Demographics of the Supreme Court of the United States Obama. In 2009, Obama appointed Sonia Sotomayor, a woman of Puerto Rican descent, to be the first unequivocally Hispanic Justice. Both the National Association of Latino Elected and Appointed Officials and the Hispanic National Bar Association count Sotomayor as the first Hispanic justice. Some historians contend that Cardozo—a Sephardic Jew believed to be of distant Portuguese descent—should also be counted as the first Hispanic Justice. Schmidhauser wrote in 1979 that "[a]mong the large ethnic groupings of European origin which have never been represented upon the Supreme Court are the Italians, Southern Slavs, and Hispanic Americans." The National Hispanic Center for
Hispanic and Latino Americans Latin America are both Latino. This definition is consistent with the 21st-century usage by the U.S. Census Bureau and OMB, as the two agencies use both terms Hispanic and Latino interchangeably. A later definition of Latino is as a condensed form of the term ""Latino-Americano"", the Spanish word for Latin-American, or someone who comes from Latin America. Under this definition a Mexican American or Puerto Rican, for example, is both a Hispanic and a Latino. A Brazilian American is also a Latino by this definition, which includes those of Portuguese-speaking origin from Latin America. However, an immigrant from Spain would