What’s a Latino?

Posted on | June 11, 2006 | Comments Off

Everyone is talking about Latinos these days, but what exactly is a Latino? If there is one thing that we all know it’s that not all Latinos have similar cultures and behaviors. But just how similar are all Latinos? Is it possible to treat them all as one market segment?

The first thing that comes to my mind is a conversation I had with a friend of mine (someone who has a lot of experience in the Latino market):

Sebastian: Juan, something like a Latino Market doesn’t exist (as a unique thing).

Me: How is that?

Sebastian: Well, I think that if we take into account the profiles of people from Colombia, Argentina, Peru, Bolivia, Paraguay, Mexico, among others, they are not similar. Their cultures are different, their histories are different, and even their languages (even when they speak the same language) are different.

I kept thinking about it after this conversation, and what Sebastian said is true: Latinos are not one homogeneous group of people. But is there really something like that, a completely homogeneous group of people? I guess not.

But the reason that we talk about Latinos as a unique and homogeneous group is that the people from most of the Latino countries (and the US immigrants from these countries) share a lot of common values that in some way rule their lives.

A Colombian does not behave in the same manner as a Dominican, but they both behave similarly when compared to North Americans.

In a similar way, their language rules their way of being. Spanish (one of the most common Latin languages) is less direct than, for example, German. We need a lot of words to say just one thing, and it is more work to make a phrase make sense than in non-Latin languages. This particular sense is added by each person, and each has a unique mental model. This is a fact, so even though Latinos share the same language as a base (inter-language differences aside), these differences are less important than the overall structure of the language as a whole.

On the other hand, since our language is not so clear on its own, we need to use our body language more intensively than the rest of Americans. We are known to other cultures for, among other things, this behavior trait: the intensive use of body language. When I say the rest of Americans what is meant are all the people from American countries (whether North, Central or South), because for us (Latinos), just as all the people form European countries are Europeans, all of the above are Americans.

So I do agree with Sebastian, but not completely. If we talk about Latinos as a group of completely homogeneous people, then I agree with in that something like that does not exist. If we talk about a group whose parts share some similar attitudes, then something like a Latino cluster (or group) certainly does exist.

Juan Manuel Damia

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