Many people use the word Hispanic and Latino as synonyms and it is an easy mistake to make, but these words have different meaning.
What is the difference between Hispano and Latino?
Hispanic was a word that originally was associated with ancient Roman Hispania (Iberian Peninsula). Now, Hispanic, refers to the Spanish language. This means, that you can call any Spanish native speaker as Hispanic.
Latino is a shortened form of American Spanish, ‘latinoamericano/latinoamericana’. Latino refers to the geography. This means all the people living in or coming from Latin America.
So you can be both Hispanic and Latino, like the Mexicans, Argentinians, Chileans, etc…but you can also only be Latino, like the Brazilians…or only Hispanic, like the Spaniards.
