Please, correct the stupidly wrong title: the last Pope was an American!
replies(1):
> The only thing that is unambiguously an US thing is the concept of calling people from the Americas latinos.
Latino is a term for people with Latin American heritage, meaning those with Spanish or Portuguese linguistic and cultural roots. You're fine with calling yourself American in English but not Latino?
Exactly! Latino is a thing created my the US to separate themselves from us. But we all have a very similar history, colonized countries, native Americans almost eradicated then assimilated, slavery, migration from Europe and Asia. The only difference is that the US got richer.
> In English, the two continents are just that: two continents; North and South America, not "America."
In Portuguese too so most of the times I refer to us as South Americans but we are as Americans as people from the US. This is all linguistics/sociology so if/when the pushback is big enough we might be able to eradicate this stupid "latino" concept (that is wrong because there are countries included that speak English, dutch, creole and other languages that are not latinas)
Maybe I'm off base here, but are you aware that most Hispanic people in the US proudly call themselves Latino? It's not a term that Americans use as a mark of separation, it's a cultural/identity thing. You can be Latino American and American American (like from the US), they're not mutually exclusive.
I might be missing your point though, are you saying that the US uses the term differently than the rest of Central and South America?
At least the people from Brazil, Uruguay, Paraguay, Argentina, Bolivia don't use the term latino to identify (South) Americans. I guess it is more common from Colombia to Mexico.