It gets massively more complicated the more granular you get.

There are hundreds, if not thousands of distinct people groups in Latin and South America.

Many of them can directly tie their lineage back to the Maya, Aztecs, etc, and those societies themselves were amalgamations of many different people groups.

There are a ridiculous number of variations of Spanish that have different vocabulary, pronounciations rules, as a result of merging with local languages in different ways.

I would imagine the same is the case with Brazil and Portuguese. I don't know any Portuguese, but I do know that I've heard Brazillians say they often have trouble understanding Portugal-Portuguese and visa versa.... and Brazil is fucking huge.

... 'Hispanic' is roughly the American equivalent of 'European'.

Oh, he's European, he's from Europe.

Oh, he's Hispanic, he's from south of the US.

Are proper Spaniards, people actually from Spain ... Hispanic?

Uh well... according the the US government, basically, maybe. Are they brown? If yes, Hispanic.

That is pretty much how it works.

https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2024/09/12/who-is-hispanic/

As with most race-based terms... it doesn't actually make barely any sense.

Thank you for breaking this down. I was astonished sometime around the year 2000 when someone told me that Christina Aguilera is Latina. Blonde hair, blue eyes, fair skin, how? But her last name definitely sounds exotic so that's fair 🤷🏼‍♀️

Would you consider a latino + white couple an interracial couple? The categories to select from are white, Asian, and black - after that there's typically a question to identify if a person is Hispanic.

Yes it's confusing because "white" is a cultural category not a phenotype. Where I grew up the Hispanic people were the white people - all the rich Cubans who fled Castro, and people from Spain. You can be Hispanic & white, or black, or brown, it just means your grandparents spoke Spanish, basically. And it's so funny because it was the white people who brought the Spanish language to the americas in the first place.

It's not possible to understand racists with logic. Their ideas are illogical.

One of my coworkers commented on one of our difficult patients calling the weekend crew racist against them and how ridiculous it was because both the patient and the weekend nurses are black. I was like oh yeah no that's because the weekend nurses aren't black (being a cultural term for African-American), they're African. Emphasis on the not-born-American. That's different (to people who care about that sort of thing). Is it rational? Not even a little, but racism, despite the claims of phrenology et al, is about as far from rational as you can get.

But Spaniards are white.

You can tell from the background that the lighting isn't as bright. It doesn't mean it was photoshopped and doesn't mean it was dishonest.