The USA was mostly colonized by Germans, Irish, and English. So skin tones are usually much lighter.

Central and South America had a larger indigenous population, and the Spanish/Portuguese colonizers had a bit darker skin, with much more frequent inter racial relationships.

However, the region in question is fucking huge. Don’t expect Mexicans, Columbians, Argentinians to all look the same.

Really Hispanic is more of a cultural category for all things with Spanish Legacy.

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.

… ‘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.

www.pewresearch.org/…/who-is-hispanic/

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