The Los Angeles Times has revised its style guide entries for Latino and Hispanic, the newspaper’s readers representative Deirdre Edgar wrote July 28.
According to Edgar, Latino is the “preferred term,” and the “umbrella term for people in the United States of Latin American descent.”
The style entry notes that the term includes “Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans and others from the Spanish-speaking lands or cultures of Latin America” and that “it is preferable” to be more specific by identifying a person as “Mexican American, of Salvadoran descent and so forth, instead of using the umbrella term,” Latino.
The entry also notes that “Latino is an ethnic group, not a race category” and that reporters can use the term “Hispanic” if it is “in quotes or in proper names.”