IT IS NOT often that a single individual changes the way a country thinks and talks about itself. But Grace Flores-Hughes, a federal administrator from south Texas, is uniquely responsible for the spread of the term “Hispanic” to describe American residents of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South and Central American descent. More than any other official, Mrs Flores-Hughes (now retired and living near Washington with her husband, a former air-force general, and a yappy poodle named Zorro) prodded President Gerald Ford’s administration to adopt the label in the mid-1970s, after much wrangling about the right word.

Mrs Flores-Hughes concedes that Hispanic is an ungainly hybrid. Technically, it describes an ethnicity, used by government as a complement to such race-based descriptions as white or black. But it is better than being called a “dirty little Mexican”—the jeer thrown at her in her rural girlhood.

“Hispanics” was contested from the start. Leftish sorts, especially on the West Coast, grumbled that the term gave too much glory to swaggering Spanish conquistadors. Many preferred “Latino”. Conservatives had a different gripe. Most Hispanics are voluntary migrants or their heirs and do not bear scars from past bigotries, so there is “no moral justification” for including them in affirmative-action programmes, argues Mike Gonzalez, author of “A Race for the Future—How Conservatives Can Break the Liberal Monopoly on Hispanic Americans”.

Leftish sorts grumbled that the term “Hispanics” gave too much glory to swaggering Spanish conquistadors, insulting their indigenous victims

Hispanic-Americans are not universally keen on the label either. When asked how they usually describe themselves, they tend to cite their country of origin or call themselves American. Only one in four prefers a pan-ethnic tag such as Hispanic or Latino. Today those two terms are used almost interchangeably, as they will be in this report.

Some conservatives want the Hispanic box scrapped. Critics are failing to grasp why a new box was created, says Mrs Flores-Hughes. In the early 1970s, when she worked in the Office for Spanish-Surnamed Americans in the Department of Health, Education and Welfare (HEW), many Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans and others were dropping out of school. That problem had to be measured before it could be tackled. Mrs Flores-Hughes says it helped that Hispanic was an artificial term rather than the name of someone else’s country. She successfully argued that “Latino” could include Brazilians or even Italians. The Hispanic box subsequently spread from HEW to the whole government.

Lines are blurring. In recent years more than a quarter of new Hispanic marriages have involved a non-Hispanic partner, a Pew Research Centre study found. The 2010 census revealed a softening of the distinction between ethnicity and race, with more than 18m of those who had ticked the “Hispanic” box then ticking “some other race”, not white or black. Census designers are now considering a single “race or origin” box, allowing those who identify themselves as Hispanic to tick that box alone or add a label specifying race.

Next in this Special report: Not our thing