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A Census meeting in California\u2019s Central Valley. <\/span><\/i>Central Valley Immigration Integration Collaborative.<\/span><\/i>\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n California\u2019s Central Valley has been home to Dr. Jesus Martinez and his family for over 29 years. Martinez was born in Mexico and feels a strong connection to his country of origin. When asked to check his race for the U.S. 2020 Census, he chose to write in Mestizo, which means a combination of indigenous and Spanish heritage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Martinez, who works at the Central Valley Immigrant Integration Collaborative (CVIIC), <\/span>compared the US Census to the one offered by Mexico, which provides detailed categories for a\u00a0 variety of Mexican indigenous identities. Those categories are easy for members of the Latino population to understand, said Martinez. In contrast, the race box in the U.S. census is confusing and has troubled many residents of the Central Valley. In 2010, CVIIC organized a number of focus groups to take a closer look at the residents\u2019 reactions to the census questionnaires. After analyzing the responses, Martinez noticed the responses had one thing in common:\u00a0 nobody was happy with the questions.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cThey didn\u2019t feel represented in the questions,\u201d said Martinez. So his group suggested residents do something about it. \u201cIf you felt uncomfortable with one of the categories that were there, then write in something that you feel comfortable with.\u201d\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Martinez believes the Census should be a place where people can express themselves and their identities. He and his staff explained to the residents that they were free to choose among the different options and there were no right or wrong answers. In fact, the race of individuals should be <\/span>self-identification<\/span><\/a> of the person\u2019s race, as it is stated on the Census Bureau\u2019s website.<\/span><\/p>\n However, they didn\u2019t want to influence people\u2019s choices by telling them what to check, either. \u201cSome organizations promoted the idea of writing in, for example, Mixteco,\u201d Martinez said. Mixtecs or Mixtecos are indigenous Mesoamerican people of Mexico. \u201cBut as an organization involved with the census, we could not propose or inform people or encourage them to respond in a certain way.\u201d\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Martinez often found that he was in a pickle when asked to choose between individuality and social norms. Like him, many residents in Central Valley have immigration backgrounds and the key to integration work often boils down to self-identification. Hispanic is often not the preferred identity for people who share Mexican origin or are from Latin America, said Martinez. What Hispanic really means to them is that a person has a colonial relationship with Spain. But the majority of us here, Martinez said, have indigenous roots.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n A question then came: should people embrace a monolithic label to integrate into a new culture that differs from their own identity narratives?<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n Ray Aguilar works as an EMT at Brooklyn Hospital Center. When filling out the 2020 census form, Aguilar checked \u201cYes, Mexican, Mexican American, Chicano” under the question about the Hispanic origin\u2014with hesitation and reluctance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n As a first-generation immigrant growing up in Brooklyn, Aguilar said that his parents still identified themselves with their country of origin. He felt somewhere in between his Mexican roots and American nationality. \u201cI don\u2019t feel American enough, but then in Mexico, I am not Mexican enough,\u201d said Aguilar.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n When he looked at the racial and ethnic questions, Aguilar said he feels very uncomfortable with terms like Latino or Hispanic. \u201cThe term, Latino and Hispanics, are imposed terms, you know, and they are not terms that we use to describe ourselves,\u201d Aguilar said. \u201cThat\u2019s why a lot of times people prefer to use a term that is based on national origin.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIt\u2019s important to have terms that unify us as Spanish-speaking people because we have different experiences as a population of the United States,\u201d said Aguilar.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n A census enumerator\u2019s records from the 1790 Census.<\/span><\/i> Photo by National Archives.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 1790, Census counting became a constitutional requirement in the U.S. <\/span>\u201c<\/span>The actual Enumeration shall be made within three Years after the first Meeting of the Congress of the United States, and within every subsequent Term of ten Years, in such Manner, as they shall by Law direct.\u201d <\/span>Since then, the census has been an integral part of American policy, as it provides data for the distribution of congressional representatives and federal funding.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n From a statistical point of view, census data provide a longitudinal assessment of population density, the size of the labor market, and the nature of the family structure.\u00a0 For the general public, the census is considered as something between a civil duty and a petty intrusion. But recently, the census has also become the source of new narratives about social identities.