Campesino may refer to: A simple farmer or farmworker is referred to as a campesino in Spanish. While English has a possible equivalent, peasant, this word has negative connotations that the Spanish word does not have. This is because in the Hispanic world, many people, referred to as campesinos, still survive from subsistence farming, whereas subsistence farming died out in the white anglophone world at least a century ago. Hence, it is customary in English to refer to subsistence farmers in Latin America as campesinos.