Sotomayor

A non-Eagles related post.

I find it curious that most news reports on the nomination of Sonia Sotomayor to the Supreme Court use the word "latina" to describe her. 

One, what happened to the word "hispanic?" Second, i'm confused by the use of the feminine form "latina" - with the "a" at the end to signify a  woman - as opposed to the masculine "latino" indicating a reference to a man which I learned in my high school sophomore spanish class. Since the English language doesn't use different masculine/feminine versions of a sentence subject, I don't understand why the media has grafted this spanish language practice into English usage.

(As an aside, i also find it humorous that some accounts have qualified as to whether Sotomayor is the first hispanic.. er latino...er latina, to serve on the high court because of the uncertain racial identity of Justice Benjamin Cardozo. I find it more humorous that the main criteria on figuring out who was first is whether Cardozo self-identified as a hispanic - a term I highly doubt was even being used in the beginning of the 20th century and so shouldn't automatically be a definitive determination. It's as if Cardozo is being penalized for not calling himself a latino when the word only has come into popular usage in the past decade. 

And I also find humorous the confusion as to what category a "portugese-american" like Cardozo falls into. One would presume that if someone from Spain qualifies as hispanic (or "spanish") rather than european-american, then someone with origins also from the Iberian peninsula would be similarly categorized. But that doesn't seem to be the case in the media's rush to annoint Sotomayor the first hispanic on the Supreme Court. 

How else to explain the lack of recognition for Benjamin Cardozo's historic accomplishment but that he had the misfortune to serve well before most Americans cared about, or became fixated with, the primacy of racial and ethnic identity. Back then, we were all just Americans.