Hispanidad or latinidad: Shakira opens debate on cultural identity beyond a common language

And Shakira said: “Let’s not speak only of hispanidad: let’s speak of latinidad, an even broader embrace. Hispanidad is beautiful, but it falls short of everything we are. Spanish is Latino; Portuguese, Italian, and French are too. And all Latin Americans are Latinos.”

This is a paragraph from an article the Colombian singer and global pop star published in EL PAÍS on August 31, titled En Madrid todos somos latinos (In Madrid, we are all Latinos). The reason was her upcoming series of concerts in Spain’s capital. The message — for example in reader comments on this newspaper’s stories about the artist — jarred because the performer of worldwide hits like Ciega, sordomuda claims that, say, a Galician, a Basque, or a Catalan are “Latinos,” like a person from Maracaibo.

Beyond characters, Shakira was referring to a set of cultural markers that link inhabitants on both sides of the Atlantic. “We share language, memory, gestures, sobremesas [after-dinner conversation],” she said. On Tuesday, after announcing an additional show for October 12, Hispanic Heritage Day, Pino Sagliocco, the president of the tour promoter, Live Nation, expanded on that idea: “On October 12, there will be many celebrations. First, we’ll join in the celebration of Hispanic Heritage Day, but we’ll mark it as Latin Heritage Day, so that all Latinos living here or around the world can see in Madrid what it means to take pride in our roots,” he said.

But to find the origin of the term “Latin American,” it is necessary to go back almost 200 years. Lola Pons, a historian of language and a regular contributor to EL PAÍS, says by phone that “almost no demonym is neutral, innocent.” The terms Latin America and Latin American are no exception. “They emerged from French politics in the mid-19th century to claim influence over parts of America. With Latin American, the aim was to include the America under the French orbit, alongside the other Latin-derived ones, like the Spanish and Portuguese.”

At that time, Spain had lost its colonies on the continent and the French saw an opportunity to get their foot in the door that had opened. In fact, there was an emperor in Mexico in 1864, Maximilian I, a European of the House of Habsburg, backed by Napoleon III of France, who wanted to revive the glories of his uncle, Napoleon Bonaparte. Maximilian lasted only three years in power (he wound up in front of a firing squad), but the term Latin American took hold and has today become stronger than ever, shortened to Latino, to define, according to the Dictionary of the Spanish Language, in its second group of definitions, anyone who “is of Latin American or Hispanic origin and lives in the United States of America.” A definition that limits the demographic to the U.S., which today seems outdated.

In the U.S., the government introduced the category “Hispanic” in the 1980s to count in the census immigrants from Spanish-speaking countries, mostly from Central and South America. Later, the term “Latino” was also introduced, which technically includes Brazil but not Spain. Today some academics and activists criticize that both terms are “pan-ethnic,” arguing they function as imposed categories that reduce and homogenize populations of enormous racial, linguistic, and national diversity.

The linguist Alexánder Suárez Sánchez, who works at the Colombian Academy of Language, says that “by the late 19th century people were already talking about a Latin race of South America,” and cites the Bolivian newspaper El Siglo. “In that sense, Latino came to mean the same as in Europe: the natives of European peoples who speak languages derived from Latin,” he explains by email. It is the first and main definition of Latino recorded in the Dictionary of the Spanish Language.

Returning to Shakira, Lola Pons, who has just published the essay El dedo en los labios (Finger on the lips), notes that “her proposal is well-intentioned; moreover, it comes at a time when the presence of Latinos in the U.S. is being debated” because of President Donald Trump’s immigration policies. Because reality is complex, a Smithsonian-affiliated National Museum of the American Latino is planned in Washington — its construction was approved in 2020.

As Pons emphasizes, the term Latino has become so commonplace in the U.S. and the rest of the Americas “because it is not tied to a country, unlike the term Hispanic, which is linked to Spain, from which their former colonies broke away” during independence. Latinidad is now fully institutionalized. One example is the existence of the Latin Grammy Awards in the U.S.

However, the term “Latino” has not always had a positive connotation. Suárez Sánchez adds that “initially, it carried a discriminatory connotation, as in ‘Hispano,’ but it later underwent a shift in meaning and was reclaimed, primarily by Spanish speakers on the continent and by those who migrated to the U.S., who began, on the contrary, to feel pride rather than shame in identifying as such.” Today, the Latino population in the U.S. is already around 65 million people.

Journalist Álex Grijelmo, responsible for EL PAÍS’s style guide since 1989, says that the words Hispano and Latino “are taken in [the continent of] America, and now increasingly in Spain, as shortenings of Latin American and Hispano-American.” “They work the way the shortening tele does, representative of televisión.”

“In [the term] Latinos, we Spanish people, the Portuguese, the Italians, or the French are not usually included, even though we are also Latinos, but only Latin Americans are. Let’s say linguistically we are a different kind of Latinos. A Spanish Latino is a European Latino, without the implicit American, but if you say [in the U.S.] just that you are Latino, without adding European, it’s easy for them to understand you are Mexican or Argentine,” he adds.

“I think the Spanish do consider ourselves Latinos or Hispanics, as appropriate, in brotherhood with the American peoples who speak Spanish or Portuguese, but not so much with those who speak French, who are a minority there, although their heritage is also present in the term Latin American,” Grijelmo, an elected academic of the Spanish Royal Academy, explains.

The journalist and writer Melba Escobar, born in Cali, is a Shakira fan who has taken part as a moderator in some of the panels of women writers held in Macondo Park, the recreational area set up next to the concert stadium in Madrid: “We share language, religion... but Latinos are a fusion. On one side are our roots and then the Spanish heritage. Shakira’s point is a way of saying: ‘This is who we are.’”

However, Escobar thought the artist’s approach to the issue was “wrong,” because “she has turned it, above all, into a business.” In this sense, she suggests that Shakira wants to crown herself queen of all things Latino, “beating Bad Bunny; she’s very competitive.” “I find it a somewhat frivolous treatment that simplifies things,” adds the writer, who sees in Shakira’s thinking “the folklorization of Latin America, which is a way of exercising power over us.” “She plays at turning us into a caricature, at seeing us as exotic,” adds the author of the bestseller Las huérfanas (The Orphans).

For Escobar, the boom in all things Latino owes much to the fact that it has become “an identity marker for this community in the U.S., against that Big Brother” that wants to “dominate” them. She also points out that many millions of Latinos have emigrated. “And when you are away from your country, you feel more Latino; by migrating, you feel lonelier and need the pack. There is a herd behavior to all this.”

Musician Alejandro Sanz has weighed in on the debate, expanding on his friend Shakira’s idea in an article for EL PAÍS published on September 27. “Madrid is Latina. Spain is Latina. America is Latina. I like the pulse of that idea […]," he wrote. “We’ve spent far too long entangled in hallway debates, in a kind of linguistic bureaucracy that tries to measure with a set square whether we’re Hispanic or Latino.”

For Sanz, “hispanidad is beautiful, but sometimes it leaves us feeling constricted […] Latinidad, by contrast, is a wider territory.” “Let the scholars argue the dictionary nuances, but let’s do it together.” On Hispanic Heritage Day in Madrid, Shakira will continue during her concerts to shout “¡Latinas!” when the giant screens show the flags of different countries, including Spain’s.

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