Hispanic/Latino Categorization

Many Americans are unaware that the labels Hispanic and Latino are only very recent terms that have been used to classify a segment of the U.S. population. Many more Americans are not aware that the U.S. government does not consider Hispanic or Latino as a race. Instead, the government classifies Hispanics/Latinos as an ethnic group, whose members “can be of any race.” Such a definition may seem confusing or contradictory, which underscores the arbitrary and subjective nature of any attempt to classify people into socially constructed racial categories.

The 2010 census counted 50,477,594 persons of Hispanic or Latino ancestry, who comprised 16.3 percent of the total national population. One of the fastest-growing segments of the U.S. population, the number of Hispanic/Latino persons living in the United States increased 43 percent since 2000. However, the terms Hispanic and Latino do not refer to a single, unified group who share a common heritage. Rather, Hispanic and Latino are pan-ethnic terms that generally denote persons with either recent or historical ancestry from a Spanish-speaking society in Latin America or from Spain itself.

The largest specific Hispanic/Latino ancestry in the United States are persons of Mexican descent, who accounted for 63 percent of the total Hispanic/Latino population in 2010, followed by Puerto Ricans (who comprised 9.2 percent of all Hispanics/Latinos). Other significant Hispanic/Latino ancestries include Cuban (3.5 percent), Salvadoran (3.3 percent), and Dominican (2.8 percent). The geographic concentrations of various Hispanic/Latino populations tend to be highly localized, with the majority of the Mexican American population residing in the southwestern states and the majority of Puerto Ricans and Dominicans living in the northeast. Most Cuban Americans have settled in southern Florida, with a sizable Cuban population also residing in northern New Jersey and the New York City area.

As the number of Hispanics/Latinos living in the United States has increased in recent decades as a result of both immigration and natural birthrates, interest in Hispanic/Latino population has grown (from the business community, religious organizations, educational institutions, the media and entertainment industries, and federal, state, and local governmental agencies). However, the various persons who are classified under these terms do not share a uniform phenotype, culture, language, or social history within the United States. One of the most perplexing questions that American society has grappled with for nearly a century pertains to the issue of categorizing its populations of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and other Latin American and/or Spanish-speaking heritages by race for official governmental purposes, such as census taking and antidiscrimination recordkeeping.