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?