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.

Are proper Spaniards, people actually from Spain … Hispanic?

None that I know would consider that that term describes them, neither do I. And I’m from Spain, so I know quite a bit of Spaniards.

The word hispanic is used in “hispanohablante”, which is a word to describe countries or communities that speak Spanish outside of Spain, naturally.

However, when talking about “hispanohablante” (spanish speaking) communities in Europe for example, the term doesn’t distinguish between South Americans or Spaniards, so idk. It’s just weird to think of us as Spanish speaking people, we are in Spain, of course we speak Spanish. Duh.

That’s honestly good to know that you as a Spanaird (and your fellows) don’t identify as Hispanic.

Because I have had to work with data sets, in the US, with ‘race’ data, that has to be in compliance with US govt standards, and… yeah ‘Hispanic’ just doesn’t make any sense, even when you go into the ‘logic’ of it.

In defense of those southern Spaniards, the US govt. can eat my white dick.

Oh I fully agree.

I’ve got a bit of Italian heritage, and… oh dear lord, you’ll get a similar kind of nonsense happening with southern Italians / Sicillians… Italians in general weren’t even considered ‘white’ untill… the 70s?