You say “Hispanic” and I say “Latino.” But neither of us says “Chicano” because we don’t want to upset the middle-class Hispanics or Latinos whom we want to read our newspapers, tune in to our news broadcasts or click on our Web sites.

I have been asked to focus this essay on the long, unresolved and perhaps unresolvable controversy over the use of the terms Hispanic and Latino among the 35 million-plus people of Latin-American origin who live in this country. As well, I have been asked to address an even older controversy over a third term, Chicano.

The Oxford English Dictionary documents the word Hispanic to the 16th Century, when it referred to residents of the Iberian Peninsula who spoke either Spanish or Portuguese. The word first came into wide usage in the United States in the 1970s, largely through the efforts of the U.S. Census Bureau. Realizing that among the U.S. minorities it had seriously undercounted in the 1970 census were people of Latin-American extraction, the bureau (abetted by a number of well-intentioned Latino political advocacy groups) launched a campaign to help it get a better head count in 1980. Hispanic was the term for Puerto Rican émigrés in New York, Cuban refugees in South Florida, Mexican migrants in Los Angeles and the descendants of Spanish settlers in northern New Mexico.

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Of course, these disparate folks already used many different terms to refer to themselves and their compatriots of Latin-American origin, such as Boricua, Cubano, Mexicano, Tejano and Chicano. So little wonder that the imposition of the official term Hispanic spawned controversy almost immediately.

The Los Angeles Times first trod into this linguistic minefield in 1981, when the newspaper’s style guide was undergoing one of its periodic revisions. The style committee’s chairman was a gruff old copy editor who detested government bureaucratese, which doomed the term Hispanic from the start. He asked me and other Latino staffers, including longtime NAHJ members Frank Sotomayor and George Ramos, to determine what Los Angeles’ many Latino residents called themselves. What we found, in an admittedly unscientific survey, was that most called themselves Mexican Americans, or simply Mexicans, but that a significant number of them also referred to themselves as Chicanos. The catch all term most often used to refer to other Latin Americans, regardless of their country of origin, was Latino. So that was the word the new Times Style Guide decreed was to be used in the newspaper. Hispanic was relegated to use only in direct quotes.

Even the origins of the word Latino are controversial. The term dates to the 18th Century and the colonial rivalry between England and France. Its application to Latin Americans apparently originated in Napoleonic France and was used to differentiate the "Latin” world (France, Spain, Portugal, Italy and the many countries of Central America and South America, all of them predominantly Roman Catholic) from the English-speaking and largely Protestant world of Great Britain and its colonies in North America. No one quite knows why the term Latino caught on and today is so widely used by Latin Americans in this country. It could be simply that the word Latino rolls more easily off the tongue of Spanish-speakers than an English word like Hispanic. Maybe if the Census Bureau had used the Spanish word Hispano in 1980, rather than Hispanic, this whole argument would be moot.

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But the argument persists, rivaled in intensity only by the generations-long debate among Mexican Americans over the term Chicano. The origins of Chicano are lost in the mists of time, where some Mexican Americans believe the word itself will eventually fade away. But it remains very much alive today, especially among younger people of Mexican origin. The consensus among Mexican-American scholars is that Chicano is a slang word that first came into wide use in the Southwest early in the 20th Century. It referred to Mexicans residing in the United States either as citizens or refugees from the Mexican Revolution of 1910 and the two decades of political chaos that followed. One theory of the word’s derivation is that it is a combination of Chihuahua and Mexicano. And, indeed, most of the Mexicans who entered this country during that era did so at what was then the chief railroad junction on the border – El Paso, Texas, just across the Rio Grande from the Mexican state of Chihuahua.

By the 1940s and ’50s, the word was widely used in barrios from San Antonio’s West Side to East L.A., mainly by young hipsters known as pachucos. Because it was closely associated with rebellious, and sometimes criminal, youngsters, respectable Mexican Americans did not start using the term until the highly politicized 1960s.

Once again, a restless young generation led the way. Inspired by the black civil rights movement in the South, Mexican Americans began to organize themselves into activist groups. Some of the more militant groups formed by students and other young people adopted the once-disreputable term Chicano as a symbol of pride and self-assertion.

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It was “our” word, the argument went. It emerged from the barrio and was not a label imposed on us by outside society, like Mexican American (or, later on, Hispanic). Thus, after a Chicano Youth Conference held in Denver in 1969, many chapters of the student group known as UMAS (United Mexican American Students) changed their names to include the word Chicano.

It is worth noting that one of the journalistic icons whose career helped inspire the creation of NAHJ (the scholarship fund even bears his name) considered himself a Chicano. One of the first Op-Ed pieces Ruben Salazar wrote during his all-too-brief career as a columnist for the Los Angeles Times was headlined “What Is a Chicano? And What Is It Chicanos Want?” In it, Salazar wrote that “A Chicano is a Mexican American with a non-Anglo image of himself.” And it was because of Salazar’s defense of the controversial term that one of NAHJ’s predecessors, the California Chicano News Media Association, used the term in its official name when it was founded in 1972, shortly after Salazar’s death.

A key reason the use of the word Chicano persists is that the young militants who started using it in the 1960s are now middle-aged and middle-class. They are among the opinion leaders in the broader Latino community and they read more newspapers and tune into more news broadcasts than the average person. So the news media should get used to using all three terms – Hispanic, Latino, Chicano – and probably a few others that may come into wider use, as Nuyorican has recently. Not interchangeably, but certainly with care and accuracy.

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Another key rule in the L.A. Times Style Guide is that reporters be careful about using any of these terms without first asking a news source what he or she wants to be called. Asking this key question of every Latino, Hispanic or Chicano we report on is a little more work, to be sure. But it is one way to convince all those potential consumers of news that we respect them, and are trying to better understand their diverse cultures and national origins.

Frank del Olmo is associate editor of the Los Angeles Times.

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