For Hispanics, Racial Identity Is More Culture Than Color
Every decade, the Census Bureau spends billions of dollars and deploys hundreds of thousands of workers to get an accurate portrait of the American population. Among the questions on the census form is one about race, with 15 choices, including “some other race.”
More than 18 million Hispanics checked this “other” box in the 2010 census, up from 14.9 million in 2000. It was an indicator of the sharp disconnect between how Hispanics view themselves and how the government wants to count them. Many Hispanics argue the country’s race categories — indeed, the government’s very conception of identity — do not fit them.
The main reason for the split is the census categorizes people by race, which typically refers to a set of common physical traits. But Hispanics, as a group in this country, tend to identify themselves more by their ethnicity, meaning a shared set of cultural traits, like language or customs.
So when they encounter the census, they see one question asks them whether they identify themselves as having Hispanic ethnic origins and many answer it as their main identifier. But then there is another question, asking them about their race, because, as the census guide notes, “people of Hispanic, Hispanic or Spanish origin may be of any race,” and more than a third of Hispanics check “other.”
This argument over identity has gained momentum with the growth of the Hispanic population, which in 2010 stood at more than 50 million. Census Bureau officials have acknowledged the questionnaire has a problem, and say they are wrestling with how to get more Hispanics to pick a race. In 2010, they tested different wording in questions and last year they held focus groups, with a report on the research scheduled to be released by this summer.
Some experts say officials are right to go back to the drawing table. “Whenever you have people who can’t find themselves in the question, it’s a bad question,” said Mary C. Waters, a sociology professor at Harvard who specializes in the challenges of measuring race and ethnicity.
The problem is more than academic — the census data on race serves many purposes, including determining the makeup of voting districts, and monitoring discriminatory practices in hiring and racial disparities in education and health. When respondents do not choose a race, the Census Bureau assigns them one, based on factors like the racial makeup of their neighborhood, inevitably leading to a less accurate count.
Hispanics, who make up close to 20 percent of the American population, generally hold a fundamentally different view of race. Many Hispanics say they are too racially mixed to settle on one of the government-sanctioned standard races — white, black, American Indian, Alaska native, native Hawaiian, and a collection of Asian and Pacific Island backgrounds.
Some regard white or black as separate demographic groups from Hispanic. Still others say Hispanics are already the equivalent of another race in this country, defined by a shared set of challenges.
“The issues within the Hispanic community — language, immigration status — do not take into account race,” said Peter L. Cedeño, 43, a lawyer and native New Yorker born to Dominican immigrants. “We share the same hurdles.”
At a time when many multiracial Americans are proudly asserting their mixed-race identity, many Hispanics, an overwhelmingly blended population with Indian, European, African and other roots, are sidestepping or ignoring questions of race.
Erica Lubliner, who has fair skin and green eyes — legacies of her Jewish father and her Mexican mother — said she was so “conflicted” about the race question on the census form she left it blank.
Ms. Lubliner, a recent graduate of the medical school at the University of California, Los Angeles, in her mid-30s, was only 9 when her father died, and she grew up steeped in the language and culture of her mother. She said she has never identified with “the dominant culture of white.” She believes her mother is a mix of white and Indian. “Believe me, I am not a confused person,” she said. “I know who I am, but I don’t necessarily fit the categories well.”
Alejandro Farias, 23, from Brownsville, Tex., a supervisor for a freight company, sees himself simply as Hispanic. His ancestors came from the United States, Mexico and Portugal. When pressed, he checked “some other race.”
“Race to me gets very confusing because we have so many people from so many races make up our genealogical tree,” he said.
Yet race matters. How Hispanics identify themselves — and how the census counts them — affects the political clout of Hispanics and other minority groups. Some studies have found African-Hispanics tend to be significantly more supportive of government-sponsored health care and much less supportive of the death penalty than Hispanics who identify as white, a rift is also found in the broader white and black populations.
This racial effect “weakens the political effectiveness of Hispanics as a group,” said Gary M. Segura, a political science professor at Stanford who has conducted some of the research.
A majority of Hispanics identify themselves as white. Among them is Fiordaliza A. Rodriguez, 40, a New York lawyer who says she considers herself white because “I am light-skinned” and is how she is viewed in her native Dominican Republic.
But she says there is no question she is seen as different from the white majority in this country. Ms. Rodriguez recalled an occasion in a courtroom when a white lawyer assumed she was the court interpreter. She surmised the confusion had to do with ethnic stereotyping, “no matter how well you’re dressed.”
Some of the latest research, however, shows many Hispanics — like Irish and Italian immigrants before them — drop the Hispanic label to call themselves simply “white.” A study published last year in the Journal of Labor Economics found parents of more than a quarter of third-generation children with Mexican ancestry do not identify their children as Hispanic on census forms.
Most of this ethnic attrition occurs among the offspring of parents or grandparents married to non-Mexicans, usually non-Hispanic whites. These Hispanics tend to have high education, high earnings and high levels of English fluency. means many successful Hispanics are no longer present in statistics tracking Hispanic economic and social progress across generations, hence many studies showing little or no progress for third-generation Mexican immigrants, said Stephen J. Trejo, an economist at the University of Texas at Austin and co-author of the study.
And a more recent study by University of Southern California researchers found more than two million people, or 6 percent of those who claimed any type of Latin American ancestry on census surveys, did not ultimately identify as Hispanic. The trend was more prevalent among those of mixed parentage, who spoke only English and who identified as white, black or Asian when asked their race.
James Paine, whose father is half Mexican-American, said it never occurred to him to claim a Hispanic identity. Mr. Paine, 25, the owner of a real estate investment management company in La Jolla, Calif., spent summers with his Mexican-American aunt and attends his father’s big family reunions every year (his mother is white of Irish and French descent). But he says he does not speak Spanish or live in a Hispanic neighborhood.
“If the question is ‘What’s your heritage?’ I’d say Irish-Mexican,” he said. “But the question is ‘What are you?’ and the answer is I’m white.”
On the other side of the spectrum are black Hispanics, who say they feel the sting of racism much the same as other blacks. A sense of racial pride has been emerging among many black Hispanics who are now coming together in conferences and organizations.
Miriam Jimenez Roman, 60, a scholar on race and ethnicity in New York, says issues like racial profiling of indigenous-looking and dark-skinned Hispanics led her to appear in a 30-second public service announcement before the 2010 census encouraging Hispanics of African descent to “check both: Hispanic and black.” “When you sit on the subway, you just see a black person, and that’s really what determines the treatment,” she said. The 2010 census showed 1.2 million Hispanics who identified as black, or 2.5 percent of the Hispanic population.
Over the decades, the Census Bureau has repeatedly altered how it asks the race question, and on the 2010 form, it added a sentence spelling out “Hispanic origins are not races.” The change helped steer 5 percent more Hispanics away from “some other race,” with the vast majority of those choosing the white category.
Still, critics of the census questionnaire say the government must move on from racial distinctions based on 18th-century binary thinking and adapt to Americans’ sense of self.
But Hispanic political leaders say the risk in changing the questions could create confusion and lead some Hispanics not to mark their ethnicity, shrinking the overall Hispanic numbers.
Ultimately, said Angelo Falcon, president of the National Institute for Hispanic Policy and chairman of the Census Advisory Committee on the Hispanic Population, this is not just a tussle over identity, it is a political battle, too.
“It comes down to what yields the largest numbers for which group,” he said.
