Why is Hispanic considered a group if it's obvious they do not even share the same race?

[Tritone]

Originally Posted by SunGrins

What does any of this have to do with geneaology?

People are identified by race/ethnicity in the United States, so issues of ethnic/racial classification are intrinsically linked to genealogy.

This thread is explaining why nobody was ever called "hispanic" in the United States. There's a disconnect between today and the recent past because today we have "hispanics/latinos", but that's not a concept that historically existed even 40 years ago. Traditionally in the U.S people were identified as black or white, the notion of a separate "hispanic" minority group did not even exist. That needs to be understood.

[SunGrins]

Originally Posted by Tritone

People are identified by race/ethnicity in the United States, so issues of ethnic/racial classification are intrinsically linked to genealogy.

Really?
When did we start making a issue of Hispanic ethnicity in our family tree research. We make note of details of nationality and immigration to further our research but being labeled as Hispanic does nothing to narrow our search strategies because it is too broad and apparently ill defined or not well understood. Even DNA results are too imprecise to be very useful in searching for records. Race is an issue especially for African American genealogy because of the lack of reliable or complete records.

[in_newengland]

Okay, this may have started out as a legitimate question but the discussion quickly deteriorated into bickering, political history, and other off topic comments. There's a lot of information but it's not really genealogy. Maybe this sort of question, after the first few pages, should have gone into another forum. Maybe it could have been Great Debates. But talking about Texas history and Portugal and black history and Irish is fringe territory for Genealogy.

It does seem that there are new definitions coming along all the time but we are taking up the whole genealogy forum discussing them. Also, posting pictures of what you think a certain ethnic group should look like is not genealogy. For these reasons I have deleted a lot of posts and yet I know I didn't get an exactly accurate result. I tried to leave some of the more on topic and informative posts but this thread needs to be closed.