"Shut up, you stupid Mexican!"

The words spewed from the mouth of a pale, freckle-faced boy, taunting me on our elementary school playground.

I wish I could recall what I said to inspire the insult. But more than three decades later, I remember only my reply.

"Stupid Peruvian," I pointed out, wagging my finger.

My family had emigrated from Lima to northern California a few years earlier, so my nationality was a point of fact (whereas my stupidity remains a matter of opinion). The response so confused my classmate that my first encounter with prejudice ended as quickly as it started.

Today my grade school preoccupation with nationality feels a bit quaint. Peruvian or Mexican — does it even matter? We're all Latinos now.

And don't call us stupid. Ever since the 2012 election, when the Hispanic vote helped propel President Barack Obama (71 percent) over Mitt Romney (27 percent), Latinos have become coveted.

The attention is nice, I admit. But it's not evident what being Latino — or Hispanic or hispano, take your pick — truly means, and most Hispanics, it turns out, don't even identify with the term.

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," explained Mark Hugo Lopez, associate director of the Pew Hispanic Center. "If you go to El Salvador or the Dominican Republic, you won't necessarily hear people say they are 'Latino' or 'Hispanic.'"

You may not hear it much in the United States either. According to a 2012 Pew survey, only about a quarter of Hispanic adults say they identify themselves most often as Hispanic or Latino. About half say they prefer to cite their family's country of origin, while one-fifth say they use "American." (Among third-generation Latinos, nearly half identify as American.)

The Office of Management and Budget defines a Hispanic as "a person of Cuban, Mexican, Puerto Rican, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin regardless of race" — about as specific as calling someone European.

"There is no coherence to the term," said 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 said. "Latinos have become a race by default, just by usage of the category."

If most Hispanics are united in something, it's a belief that they don't share a common culture. The Pew Hispanic Center finds that nearly 7 in 10 Hispanics say they comprise "many different cultures" rather than a single one.

Even the Spanish language is losing some of its power as a cultural marker for this community. About 80 percent of U.S. Hispanics say they read or speak Spanish "very well" or "pretty well," according to Pew, but only 38 percent claim it as their primary language, while another 38 percent say they are bilingual and 24 percent say English is their dominant tongue. By the third generation, nearly 7 in 10 Latinos say they are English-dominant.

If language or race or a common culture isn't enough to define or unite us, perhaps politics can help.

A stark vision of a Latino political identity emerged last month from former New Mexico Democratic Gov. Bill Richardson, who suggested to ABC News that Sen. Ted Cruz, a Cuban-American and conservative Republican from Texas, should not be "defined as a Hispanic" because he doesn't support immigration reform. (Soon afterward, Richardson told Fox News that it was a misunderstanding: "All I was saying is, I don't consider myself just a Hispanic, and he shouldn't be defined just as a Hispanic. We're other things.")

Yes, the notion of a political litmus test for Hispanic identity seems bizarre. But Richardson's words made clear how, in the political world, that identity has evolved from a broad ethnic and cultural category to include an implied liberal sensibility.

Fix immigration and Hispanics will love you. Simple, right?

In a 2012 survey, Pew found that immigration reform was not the key issue for registered Latino voters. When asked what subjects they considered "extremely important," Hispanics rated education, the economy, health care and even the budget deficit before immigration.

Not that different from the rest of America.

I'll check the "Hispanic origin" box on official documents — doing so feels less wrong than not — but other aspects of my identity, whether my birthplace, my faith, my alma mater, my profession or my roles as a father, husband, son or brother have all felt more vital at different moments. A pan-Latino identity is too broad to feel essential. I read Latin American novelists and speak to my kids in Spanish, but as Richardson might say, I'm also other things.

I'm Hispanic when census forms and my children's birth certificate documents nudge me to choose. I'm Hispanic when junk mail arrives at my house trumpeting special offers for my Irish-American wife and "ofertas especiales" for me. I'm Hispanic in America because people I don't know have decided that is what I am.

There is one moment, however, when assuming the Latino label feels right, even urgent: When the political debates over immigration turn ugly, when talk of self-deportation and racial-profiling laws and anchor babies permeates campaigns, distinctions and nuances seem to dissipate.

This is why the anti-Latino sentiment that has emerged in some quarters of American politics is self-defeating. It fosters unity among the otherwise disparate peoples it targets. It strengthens, even creates, the very identity it seeks to dislodge.

Carlos Lozada is Outlook editor for The Washington Post