“Hispanic” an ethnic group? I don’t think that all the Spanish speakers from Latin America are all of one ethnicity, nor do they share ethnicity with Spaniards from Spain.
If you’re of Spanish decent, then yes that’s an “ethnic group” if you play that game.
You’re totally correct in saying that just because an entire group speaks the same language and shares the same culture, doesn’t mean they share the same ethnicity.
There are a lot of people descended from Spaniards living in Latin America. In the mid 1800’s, Mexico was over 70% “white”—we call them “creole”, meaning Spanish ancestry born in Mexico. But there are a lot of German, Italian, French, even Slavic ancestry of white people in Latin America.
Hell....Anthony Quinn was half-Irish, yet Mexican!
Common sense would seem to call an ethnic group those with most of their ancestors originally in a country where a certain language was spoken-in this case, Spain and the Spanish language-and they dispersed and interbred from there.
Most people think of Hispanic as being those of Spanish ancestry in the New World-the Spanish part is what makes it an ethnic group. If you want, you can split them into sub-groups by location-but why? The Spanish we speak here is a different dialect from what is spoken in Mexico City-but so is the dialect spoken in Michoacán or Brazil-but it is still Spanish-the language originally by that ethnic group in Spain.
All three races are involved-I am to all appearances Caucasian, like most Hispanics in the Americas-but in the Caribbean and some parts of central and south America, some Hispanics are Black, and in the Philipines, they are Asian-the Spaniards spread their genes far and wide outside of Europe.