Once upon a time, Italians were “Latins.” So were the French, Spanish, Portuguese, and even Romanians – all descended from Roman colonists who mingled with the locals.
Screen idol Rudolph Valentino (1895-1926) was the poster boy for the “Latin lover” during the silent movie age. Hollywood used to reflect the English-speaking world’s understanding of who Latin people were. Stars Charles Boyer (France), Riccardo Montalban (Mexico), Antonio Banderas (Spain), Cesar Romero (USA), Fernando Lamas (Argentina), as well as Italians Rossano Brazzi and Marcello Mastroianni were quintessentially Latin. As one internet definition has it, the Latin lover had “…a romantic, passionate temperament and great sexual prowess.”
Marcello Mastroianni
and Monica Bellucci.
On Quora, contributor Joni Zunino, a professional voice actor, explains that the Latin lover was “an attractive male stereotype that was foreign, dark, good looking, exciting, smooth and a bit dangerous, but generally one-dimensional – so different from the portrayal of the typical American white male father/boy next door/boss stereotype.”
We should add all the female Latin lovers who seduced many a cinema Anglo: from Italy, Sofia Loren, Gina Lollabrigida, Claudia Cardinale, and Monica Bellucci; from Spain, Penelope Cruz; from Columbia, Sofia Vergara, among others.
We’ve come a long way from that mostly flattering definition. Google the words ‘Latin people’ today and all you get are Hispanic results—and by ‘Hispanic’ it doesn’t even include Spanish or Portuguese people.
This is a personal insult to me and should be for all peoples having Latin roots. My father’s side came from the Italian province of Latina in the region of Lazio (Latium in Roman times), in short, the epicenter of the Latin ethnicity. I certainly have the right to be a Latin. They may still call themselves Latins in Italy but you’d be lucky to find a handful of Italian Americans who identify as that. I suppose we can blame Columbus for claiming half the New World for Latin Spain. The name stuck as Latin America.
In 2022, I wrote about the race for mayor of Los Angeles during which candidate Rick Caruso advertised that he was Latin so latinos would vote for him. The media was aghast that a White Italian American would claim to be a Latin. One jackass tweeter wrote: “[didn’t Caruso know that] Italy is not in Latin America?” Caruso lost to a Black woman.
Latinos are a racially mixed bunch, the term also covers cultural and language ties, but one Latino magazine estimated there were 20 million White Latinos in America, in essence, these are actually ethnic Latins. (The U.S. Census doesn’t recognize ‘White’ Hispanics and subtracts them to create the category ‘non-Hispanic Whites’, which lowers the White population count by 20 million.)
Wonder how many Latins are there in the world? We know that European Latins spread themselves across the globe for centuries. I did a quickie census to arrive at 569 million Latins globally, starting with the mother countries (204 million), adding 40% of Latin America as White (overwhelmingly Latins, 286 million), 65 million Latins of the USA (of Italian, French, ‘White Hispanic’, and Portuguese extraction), 13 million in Canada, and 2.5 million Latins in Switzerland.
As a side note, of all the wars, famines, and plagues throughout the world today, Latin America is rarely consumed by such catastrophes. That’s not to say the continent is any sort of paradise—poverty, violence, and drug cartels abound. But there hasn’t been a major border war Latin America since the Paraguayan War, 1864 to 1870, between Paraguay and the Triple Alliance of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay. An estimated 500,000, mostly Paraguayans were killed – less than Americans lost in the Civil War. The point is you don’t see the UN or World Health Organizations overwhelmed by man-made disasters south of the border as they are in Africa or the Middle East.
Could it be that the Latin culture, flawed as it may be, is ultimately more stable than the rest of the world? Catholicism, Latin values, and shared languages (Portuguese and Spanish are both Romance languages) may play a huge role this. By contrast, Germanic and Slavic cultures have unleashed unimaginable horrors in Europe and around the world and have spawned Nazism, Communism, and genocides. Something to ponder.
Let’s not abandon our Latin identity. -JLM
Totally agree, somehow for those Italian Americans who care, we are of Latin Heritage and Culture, pure and simple……and how the term got coopted into a political category, is one of the more weirder parts of the American political spectrum. Even applying the term to racial compositions gets to be absurd or “reduction to the absurd”. I don’t even think this conversation could be happening in any other part of the globe, such is the state of todays political realities in the USA.
I recall once at a proverbial sensitivity trainings on diversity at work, we had to talk about backgrounds…..and I said I was of Latin heritage, and end of discussion, and no one was going to take that part of my heritage away.
I became aware of this separation many years ago. In a group of workers, when I mentioned that I was a Latina, a woman of Spanish heritage looked at me. I could see the puzzled pain in her face! She didn’t know that the Italians are the original Latins.