What a Google & Yahoo! Image Search Reveals
My friend Juan Guillermo Tornoe’s Hispanic Trending blog is always a good read. His post “Search Engine’s Perception of Hispanic vs. Latino” made me think.
First, the headline made me consider why I think of myself as Hispanic but never use the term Latino to describe myself. For those of you confused by that, Spanish is my first language. I never learned English until I went to school. My parents immigrated to the US from Argentina in 1962 and my mother’s family — they’re Sephardi Jews — spoke Spanish as their first language, centuries before Columbus bumped into the island of Hispaniola.
Second, image search is revealing. The way people use the terms Hispanic & Latino is often interchangeable. However, it’s obvious that the people using the term have different ideas about what they mean. I simply never thought before about how valuable image search is in understanding the underlying terms. Marketers take note: What an interesting way to determine relevance!
Read the post. It’s short and it might make you think, too.
So, what is the right term; Hispanic or Latino? If there isn’t one right term, how do you choose which one to use?
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Written by:Jeffrey Eisenberg
I always thought Latino refers to Latin cultures (as in Latin America & Mexico, incorrectly) and Hispanic refers to Spanish cultures (Spain, really).
From a completely uneducated view (on the topic), the first images that come to mind from the word Hispanic is Mexicans and Latino to Puerto Ricans. I feel the majority of my Puerto Rican friends use the term Latino while my Mexican friends use Hispanic. However, in truth though I also thought the words interchangeable. I have also been told that Latino is the politically correct term.