"If all ethnic identities are created, imagined or negotiated to some degree, American Hispanics provide an especially stark example."

"As part of an effort in the 1970s to better measure who was using what kind of social services, the federal government established the word 'Hispanic' to denote anyone with ancestry traced to Spain or Latin America, and mandated the collection of data on this group."

“The term is a U.S. invention,” explains Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center....

“There is no coherence to the term,” says Marta Tienda, a sociologist and director of Latino studies at Princeton University. For instance, even though it’s officially supposed to connote ethnicity and nationality rather than race — after all, Hispanics can be black, white or any other race — the term “has become a racialized category in the United States,” Tienda says. “Latinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the category.”...

If most Hispanics are united in something, though, it’s a belief that they don’t share a common culture. The Pew Hispanic Center finds that nearly seven in 10 Hispanics say they comprise “many different cultures” rather than a single one. “But when journalists, researchers or the federal government talk about” Latinos, Lopez acknowledges, “they talk about a single group.”

If it's an invented, created category, the questions become: Who is using this category and for what purpose? What are the alternative categories, and who has something to gain/lose from using those categories? What is the political dynamic that feeds the dominance of this political categorization and suppresses the alternatives, and what changes would cause those alternative categories to become prominent?