Monday, March 25, 2013

Where Hispanics Live...

And which Hispanics live where.
These are the topics of a new report from the American Communities at Brown University and the Russell Sage Foundation. See: http://www.s4.brown.edu/us2010/Data/Report/report03202013.pdf.
Neither New Mexico nor Albuquerque are mentioned. I suppose our numbers are too small. Large metro areas such as New York Houston, Chicago and Miami are analyzed.
From my cursory look at the report, two topics seem of interest to New Mexicans.
First is the increasing diversity of Hispanics nationwide. There are far more people from Central and South American. In New Mexico our diversity increase means that people tracing their heritage to Mexico now outnumber the Northern New Mexico Hispanics tracing themselves to Spain or saying, “Other,” to the Census question about heritage.
Second, the Census messed up the origin question in 2000. I have no idea what this means for New Mexico.
The report said, “The Census has done an excellent job of counting Hispanics, but in 2000 it performed poorly in identifying their origin. In previous years, a single “Hispanic question” on the census served reasonably well to distinguish Hispanics from different national origins. In 1990 people who identify as Hispanic were asked to check one of three boxes (Mexican, Puerto Rican, or Cuban), or to write in another Hispanic category. In Census 2000, no examples of other categories were provided to orient respondents. It is likely that this caused an unprecedented number of Hispanics to provide no information or only the broad category of “Hispanic” or “Spanish.” As a result, 6.2 million, or 17.6% of all Hispanics, were counted in census reports as “Other Hispanics”. This represents nearly double the share of the Other Hispanics category in the 1990 or 2010 census. The result is a severe underestimate of the numbers of many specific Hispanic groups in 2000. States and metropolitan areas where New Latinos are particularly concentrated were dramatically affected by this problem.”

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