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From what I gather, the Magyars were a warrior nobility who converted the central European peasants (who were not really that genetically distinct from the Germanic and Slavic people around them) to speaking Hungarian, but were never that huge in number and were mostly wiped out in wars with the Mongols and the Turks. Meaning today's Hungarians aren't really all that mixed, but ... not in the way you might think.
Anyway, the census categorization that calls 'Hispanic' an ethnicity is using the word 'ethnicity' in a somewhat non-standard way. Perhaps it has to, since the people of Latin America have, like you say, such a wide spread of degrees of admixture, from pure European, pure Amerindian and pure sub-Saharan African, to any combination of the above, that there aren't really neat boxes to put people in where ancestry and culture are tightly matched. But it's not an ethnicity in the sense that, say, Welsh, or Igbo is an ethnicity; more just a hold-all cultural category for 'people from south of the US/Mexico border, at least some of whose ancestors spoke Spanish'.
I don't think you understand that Europeans are themselves descended from extremely deeply diverged races. The Ancestral North Eurasians are as different from the Early European Farmers as modern Chinese people are from the French. There are countless examples of groups that are culturally descended from one group, but who have little ancestry from the original group. Every Uralic speaking people in Europe, the Hungarians being the most prominent, and least Uralic by ancestry, Chadic people in central Africa, even the largest ethnic group in the world the Indo Aryans who originally came from Europe. Genes and culture correlate, but not enough that having different terms to refer to these concepts isn't useful.
No, I'm well aware of that. Just that after millennia of intermarriage, modern Europeans are a lot more homogenous (and largely distinct from the original Magyars, even though modern Hungarians claim continuity with them). I'm sure that the same would happen in Latin America too, given time, and barring any further large population migrations.
If you read my responses to the original poster he was claiming as an American he had never heard the term ethnicity used to refer to anything other than ancestry, despite the fact any American would have had to fill out various government forms that list ethnicity as something other than race.
We need a term to denote if someone is culturally, genetically or phenotypically like a certain group. Ethnicity seems the most obvious and widely used term to denote culture.
Turks all consider themselves the same ethnicity despite ranging from people who look like Nazi propaganda posters to people who wouldn't be out of place on the streets of Beijing.
Usually in the field of population genetics they refer to people of being of different 'clusters' or 'ancestries' usually using some specific principle component analysis or the genomes of some ancient population as a reference.
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