Excellent, well-stated point. There's a lot more to race than morphology. The "Hispanic race" includes people with blonde hair and blue eyes as well as 100% indigenous Americans. As far as I can tell, pretty much anyone can be Hispanic if they want to be....I like going to Ethiopian restaurants for many reasons, not all of them food-related!
Me, too! Halle Berry would be just another Plain Jane if she lived in Ethiopia.Ethiopian supermodel Liya Kebede.
"As far as I can tell, pretty much anyone can be Hispanic if they want to be."
There was a thread about this a few months ago. The US census defines Hispanic basically as people from Spain and its former colonies, including ethnic Chinese in the Philippines and ethnic Germans in Argentina. It's not considered a "race" by the Census, which is why you see demographic data for "white, non-hispanic" and "black, non-hispanic." Popularly, however, the term seems to refer more and more to people from Central and Southern America of mixed European and Indian ancestry.
The history of the racial classification of Mexicans in the US is fascinating.