Latino Identity, Philosophy of

What is the identity of the group designated by the label “Latino”? Is their identity racial, ethnic, both, or neither? Philosophers and social theorists have offered different answers to these questions, partly because there is no single, uniformly applied use of the concepts of race and ethnicity. The second edition of the Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary defines an ethnic group as “a group of people sharing a common and distinctive culture, religion, language, or the like” and “belonging to or deriving from the cultural, racial, religious, or linguistic traditions of a people or country.” This definition indicates that ethnicity contains biological/genetic components as well as cultural components. The same dictionary defines race emphasizing similar components: “a group of persons related by common descent or ...