Quote:
Originally Posted by iheartthed
Unpopular opinion, but I think the "Hispanic" overlay onto U.S. racial convention is nonsense. It is the most discretionary of any demographic category that the census bureau tracks. It's common to have Hispanic siblings with the same parents check different boxes because one has a lighter skin tone than the other. Racial categories in the U.S. context were meant to be much more rigid.
It also has a more subtle but huge flaw in that a significant number of Hispanics in the U.S. are actually from an indigenous American background, but that doesn't show up in the way we track ethnicity data.
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Unfortunately, because of the way the census bureau has done this (by actually instructing people who choose Hispanic/Latino ethnicity, until 2020, to pick white unless they expressly identify as another race), the population has largely been racialized:
Spaniards and Portuguese generally identify as white.
Mexican Americans generally identify as hispanic/latino.
Cubans have heterogenous identifications depending upon immigrant wave. Older generations as white, middle and later as latino or black.
Many central americans and afrohispanic caribbean islanders identify in the american context as black, with a lesser extent as Latino, likewise for most south americans outside of Argentina and Brazil and expressly native countries (for instance, Aymara and Quechua)
Most argentine immigrants identify as white alone, whereas Brazilians largely refuse to adopt the American racial identifiers wholesale (though some small number identify as black, making an easier transition given that that is also a category in Brazilian’s colorist society) and usually loathe the terms Hispanic and Latino.
https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.7758...o_tab_contents
Among many others.