<\/span><\/p>\n With so few constitutional details, the census has had to change a lot, depending on American society\u2019s demographics and attitudes. Between 1790 and 2020, 600 separate census questions have been asked. Examining them yields information about how American society has counted and considered its citizens. One question that has been asked from the start is about race, the longevity of which serves as proof of its importance. A question about race makes sense for a country of immigrants. But what happens when the sources of migration, and the self-definition of the migrants, grow so large and various that the number of categories becomes unwieldy?\u00a0 The story of the race box shows how the nation has explored its complex identity through trial and error.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Racial categories on the 2020 Census. <\/span><\/i>Photo by MGN online.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n At first, only free white males and females were counted. In 1850, a separate color question was inserted, providing three categories to choose from: White (W), Black (B), and Mulatto (M). More racial categories of Asian and Hispanics appeared on the census along with waves of immigration: Between the California gold rush in 1849 and 1882, a large group of Chinese immigrated to the U.S., and \u201cChinese\u201d was added as a subsection in 1870, which was followed by the addition of \u201cJapanese\u201d and \u201cIndian\u201d in 1890. Through the 20th century, more Asian racial categories, such as \u201cFilipino\u201d and \u201cKorean\u201d, were added.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The \u201cHispanic\u201d category didn\u2019t appear on the census form until 1970. A \u201cMexican\u201d race category was included once in the 1930 Census when forms were filled out by census-takers during home visits. Yet, prior to 1930 and between 1940 and 1970, enumerators were instructed to list Mexican Americans as White.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The \u201cwhiteness\u201d of Mexican Americans was due to protests about citizenship for people of Mexican ancestry. Between 1790 and 1952, the boundaries of whiteness were a precondition for naturalization. European immigrants were judged to be white, whereas Asian immigrants were judged to be non-white. By law, Mexicans are eligible for naturalization. But unlike European immigrants, Mexicans were eligible because of relations and treaties between the U.S. and Mexico. The Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) granted U.S. citizenship to Mexicans in the newly incorporated territories. For instance, the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a citizenship application from Ricardo Rodriquez in 1893 not because he was white but because of U.S. treaties with Mexico.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In 1935, a New York federal judge <\/span>upheld<\/span><\/a> an immigration officer\u2019s denial of three Mexican immigrants\u2019 applications for citizenship on the grounds that they were not white, but rather individuals \u201cof Indian and Spanish blood.\u201d Mexican Americans protested and filed petitions to reverse the decision. To quiet the controversies and seek better relations with Mexico, the Roosevelt administration convinced the judge to reverse the decision. Accordingly, the Labor Department ordered officers to treat all Mexican immigrants as White. The Census Bureau took heed of the guideline by the Labor Department.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Despite Mexicans\u2019 claims to whiteness in the 1930s and 1940s, the reality hit hard. Between 1929 and 1936, about <\/span>one million<\/span><\/a> Mexicans and Mexican Americans were repatriated to Mexico, because of fear and anxiety over Mexicans taking jobs away from white Americans. In <\/span>Decade of Betrayal: Mexican Repatriation in the 1930s<\/span><\/i>, authors depicted how Mexicans were deported no matter whether they just arrived with documents or lived in the U.S. for generations. \u201cThat population was regarded as not being part of the American community,\u201d Francisco Balderrama, a co-author of the book, said in an interview with TIME.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Even for those who stayed in the U.S., few Mexican Americans were eligible for Depression relief because of their occupation status. Back then, many Mexican Americans were working in the agricultural and domestic industries where, according to the Social Security Act of 1935, workers were excluded from receiving social security benefits and unemployment insurance.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Between the 1940s and 1950s, Mexican American Civil rights movement started to arise. Three major court cases highlighted the movement during the period. First, <\/span>Mendez v. Westminster (1947) <\/span><\/i>set the legal precedent for ending educational segregation between Hispanics and White Americans as unconstitutional. The next year, <\/span>Perez v. Sharp (1948)<\/span><\/i> challenged the ban on interracial marriage, which was found by the court to violate the equal protection clause of the Fourteenth Amendment. Another case, <\/span>Hernandez v. Texas (1954)<\/span><\/i>, further challenged segregation in the courtroom. In the Southwest, Mexican Americans were excluded from serving as jurors prior to the 1960s, and legal advocate for Pete Hernandez, who was convicted for murder, argued that he was discriminated against because there were no Mexicans in the jury of his trial. The then-Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren ruled in favor of Hernandez and required he be retried by a jury consisting of his peers.