In order for your distinction to “explain, perfectly, the reason Hispanics may prefer hamburgers to tacos”, there would have to be a very large Spanish-American population, large enough to skew the poll by more than a dozen points, AND NBCLatino would have to be using your terminology when they conducted the poll.

Neither are true.

NBCLatino was just using the terms interchangeably. I think that was pretty obvious from the first sentence in their series of stories on the survey:

“This is the first of four stories on Hispanic attitudes as captured by a survey of 400 U.S. Latinos.”

When I lived in Spain I was told in no uncertain terms that they were not Latino, they were Hispanic and NOT LAtino. I lived there for over a year and was informed this by people from all different regions. And the definitions of Hispanic and Latino are in fact what I wrote. You have a different view, good for you.

Not to mention that the word hispanic comes from the word hispania the Iberian penninsula of Spain and the word originated in aprox 1548, and the word latino, by definition, is a person native or inhabitant of latin America, or of latin American origin. That word wasn’t invented until 1946.

Now, people can use a word any way they wish, but words do have actual meanings, and can be used erroneously to quell prejudice, much as you yourself suggest in your own idnetifying, you do it for reasons not related to the actual meaning of the word.

Trying to change the meaning of a word that’s been a classification of race since the 1500′s is awfully bold, you can say they mean other than what they do, but the dictionary and the scientific community would have to disagree.

I’ll stick with what my friends told me in Spain, and what my other friends have told me as well, and I’ll stick with the dictionary and the scientific community.

You can continue to say I am completely false, but looking up the words does help, and just because today some would rather call themselves one thing because the other “carries heavy ethnic and racial stereotyping in the US”, doesn’t mean the term is being used correctly.

Until you can change the actual long standing definitions of the words, I’ll hold to what I know.

The Portuguese and those of such descent are not considered Hispanic, rather Ibero American.

A cursory glance at Telemundo or any local South American channel will enlight you as to what terms are actually used.

I personally prefer to be addressed as Hispanic since Latino carries heavy ethnic and racial stereotyping in the US, where Americans suddenly see all of us as Central American mestizos or South American mulattos, erasing the Asian (look at Peru with its heavy Japanese descendant population, or Cuba’s Chinese descendants) and European descended Hispanics.