It’s a legacy of how the Spanish did colonialism versus how the British did it. The British were much more hardline about interbreeding with the natives and the imported slaves, one drop rules about European purity. Whereas the Spanish, while brutal in their own way, didn’t have the same hang ups. So fast forward a few centuries, people start migrating up from Latin America to the U.S., Amerikkkans didn’t know to process a population that didn’t have that sort of strict racial categorizing. So everyone from a 95% Spaniard Puerto Rican to a Chicano gets flattened to “Latino.”
It’s a legacy of how the Spanish did colonialism versus how the British did it. The British were much more hardline about interbreeding with the natives and the imported slaves, one drop rules about European purity. Whereas the Spanish, while brutal in their own way, didn’t have the same hang ups. So fast forward a few centuries, people start migrating up from Latin America to the U.S., Amerikkkans didn’t know to process a population that didn’t have that sort of strict racial categorizing. So everyone from a 95% Spaniard Puerto Rican to a Chicano gets flattened to “Latino.”