How Race Counts for Hispanic Americans

John R. Logan

Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research

University at Albany 

July 14, 2003

Hispanics are now the largest minority group in the U.S.  They are also quite diverse.  A previous Mumford Center report analyzed differences among Hispanics by national origin.  This report assesses racial differences among Hispanics.  Census data do not allow us to measure how people are actually perceived in the neighborhoods where they live and work and go to school.  They do enable us to count Hispanics with different racial identifications, compare them in terms of social and economic background, evaluate their residential integration with whites, blacks, and other Hispanics, and assess whether other characteristics of their neighborhoods are more similar to the neighborhoods where whites, blacks or other Hispanics live. 

Since 1970 the U.S. Census has asked all Americans to identify their race and, separately, whether they are Hispanic.  This means Hispanics can be of any race.  It is widely understood that there is a small black minority among Hispanics.  Less well known is that only about half of Hispanics in Census 2000 identified themselves in standard racial categories such as white, black, or Asian on their census form.  Nearly as many people instead wrote in their own term, most often “Latino,” “Hispanic,” or a similar word.  Many of these people might be perceived by non-Hispanics as “white” – but apparently they do not see themselves in that way.  In this report they are referred to as “Hispanic Hispanics.”  

We find substantial differences among these Hispanic racial groups:

• Hispanic Hispanics are the fastest growing segment, and very likely they will soon be an absolute majority of Hispanic Americans. 
• There are nearly a million black Hispanics.  These people have a socioeconomic profile much more similar to non-Hispanic blacks than to other Hispanic groups, and their neighborhoods have nearly as many black as Hispanic residents.  Many black Hispanic children have a non-Hispanic black mother or father.

• A very small share of Mexicans identifies as black. Still, there are nearly a quarter million black Mexicans in the United States.  Dominicans and Puerto Ricans are most likely to identify as black.  Cubans, in contrast, mostly identify as white.