Are Latinos Becoming White?

A new study on Latino immigrants finds that, in contrast to past generations of European immigrants, a significant share of second-and-third-generation Latino-Americans identify with a Latino racial category. The paper – “Are Latinos Becoming White" Determinants of Latinos’ Racial Self-Identification in the U.S.” – was presented Aug. 12 at the 102nd annual meeting of the American Sociological Association in New York, and was co-written by Joseph Michael, a UC doctoral student in the Department of Sociology and a researcher at the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago, and Jeffrey Timberlake, UC assistant professor of sociology.

Michael and Timberlake are examining how the immigration of Latinos to the United States compares to the earlier immigration waves of white ethnic groups such as the Italian, Irish and European Jewish immigrants who were once considered non-white. The researchers explain that in most surveys and the U.S. Census, Latino respondents are first asked to identify themselves as Latino or Hispanic, and then they are asked to select a racial identity. “Thus, American social scientists have defined Latinos not as a racial group, but rather as an ethnicity (or set of ethnicities) based largely on the relatively common cultural heritage of Latin America and the Spanish Caribbean,” write the authors.

This is rather interesting. I have held the point of view that someday everyone in the US will be Latino, but that would be just like the fact that most people who are white have German ancestry in the US...and there was a time when Ben Franklin was very nervous about the German immigrants, fwiw, just as we are now about all the Lantinos.

What's interesting to note though is that Latinos, and other immigrants, are intermarrying quite a bit. Latino and Asian immigrants and their descendants integrate via marriage much more than blacks or whites. There was a statistic out there about the 3rd and 4th generation Latino and language that indicated that they were essentially generic American (ie cursed) wrt the English language being their sole language including at home by the third or forth generation. IDK where to find it right now...