Board Thread:False Info and Speculative Discussion/@comment-25184427-20140722165407/@comment-19765459-20140728172146

I didn't remember that scene either. Basically, because of Scott's last name, I and a lot of other people assumed that Melissa had to be the Mexican parent but were never quite sure, although now we see that Rafael is Latino as well. But neither Melissa nor Rafael have obvious accents that would suggest that their families are recently from Mexico. As I mentioned before, Mexicans have lived in California for a long time. There is nothing peculiar about a Californian whose ancestors were from Mexico - four or five generations ago, and only know Mexico as a tourism destination and not "home".

Puerto Ricans of course run the gamut. If he didn't have an accent, Ricky Martin would be very difficult to identify as a Latino for example. Like we've been saying, it's linguistic, not a "race". This gets even more apparent in countries like Argentina and Brazil, which still had significant European influx into recent times and thus have no shortage of natural blonds walking the streets, falling into the Latino category solely because they speak Spanish or Portuguese.