Minority Report

The US Census Bureau announced yesterday that Hispanics now comprise 37 million people, or 13% of the population. The Associated Press spins this to mean that Hispanics are now "the nation's largest minority group".

But what does this really mean? The Census Bureau defines "Hispanic" as follows:

Persons of Hispanic origin, in particular, were those who indicated that their origin was Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, Central or South American, or some other Hispanic origin. It should be noted that persons of Hispanic origin may be of any race.

It should also be noted that this modern definition of the word "Hispanic" has been in use only since the 1970s (according to the Oxford English Dictionary, offline) and that the concept of a Hispanic ethnic identity was invented by the federal government.

By the above definition, a Hispanic is any person who is descended from anyone who ever lived in a Spanish-speaking country. This includes people who trace their ancestry to Spain, many of whom are indistinguishable from other Caucasians; as well as people descended from the Aztecs and Mayans of Central America, the Incas of Peru, African slaves who were brought to Cuba, and Northern Europeans and Japanese who immigrated to South America. It also includes people descended from 17th century Sephardic Jewish immigrants as well as recent arrivals from Mexico. As such, the term "Hispanic" is as broad as would be the term "Brittanic", meaning any immigrant or descendent of an immigrant from a country where English is a dominant language -- including Scotland, Canada, India, Hong Kong and South Africa (both Blacks and Whites).

In fact, when the Census Bureau breaks down the "Hispanic" population by country of origin [pdf], it appears that there are about 21 million Mexican Americans (7% of the population), which makes them only the 4th largest minority group, behind the German Americans (46 million), Irish Americans (33 million) and English Americans (28 million), and just ahead of the 20 million Americans who simply consider themselves "Americans". (Not that referring to "Mexicans" as a single ethnic group is particularly accurate, as Mexico is itself an ethnically diverse country) The second largest group of Hispanics are Puerto Ricans (all of whom have been US citizens since 1917), of whom there are about 3.4 million, significantly smaller than several other minority groups, including the Italian, French, Polish and Norwegian Americans.

So why, then, are Hispanic Americans considered a distinct and distinguished minority group, eligible for bilingual education, hiring preferences and government contract set-asides? Presumably because there are a lot of them, and with well-organized numbers come political advantages. I imagine that one of the original justifications for "affirmative action" for Hispanics was the fact that so many Mexican immigrants were (and are) low-wage unskilled laborers. Not that this has anything to do with, say, my friend's Ecuadorean father who owns his own business, or another friend from Madrid who earned her PhD in Mechanical Engineering from MIT, or the late Roberto Goizueta, a Cuban immigrant (from a rich family) who became CEO of the Coca Cola Company. Still, if you want government largesse, it helps to create a grand coalition, and if you're an immigrant from, say, Chile, it's easier to go "oh, okay, I don't mind if you give my daughter some unearned advantages in getting into law school" than to write your Senator to protest your daughter getting a leg up over the competition. So why not lump all of the various diverse Spanish-speaking ethnic groups into one big voting bloc, and promise them something (at the expense of somebody else)?

But what the heck. Hispanic identity is solely a matter of self-identification, it only lubricates admissions and hiring, it carries no inherent disadvantages, and the category is already broad and permeable. It's time for me to come out of the closet as a Hispanic: At least one branch of my family lived in Spain before they were expelled by the Inquisition. I'm sure that many other folks with non-Hispanic surnames can come up with a Hispanic great-great grandmother if they shake their family tree hard enough. And who's going to prove them wrong? Imagine how happy the university diversity officers will be when they start getting a flood of new Hispanic applicants.

Posted by Stefan Sharkansky at January 22, 2003 07:00 AM