1800s is a Latino?


Or someone from Montana, whose ancestors came from Euskal Herria (the Basque word for the Basque country), in the 1800s to tend sheep in the mountains of Montana... is Latino?


At least the Portuguese speak a Romance language, although by that definition the French, Italians, Rumanians, cough, cough... The Basque have their own confounding language which has no relationship to any other known human language family.

Similar confusion exists in the USA with the term "Anglo-Saxon" by the way... In fact I think that Univision newscasters have begun a semantic revenge upon all Non Hispanic Americans of European ancestry; lately I've noticed that they refer to this group as "Anglo-Saxons".

That ought to piss off Scots, Italians, Spaniards, French, Russians, Bulgarians, Greeks, Welsh, Irish, Swedes, Norwegians, Estonians, Finns, Laplanders, Andorrans, Belgians, Poles, Danes, and all the other folks who live from Portugal to Russia, etc. as much as being labeled under one label pisses me (and a lot of other gente) off...

By the way... if you describe a Scot as an Anglo-anything; you better be ready to fight...



Makes my head hurt.

No comments: