By Nicola Acevedo -
NBC News
A large portion of the US Latino population does not identify with current census racial categories, according to the 2020 Census Bureau, which shows a "significant shift" in how Americans who identify as Hispanic report their race.
[Latinas are thriving in the United States, although they still face economic obstacles]
While almost 60% of the 54.6 million Americans who identified as Hispanic reported belonging to a racial group, such as white or black, more than a third (35.5%) of Latinos chose Other
race
.
This category is not recognized as a breed by the federal government.
The Census Bureau said a combined 43.6% of Americans who self-identify as Hispanic reported being "some other race" (35.5%) or did not answer the race question in the 2020 count (8.1%).
A group of people register to vote near a table offering jobs for the 2020 census, in Guadalupe, Arizona.AP
The
results come as the Biden Administration is considering allowing Americans to mark "Hispanic or Latino" as their race and ethnicity
, as part of a new classifications proposal for the upcoming census.
The census views race and ethnicity as two different categories, and Americans are asked about them on census forms in two separate questions.
The "average Latino" doesn't see the difference
The proposal to include Latino/Hispanic as a "race" has been explored for more than a decade, because Latinos "have been telling the Census Bureau that the [current] question didn't work for a lot of people," he told NBC News. , sister network of Noticias Telemundo, Jens Manuel Krogstad, a writer and editor for the Pew Research Center focused on Hispanic demographic issues.
“A central issue is that the average Latino doesn't necessarily see the difference between race and ethnicity,” he said.
[Are Latinos a race? A definition change in the Census sparks controversy]
At the same time, a growing number of Latinos who are multiracial or have mixed origins “view their Hispanic identity as part of their racial identity,” Krogstad said.
In the 2020 Census, 19.4 million Latinos identified themselves as only “some other race,” followed by 9.6 million who identified only as White, 1.4 million who identified only as American Indian and Alaska Native, and 960,080 who identified only as American Indian or Alaska Native. identified only as black or African American.
Another 4.45 million Latinos did not respond to the question about race in the 2020 census.
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The numbers support previous Census Bureau research showing that “a large proportion of the Hispanic population does not identify with any of the current Office of Management and Budget (OMB) racial categories,” the bureau said.
Robert Santos, the first Latino to lead the Census Bureau, has said that he is part of that large proportion of Latinos who do not use current racial categories.
Santos has been marking
Otra raza
and writing
mestizo
on his census forms for 40 years to better describe his Mexican-American heritage.
[USA. The US and Mexico are studying an agreement to stop the flow of fentanyl to the north and the flow of weapons to the south at the border]
As he prepares the office for the next decennial census in 2030, Santos has said one of his priorities is to improve the count of non-white populations, many of which have been historically undercounted.
More than 18.6 million self-identified Hispanics reported belonging to two or more races, according to the latest census data.
The data also shows that an overwhelming majority of these Latinos, nearly 17.5 million, checked
Some other race
as one of their multiple racial categories.
“This highlights the diversity of the Hispanic identity and how the Hispanic identity can contain many things for people,” said Krogstad, of a Mexican mother and a white father of Norwegian descent.
This is particularly true at a time when millions of Americans are expanding the definition of what it means to be of Latino or Hispanic descent amid dramatic population growth and rising intermarriage rates that are producing a population each increasingly multicultural, Krogstad added.
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The Office of Management and Budget, which provides guidance on how government agencies should collect information on race to manage federal programs, has been accepting public comments on proposals around census classifications and is expected to take a decision next year.
While 54.6 million Americans self-identified as Hispanic in the 2020 census, the bureau estimates that a total of 62.1 million Latinos live in the country, based on 2020 census data.
