>Actually, it's Hispanic that was pushed by the government:
Some say Latino is an establishment term too though. To me this looks similar to Common Era and Before Common Era to replace Before Christ and Anno Domini.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hispanic/Latino_naming_dispute
The adoption of the term Latino by the US Census Bureau in 2000 and its subsequent media widespread brough about several controversies and disagreements, specially in the United States and, to a lesser extent, in Mexico and other Spanish-speaking countries. Regarding it as an arbitrary generic term, many Latin American scholars, journalists and indigenous rights organisations have objected against the mass media use of the word "Latino", pointing out that such ethnonyms are optional and should be used only to describe people involved in the practices, ideologies and identity politics of their supporters. They argue that if Hispanic is an imposed official term, so is Latino (from the words 'Amérique latine'), since it was the French who imposed that name on the Spanish-speaking countries of the western Hemisphere, during their support of the Second Mexican Empire. Popular personalities like Andy Garcia have also expressed concern. He has stated that, in spite of his love of his native Cuba, he dislikes to be labelled as a 'Latino actor' preferring instead to be addressed as an actor without a tag attached to him.
Criticism from the media
In the US the terms 'Latino' and 'Hispanic' are officially voluntary, self-designated classifications. Yet the mass media has helped propagate them irrespective of this fact. The rapid widespread of "Latino" in the US has been possible due to the policies of certain newspapers such as the Los Angeles Times and other California-based media during the 1990s. The overuse of the term as a label has been the target of journalists like Raoul Lowery who have heavily attacked it denouncing it as a misleading and simplistic way of tagging a group as diverse as Latin Americans:
"For years I have campaigned against the Los Angeles Times-imposed word, "Latino", in describing the country's fastest growing ethnic "Group," those with Spanish-surnames, those who speak Spanish, et al. The LA Times set its feet in concrete and the use of the word "Latino" and nothing has cracked the concrete since. Worst of all, other newspapers have followed the Times' lead and news coverage, accuracy and the community have suffered."
Lowery argues that, according to the statistics of the Census Bureau, most middle-class people with Latin-American background living in the United States reject the term. He traces back the poularization of the word to the Los Angeles Times columnist Frank del Olmo who regarded the term Hispanic as "ugly and imprecise". He writes:
"The third reason Del Olmo objected to the word "Hispanic" and championed the word "Latino" was that "Chicano" had been roundly rejected by all Mexican Americans but the most radical, blue collar, less educated, under-class people of Mexican-origin. Del Olmo pushed "Latino" as a substitute for the rejected "Chicano". Unfortunately, he was in a position to push this substitution into the language of the "Newspaper of Record" in the West. Other papers and broadcast stations took up the word because it was the "style" of the LA Times. Frank Del Olmo single handedly branded millions of people.