The "Latino race" thing bothers me. It's just ridiculous; I'm tired of explaining again, and again, and again, that Latin is a culture, not a race. Race is a biological classification; it shouldn't be used to classify millions of Latin Americans, who belong to different biological types (Black, Indian, Asian, Caucasian, etc.).

For example: I find ridiculous that a Caucasian man from Argentina, can not describe himself as "Caucasian/White", in the documents and forms he fills, when entering the US. Beyond the border, he's Latin, not Caucasian. C'mon!

And then there's the Hispanic thing. First of all, for Latinos, Hispanic describes something from Spain, not themselves, although you can say they have Hispanic origins. But, Brazilians are not Hispanic. We are Latinos but not Hispanic; our origins are Portuguese, and so is our language. I'm Latina, I'm Also Caucasian, but I'm not Hispanic. Got it?

I always ask myself, why Americans (and there goes another thing that bothers me: shouldn't people from the three American continents be called Americans? How come this became the definition for US citizen? Have you noticed that we have Latin Americans, and Americans? An the Canadians are just... Canadians?), I mean, why do US citizens insist in labeling us as if we're all the same thing?

Alex Castro, a fellow Brazilian blogger, has a theory. He says the mega-tag "Latin/Hispanic" is something that acknowledge the fact the Latin America racial diversity doesn't fit the American preestablished, mutually exclusive racial categories.

"An American can choose just one option; if he's Caucasian, he is not Black; if he's Asian, he is not Native-American. Latin Americans, by definition, always can select two options: not only Latin/Hispanic, but also what we REALLY are, Caucasians or Blacks, etc. There isn't a better example of how the concept of race is fluid in Latin America and static in the US."

That's true. I just don't know if "you people don't fit our categories" it's a good enough excuse to classify Latin Americans so arbitrarily.

Here's Alex's post (in Portuguese): Auto Identificação Racial (Parte 3 de 3). In fact, he wrote an excellent mini-series of posts about racial identity, that's really worth reading. If you understand the language, check it out.

If you're new here, maybe you'll be interested in these posts:

What Does a Latina Look Like?
What Does it Means to be a Latina?

A final word: does any of the people in the picture look "Brown" (as Latins are also labeled) to you? No? Well, I know plenty of Latin Americans that look just like that: blue eyed Caucasians, Asians with yellow skin... etc. There are millions of them. And they are not really different of US citizens, are they?