A very sensible opinion, IMO.

Really? Haiti was a French colony, and they speak some French creole, so it can be labelled "Latino", though not "Hispanic".

From my European viewpoint it is redundant and ridiculous to label someone as "Mexican-American": Mexico is in America, so all Mexicans are Americans. But I understand the use when used by someone from the USA, so no need to explain it again. I'm just stating my viewpoint.

Saludos cordiales
Javi
Conjunction of an irregular verb:
I am firm.
You are obstinate.
He is a pig-headed fool

I'm surprised. Why do you say that, Michael? I've seen the principle strongly defended here when it comes to how to pronounce personal names, for example, and unusual pronunciations of town names, and names for racial groups.

Best Donna Richoux

)


As others have pointed out, "Latino" does not apply to the French or to others who speak French as a first language.


I'll take your word for it that you find "Mexican-American" redundant and ridiculous, but it's misleading to attribute it to your "European viewpoint." There are at least two countries in Europe, France and Finland, in which a version of "America" is used to mean "The United States of America" with a derived term, a version of "American," is used to mean "a citizen of the United States of America." I've written about this before:
http://groups.google.com/groups?q=amerikkalainen+raymond+wise&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=vis48itnnr4s2b%40corp.supernews.com&rnum=2

or
http://tinyurl.com/ncz9
(begin quote from Usenet post)
A look at the Finnish to English and English to Finnish dictionaries at
http://www.freedict.com/cgi-bin/onldict.cgi
reveals that "Yhdysvallat" is "United States of America, USA," "Yhdistyneet Kansakunnat" is "United Nations," the English word "state" translates into Finnish as "tila, valtio, valtakunta," and "lainen" is used to indicate an inhabitant of a country or nation or continent, so that "aasialainen" means "Asian," "amerikkalainen" means "American, US citizen" (is the usual sense "US citizen," I wonder), "brasilialainen" is a "Brazilian," and "englantilainen" is "English, Englishman, Sassenach" (what's the story behind that last?)

That appears to make "yhdysvaltalainen" the equivalent of the standard Esperanto term (only term in fact) for a citizen of the US, "Usonano" (feminine form "Usonanino") and the French "états-unien" ( f. "états-unienne"), which is not only all over the Internet and Usenet, but is also in a couple of dictionaries, the *Petit Larousse* and the *Petit Robert* according to the following Web site:

http://users.skynet.be/Landroit/ABL/etatsunien.html

which also mentions the variants "étatsunien" ( f. "étatsunienne") and "étasunien" ( f. "étasunienne"). United States of America Yhdysvallat, Amerikka Yhdysvallat United States of America, USA

(end quote if Usenet post)
I expect there are other countries in which the words "America" and "Americans" are similarly treated.
It may well be that the French and Finns do not not naturally produce such forms as "Mexican-American" in their languages, but this would not be because they think it redundant, not because they think Mexicans are Americans, but because they don't tend to form ethnic terms in that way. The French would probably refer to Mexican-Americans as either "Mexicains" or "Américains de l'ethnie mexicaine." (If you go back far enough, you will see that hyphenated forms used to describe ethnicity were once unknown in English as well.)

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com

http://groups.google.com/groups?q=amerikkalainen+raymond+wise&hl=en&lr=&ie=UTF-8&oe=UTF-8&selm=vis48itnnr4s2b%40corp.supernews.com&rnum=2

The passage in the last paragraph quoted above, "United States of America > Yhdysvallat, Amerikka Yhdysvallat United States of America, USA," was an error resulting from accidentally mixing the results of two copy-and-paste operations and was not in the original Usenet post.
I should note that "états-unien" is not a standard term in French, but rather a slang or colloquial term. A friend of mine who is French herself and an American citizen and who visits France every year has never encountered the term, although she is well aware of the French slang term "Ricain" for "Américain." I'm quite certain that "Ricain" never means "an inhabitant of the Americas" nor does "traduit de l'américain" ever mean anything other than "translated from American English." The friend in question dislikes the term "American" for "a citizen of the United States of America," but she explicitly agreed with my point about "traduit de l'américain" and I am sure she would also agree with my assessment of the term "Ricain." She never encounters the term "états-unien" because she never reads posts on Usenet and rarely reads items on the Internet, and young French people must never have said "états-unien" in her presence: She heard it first from me when I was discussing the word.

Raymond S. Wise
Minneapolis, Minnesota USA
E-mail: mplsray @ yahoo . com