Because for us, Latino doesn’t exist.
Matter of fact, it pretty much only exists in the heads of people in the United States.
This only makes sense in the US because during the 60’s, there was a need to group a mass of people that came from countries south of Texas, who by the way speak mostly the same language (Castilian), who started representing a growing share of the country’s population, and were loosely assumed to have one same culture (possibly because of the disproportional contribution of people from Mexico - 63% of the “Latino” population, which means that many people have only been exposed to one single Latin American culture, and this generalistic terminology leads them to reduce the cultural differences of more than 20 nations to the same rough assumption based on the little they have experienced). Latino is not a “race”, Latino is not a “culture”, Latino is a statistic category made up, during the term of Richard Nixon, to reinforce a sense of otherness.
You can’t fit all of these countries into a poorly made archetype (often caricatural/degrading) of your closest neigbour’s culture.
Brazil is as different of Mexico as it is of Canada (depending of the region, even more), and so happen with our Hispanic neighbours, that often don’t share almost anything else between themselves besides the language.
That being said, let me point out another difference: “Latino” and Latin American are not the same thing: Latin America is a geographic designation that dates back to the 19th century (its original mention is often attributed to Napoleon III, the last emperor of France, who, by the way, invaded Mexico in the 1860’s) and refered to a socio-economic and “racial” sphere (Yes, back in the day, it was a norm to believe in racialist pseudoscience, and the political use of it was rampant) much more than anything political and cultural. It refers to countries that, at least in the time concept was brought up, had formed similar structures of power - consequence of social hierarchy inherited from the Spanish Empire-, had similar commodity-exporting economic systems, and republican governments hailed from the ever-quarreling offspring of the people who once ruled this very hierarchy. Also, linking the conception of Latin America to the criollo elite who declared the independence of most of it, there is the ideology of Pan-Americanism, that sought to reunite the continent under one single political authority.
This is another point where Brazil differs greatly: Our way to independence was entirely different of what happened to our neighbours. In his famous “Carta de Jamaica”, written in 1815, among other documents, Simon Bolívar expresses the desire of uniting the continent in one strong Pan-American confederation. Out of his plans were: The already independent United States and Haiti, British Canada, and… Brazil.
Yes, in the beginning of the 19th century (1808), unlike our Hispanic neighbours, we were no longer a colony, but a realm, united and with equal status to Portugal. Plus, the capital of this “United Kingdom of Portugal, Brazil and Algarve” was Rio de Janeiro (fleeing from Napoleon’s invasion to Portugal, Queen Maria I, her son and regent João VI fled to across the Atlantic, moving with themselves the whole administrative and political center of their domains: a situation that lasted until 1821, and of which the end was one of the main triggers of our independence 1822 - Keeping in charge of the country the same House of Bragança, under emperor Pedro I). This is another factor that has put us apart of our neighbours: while they were all considered republics who fought arm in arm for their freedom, We were yet a bulky Empire, ruled by the branch of an European royal family (Habsburg-Bragança), with the same kind of European nobility, and the worst of all: with an economy heavily based on slavery.
Idealized map of “Greater Colombia” (roughly the map of Hispano-America).
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A final point : Geographic position. Due to its sheer size and relatively sparsely populated western borders, Brazilians usually have not much contact with other countries. We have indeed received massive waves of immigration during the last two centuries (only behind than the United State, in the whole continent), but these newcomers end up assimilated in a crescent degree, into Brazilian society and all its dynamics. With most of our population concentrated away from the borders, within the Atlantic coast, we don’t know what is it like to be a foreigner, most of us has never been abroad, our sense of otherness is flawed: We’ll think our country is the best because we don’t know any other, we’ll think our country is the worst (don’t even get me started with the “only in Brazil…” drama thing), because we don’t know any other. Neighbour countries’ biggest centers are often not many kilometers away from foreign land: See Asunción, La Paz and Santiago not many hours by car from another nation, or even Buenos Aires and Montevideo, lying a river away, which allows a spontaneous cultural exchange that creates a barely common identity. This is not the case of Brazil, not even the entire country shares much more than the language, streched in our eastern edge of South America, we’re a continent in our own. This makes it much harder to establish any closer tie with the rest of Latin America: When we hear “música latina”, we think about tango and lambada, when we think about “sotaque latino”, it has to be someone speaking with Spanish mannerisms. “Latin” ends up as something foreigner to us.
Brazil’s populational density map.
I personally would call myself a Latin American, but it has to do with sociopolitics, and would serve me as a tool to analyse and debate some macrossocial problems that are recurrently seen across the continent. It would not be a lie to say that, in certain points, when we’re all put in the same bag for long enough, we end up becoming the same in at least something, and that includes global political features that were developed/applied in a similar way in/towards Latin American countries during mainly the last two centuries. If we think, for example, in the way the US dealt with LA, you’ll find quasi-generic policies like: the Monroe Doctrine, the “Big Stick” policy, the “Good Neighbour” policy, the “Banana Wars”, the Operation Condor, and others. All of them have shaped similar social-political movements throughout the continent, like certain kinds of populism, dictatorship-derived anticommunism, peasant rights struggles, Theology of Liberation, “21th Century Socialism”, and others, that can really be thought as of “Latin American” sociological characteristic. Other than all the social stratification that can be traced back to the establishment of late-medieval Iberian institutions here beyond the Atlantic, which certainly have much to do with the sheer naturalization of brutal inequality we also share (that has been reduced in some countries, and drove others to the brink of chaos). But outside of this debate, I honestly don’t think we’re much of “one thing”.
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