AHC: Italian-Americans and Ibero-Americans lumped together

With a POD in the nineteenth century, how can we make it so that Italian-Americans, Hispano-Americans, and Portuguese-Americans are all popularly lumped together into one primary ethnic category? Call it Latino or Romantic or whatever. Considering that WASPs often perceived these groups as interchangeable "dagos", and considering that Spanish and Italian have some mutual intelligibility, is there any way that these people might come to identify as a single pan-ethnicity?
 
There was never Spanish or Portuguese immigration to the US on the scale of the Italians so they as individual weren't much of a thought.

Immigration from southern and eastern europe did get lumped together, in the negative sense of the immigration restrictions of the 1920's.
 
Well, this wouldn't require any actual Spanish immigration. I'm looking for an eventuality where (for example) Mexican-Americans and Italian-Americans are considered - and consider themselves - part of a single pan-ethnicity.
 
Well, this wouldn't require any actual Spanish immigration. I'm looking for an eventuality where (for example) Mexican-Americans and Italian-Americans are considered - and consider themselves - part of a single pan-ethnicity.
What we didn't? That Is new for me, hell if push come to shove, Quebecois could be considered Latino-Americans.
 
With a POD in the nineteenth century, how can we make it so that Italian-Americans, Hispano-Americans, and Portuguese-Americans are all popularly lumped together into one primary ethnic category? Call it Latino or Romantic or whatever. Considering that WASPs often perceived these groups as interchangeable "dagos", and considering that Spanish and Italian have some mutual intelligibility, is there any way that these people might come to identify as a single pan-ethnicity?

Perhaps they'd redeem the term "dago" much like other ethnic slurs have been reappropriated over the years.

Their fellow Mediterraneans, the Greeks, might be lumped in under this group, but IIRC Greek immigration was slightly different in character than Italian or Iberian immigration.

There was never Spanish or Portuguese immigration to the US on the scale of the Italians so they as individual weren't much of a thought.

Really? If you look at Rhode Island (full of Italian Americans) and neighbouring parts of Massachusetts like Fall River (full of Portuguese Americans), and of course Boston which owes almost as much to the Italians as it does to the Irish, then there's certainly some places where those groups occurred in proximity. Of course, both were considered "dagos" by other Americans, and nowadays both groups are thought of as separate (other than being White/European Americans).

What we didn't? That Is new for me, hell if push come to shove, Quebecois could be considered Latino-Americans.

The Quebecois were different than other immigrants IIRC. They were mostly in New England, and often in rural parts like the backwaters of New Hampshire and Maine, not so much where the Italians, Portuguese, etc. were (many exceptions exist of course).

Well, this wouldn't require any actual Spanish immigration. I'm looking for an eventuality where (for example) Mexican-Americans and Italian-Americans are considered - and consider themselves - part of a single pan-ethnicity.

I don't think that's possible. Most Mexican immigrants arrived after the Mexican Revolution, later than Italian and Portuguese immigrants did, and mostly in different parts of the country where neither of those groups were present. Modern Mexican immigration (to say nothing about Central Americans and South Americans) is different from earlier Mexican immigration and has occurred after most Italian and Portuguese (and many earlier Mexicans) have assimilated into an American identity and correspondingly have moved up in class, political power, etc.
 
There is some overlap in New England between Francophone Canadian immigrants (not sure Canadiens from Québec and points west but Acadians, too) and Portuguese.

Generally speaking, I'm not sure how you would get overlap between Iberian and Italian immigrants. Maybe if there was a substantial amount of early Italian immigration via Latin America?
 
I'm looking for an eventuality where (for example) Mexican-Americans and Italian-Americans are considered - and consider themselves - part of a single pan-ethnicity.
That seems more than improbable. The principal ethnic conflict that drove Mexican cultural perceptions was the strict Casta laws that controlled life choices, political rights, economic status, and social opportunities for all of Mexico going back to the first colonias. With all that history and oppression behind them, there is no way a community of Mexican mestizos is going to identify with Italians or Portuguese, whom they'd regard as the same peninsulares and gachupinos who treated them like dirt their whole lives.

To get a sense of how deep & rigid the casta segmentation was drawn, I'm posting this chart

casta.jpg
 
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