>>17953923 (OP)
>>17953923 (OP)
Latino and Latin America is an Exonym that just sorta stayed.
At the time of the independence of the Spanish American Viceroyalties in the early 1800s, the people there broadly identified themselves as Americanos/Americans, with the suffix of Iberoamericano or Hispanoamericano to distinguish themselves from the Anglophone USA.
However, in the middle of the century, the French under Napoleon III, wanted to expand their influence and power over the Americas, like during the French Intervention in Mexico, so they began promoting the term Latino and Latin-America as a way to culturally tie themselves to the ex-Spanish colonies through the shared Latin origin of the French and Spanish languages. Since France was the premier cultural power at the time, a lot of the new elites in the new world saw France as a modernizing positive influence compared to the backwards Spanish, so they used it too, including in the USA, which through it's posterior cultural hegemony, would cement the term further.
