Dear Evangelina,
I neglected to take up the thread of multiple replies, so instead, I opted for a separate reply, this time on American exceptionalism, especially when it comes to terms not based on science, and this one is quite frequent, as it needlessly offends speakers of Romance languages.
From a scientific standpoint, there is but one human race. The system America is using and nobody else comes from an outdated era when Birth of a Nation was shown to a sitting president who endorsed the KKK. If laws and customs have since now changed somewhat (and I say somewhat because punishing marijuana way more strongly than cocaine does come from the intent of profiling Spanish speakers, and was meant to discourage white people from having relations with bilingual people) then it doesn't seem logical to uphold a different slice of the same pie.
It's evident that you talk about ethnicity, but even there the Caribbean is of course way more complicated. For one, Rihanna sings just as much in English as she signs in Patois despite that being a version of French. Two, there are at least two islands where two countries share the space, like Haiti and the Dominic Republic or Sint Maarten with its French counter half. Strictly legally, that's the second closest of Europe from America, with the other being Saint Pierre up north.
I'd say it's interesting people take you for an Italian, as a European with freedom of movement, I make no assumptions until a person speaks. This is a different way of saying it's already an achievement if over there Spanish speakers are not misidentified (like Puerto Ricans, who despite being citizens do get at times falsely labeled as immigrants). As a side note, to protect the Boot from frequent raids by Barbary pirates, the Papal States have pretty much "let" the Spanish Habsburgs rule the Two Sicily Kingdoms, and like a lot of the knights and mercenaries who served there were Spanish, chances are high, your grandpa already had Spanish lineage. The original inhabitants of Sicily were Illyric, the phenomenon of vendetta comes from them, and because they exist in that region, the South Balkans and Albania also has it. It has spawned the factoid of "man-woman", upon where the only remaining member of a family is a woman who has the obligation of carrying on the blood feud.
It'd be nice to see it one day that any majority becomes at least as sensitive that they recognize a common language does not mean a common culture. American Spanish speakers are as diverse as Romance or Slavic speakers in Europe. The same goes for contrasts, we can generalize, but we can also conclude, that motivation, determination and experience play way more into the equation, than hair color.
