In 2014, the Hispanic population of the United States was 55 million people. Making it the nation’s largest ethnic or racial minority with a 17% of the total population of the US.
A prediction by the Census Bureau says that by 2050 the Hispanic population will represent 28% of the American population, keeping the title of the largest portion of a “majority-minority”. According to this census, in between 2000 and 2010 the Hispanic population grew from being 12,5 percent of the American population to 16,3 percent.
A research by the Population Association of America presented an estimated of 1.2 million people who changed their racial and ethnic identification from “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin” in 2000 to “White” in 2010, the same way 1.3 million people made the opposite change identifying from “White” to “Latino, Hispanic” or even “White-Hispanic”. Several researchs including the one mentioned before, show that a lot of Hispanics or Latinos are identifying as “white”, even if they hold to their cultural heritage.
A high percentage of third-generation Hispanics are being born from mixed marriages, making from one generation to another to identify less as Hispanic and more as White than foreign-born and noncitizen Hispanics. A pattern that economists Brian Duncan and Stephen Trejo call “ethnic attrition”, added to this characteristic comes assimilation and upward mobility.
“In any case, it’s more than clear that some Hispanics are following the path of previous European immigrant groups, where success breeds assimilation, and assimilation brings whiteness” wrote Jamelle Bouie in an article for Slate
Census Bureu in 2010 reported than more than 18 million Latinos checked “some other race” showing there’s a disconnection in between how Latinos identifying their race and how the American government wants to categorize them. The complication with the census comes from the fact that the categorization is done by race, which is connected to the physical traits, but the Latino community usually categorizes themselves by their ethnicity, cultural heritage including their traditions, language and other characteristics taking into account how Latinos can be of any race and a big part of the populations is mixed.
Another fact is that a lot of Latinos identify themselves as white because they’re light-skinned which makes them white in their native countries, something that does not match the concept of “White” in countries like The United States, in which no matter the skin color a lot of Hispanics and Latinos are part of the ethnic stereotyping.
It’s important to take Brazil as an example of how complex it is, with it being one of the most racially intermixed countries in the world, where racial identity is a more complex issue when the difference between black and white is different than what countries like the US think.
Since generations of interracial marriages have led to a lot of different skin tones, making racial identity an evolving situation where a person’s perception of their race can change as time passes and learns more about society making it a lot more complicated for a lot of people to identify as one race or another depending on their background, also depending on the stereotypes or categorization certain countries have about the matter.
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