On Thu, 13 May 2004 14:34:21 -0700, Fly-by-Night CC
wrote:

In article , "George" george@least
wrote:

If you think "Hispanic" means Mexican, I guess you have a point. It
celebrates the defeat of Maximilian's forces in 1862, by those loyal to
Diaz.

Someone of Spanish descent recently explained that in general terms,
Hispanic refers to Mexican decent or origin while Latino generally
refers to all of the primarily Spanish speaking countries of North,
Central and South America. I don't know if that's a universal generality
but it sorta made sense to me.



IIRC, the word "hispanic" was made up by the nixon administration to
refer to anyone in the western hemisphere who natively speaks spanish.
thus it refers to mexicans, chileans and most of the rest of south
america, but not to brazillians, who speak portugese.