Hispanic/Latino American

So, who is considered Hispanic in the United States today? How exactly do the federal government and others count the Hispanic population? And what role does race play in deciding who counts as Hispanic?

In the long-running debates about which terms to use to describe the U.S. population with roots in Latin America and Spain, “Latinx” has emerged as a gender-neutral alternative to Hispanic and Latino, the two most popular pan-ethnic terms used today. After years of public use…

This expert issues brief discusses the impact of recent changes to the race and ethnicity questions on the Census and federal surveys, and advocates for the addition of a new question on street race. Though the “Latino” identity remains essential to our shared political mobilization, we must…

The new OMB standard now combines both inquiries into a single question of “What is your race and/ or ethnicity?” and collapses Latino/Hispanic ethnic identity into the list of ethno-racial categories with Black, White, Asian, American Indian, Middle Eastern, Native Hawaiian. While the OMB…

Explanation of how racial relations in Mexico have been influenced by the colonial caste system.   Document date unknown.

The effort to coin a term to describe a wildly diverse group of Americans has long stirred controversy. The terms Latino, Hispanic and Latinx are often used interchangeably to describe a group that makes up about 19 percent of the U.S. population. While it’s now common to use umbrella terms to…

Hispanic? Latino/a/e/x? The terms have been used interchangeably to describe people with roots in Spain or Latin America. The lumping of the terms, specifically Hispanic, has been used to refer to a person from Spain, Chile, the Philippines, or Equatorial Guinea. But the ambiguous nature blurs…

From the introduction: Massachusetts is among the wealthiest states in the country, and yet Latino communities here have struggled economically relative to Latinos nationwide. There have been some bright spots—poverty rates have decreased and Latinos now have higher rates of…

How communities and governments describe people from the Spanish and Latin American diasporas has a convoluted history.

2021 Latinos in Massachusetts series of reports focuses on the cities in the state with large Latino populations and that were most affected by Covid-19 cases.  This release includes the cities: Chelsea, Lawrence, Lowell, Lynn, New Bedford Springfield…

A go-to guide for the meaning of "Latinx." While the difference between "Latinx" and "Hispanic" largely comes down to how you self-identify (more on that, below), "Latinx" has typically been adopted among people who are looking for a more inclusive and…

Hispanic and Latino are often used interchangeably though they actually mean two different things. Hispanic refers to people who speak Spanish or are descended from Spanish-speaking populations, while Latino refers to people who are from or descended from people…

For Latinx individuals working within civil rights organizations, the 2020 census promised to be the most complete enumeration of their community to date. The count would mark fifty years since community stakeholders, from Latinx politicians to academics to Spanish-language media, had worked…

The Pew Research Center report. The emergence of Latinx coincides with a global movement to introduce gender-neutral nouns and pronouns into many languages whose grammar has traditionally used male or female constructions. In the United States, the first uses of Latinx appeared more…

We use language to categorize groups, often failing to effectively — linguistically — describe the people we’re referring to in a single word. People contain multitudes. No one phrase is truly adequate to represent millions of people, especially when so many distinct cultures are…

When census takers, pollsters or bureaucrats with application forms ask people to identify their race, most have no problem checking a box that corresponds to one of the five, standard, government-defined racial categories. In the 2000 Census, for example, 90 percent of the U.S. population was…