The word "Latino" means different things for different people.
It's basic meaning is quite straightforward: Latinos are people who speak romance languages that evolved from Latin. From that point of view, yes, Spaniards, Italians, French, Romanians, Walloons...etc., are Latinos.
However, if you try to use the word "Latino" as a racial term, things get messy...
XIX-XX European scholars tended to identify contemporary nations with ancient cultures, (which is dumb, every nation in Europe is the product of a mix of many people and cultural influences): The English, Germans and Scandinavians would be Germanic, the Irish and French would be Celt, the Italians and Spaniards would be Latins, the Greeks would be Greek...etc.
Of course, that is problematic, because the Iberians and Celts (among others) lived in the Iberian Peninsule before the Romans arrived, and the Vandals, Goths, Arabs, Berbers...etc., arrived later... so, are the Spaniards and Portuguese Latinos, or not?
Now with North Americans, it becomes way more complicated. Historically speaking North Americans loved to put people into neat racial boxes: White, Black, Asian, Native American, Arab...etc., and they really, really, really had a lot of trouble accepting that something could be outside their tidy mental boxes. Just look at how people still keep arguing if ancient Egyptians were Black or White, as if everybody had to fit in one of those categories.
People in Spanish-speaking and Portuguese-speaking American countries challenge that worldview. Anglo-saxons and Germans weren't really sure that South Europeans were really White in first place, but, in addition to that, there are mixes of every race in Latin America, and there are a lot of different combinations. That made the brains of the people who were trying to sort everybody in US into neat racial boxes bleed...so they just chose to dump every Spanish and Portuguese people (White, Black, Native American and all the mixes between them) into a common box, the Latino race, which is largely a bureocratic construct, so they didn't have to acknowledge that the world wasn't divided in neat racial categories.
Oh, but there are Spanish and Portuguese-speaking people who are of almost exclusively of European ascentry... No problem, they created the White Hispanic box for those.
So, are Italians and Romanians and French and even Walloons Latinos? The answer is: Your choice. It all depends on what you mean when you say "Latino".
