page_title: Latin Americans
section_title: Definition
hierarchical_section_title: Latin Americans / Definition
context_page_description: Latin Americans are the citizens of the Latin American countries and dependencies. Latin American countries are multi-ethnic, home to people of different ethnic and national backgrounds. As a result, some Latin Americans do not take their nationality as an ethnicity, but identify themselves with both their nationality and their ancestral origins. Aside from the indigenous Amerindian population, all Latin Americans or their ancestors immigrated since 1492. Latin America has the largest diasporas of Spaniards, Portuguese, Black Africans, Italians, Lebanese and Japanese in the world. The region also has large German, French, and Jewish diasporas.
  The specific ethnic and/or racial composition varies from country to country: many have a predominance of European-Amerindian, or Mestizo, population; in others, Amerindians are a majority; some are mostly inhabited by people of European ancestry; and others are primarily Mulatto. Various Black, Asian, and Zambo minorities are also identified in most countries. White Latin Americans are the largest single group. Together with the people of part-European ancestry they combine for almost the totality of the population.
context_section_description: Latin America (Spanish: América Latina or Latinoamérica; Portuguese: América Latina; French: Amérique latine) is the region of the Americas where Romance languages (i.e., those derived from Latin)—particularly Spanish and Portuguese, as well as French—are primarily spoken.
  It includes more than 20 nations: Mexico in North America; Guatemala, Honduras, El Salvador, Nicaragua, Costa Rica and Panama in Central America; Colombia, Venezuela, Ecuador, Peru, Bolivia, Chile, French Guiana, Paraguay, Brazil, Argentina and Uruguay in South America; Cuba, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, and Puerto Rico in the Caribbean—in summary, Hispanic America, Brazil, and Haiti. Despite having a sizeable Romance-speaking communities, Canada and the United States are almost never included in the definition, primarily for being predominantly English-speaking Anglosphere countries.
  Latin America, therefore, can be defined as all those parts of the Americas that were once part of the Spanish, Portuguese, or French colonial empires, namely New Spain, Colonial Brazil and New France.
caption: Latin American countries (green) in the Americas
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