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n After the successes of the black civil rights movement in the late 1960s, Mexican-American activists initiated the campaign, known as the Chicano movement, to gain political power. Drifting apart from the previous efforts to be recognized as a class of white Americans, leaders in the Chicano Movement decided to embrace their heritage. Chicano was long treated as a racial slur. By adopting \u201cChicano\u201d as their identities, those who joined the movement took pride in their Mexican heritage, especially their indigenous and African roots.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The Chicano movement consisted of several movements, including fights for farmworkers\u2019 rights, land reclamation, and the creation of bilingual and bicultural programs in the southwest schools. Jimmy Patino, who is a Chicano & Latino Studies professor at the University of Minnesota, commented in an <\/span>interview<\/span><\/a> that the core of the Chicano Movement was about self-determination. \u201cThe idea that Chicanos were a nation within a nation that had the right to self-determine their own future,\u201d said Patino.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Unfortunately, poor racial statistics made it hard for people from Mexico and Latin American to gain fair representation in economic, political, and education domains. The demand for better statistics became an important impetus for refining the census race box.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Before 1970, the prevailing method of identifying Hispanic households during home visits was through looking for people with \u201cSpanish surnames\u201d or people who speak Spanish. The repatriation in the 30s traumatized generations of Mexican American families, as shown in a follow-up study by Balderrama and his colleagues. Descendents of the repatriation hid the past from their children and anglicized their names after coming back. Many ended up marrying people that were not Mexican to declare their independence from the Mexican heritage.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The interviews corresponded to the <\/span>research findings<\/span><\/a> by Hispanic leaders who vowed to design a better census race box for their people. They noticed that many \u201ctypical\u201d first names were disappearing among the Hispanic population in the late 60s. The \u201csurname\u201d method thus not only became an unreliable way of counting Hispanic communities but also diminished the cultural diversity due to the expansion of Anglo names. To address the issue, the leaders petitioned to add a question of Hispanic origin by self-identification. In 1970, a Hispanic origin question was added to the census questionnaires that were sent to a sample of the population.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Hispanic Origin Question in the 1970 Census. <\/span><\/i>Photo by U.S. Census Bureau.<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n However, the question in the 1970 census didn\u2019t work well. Some people who lived in the central or southern United States filled in the \u201cCentral or South American\u201d, even though they were not even people of Spanish origin. But there\u2019s a bigger issue than that. When the Census Bureau compared the 1970 count of \u201cpeople of Spanish origin\u201d with other categories, such as language use, they found that the Spanish origin question performed poorly.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Many Hispanics didn\u2019t identify with their Spanish origin in the 1970 census. Table by Jacob S. Siegel and Jeffrey S. Passel, \u201c Coverage of the Hispanic Population of the United States in the 1970 Census: A Methodological Analysis,\u201d Current Population Reports, Special Studies, Series P-23-82(1970): table1.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n <\/p>\n In 1980, the Census Advisory Committee on the Spanish Origin Population was formed to facilitate negotiations between census officials and leaders of Hispanic organizations. From Hispanic activists\u2019 view, technical concerns raised by census officials were merely bureaucratic excuses to avoid political consequences; In the eyes of Census officials, Leaders of Hispanic organizations were opportunists who don\u2019t understand the level of technical sophistication in the census.<\/span><\/p>\n The goal of the Hispanic leaders was clear: they wanted to try everything to produce better Hispanic statistics. At one point, they got to know that the lack of demographic estimate of the Hispanic undercut was partially due to the lack of knowledge of Hispanic birth and death rates. The committee members then requested census administrators to meet with officials of the National Center for Health Statistics and representatives of any other relevant agencies to rectify the situation. But for census officials, those complaints were beyond their control and drifted away from the purposes of preparing for the decennial census. Hispanic activists on the committee took their passive attitudes as completely bureaucratic put-offs.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n For census administrators, they felt sympathetic towards the Hispanic leaders\u2019 proposal of a self-identification technique. They were well aware of the sentiment\u2014which was expressed wholeheartedly through all the protests and lawsuits against the Census Bureau for inaccurate information about the Hispanic population. But they had their reservations: what terms to use to avoid confusion? who is a Hispanic person anyway? Census officials wanted to make operational definitions of racial categories and find an unambiguous solution. But the task was not easy. Individuals define themselves differently over time, not to mention the fact that people attach different meanings to terms.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The scientists at the Census Bureau, as Harvey Choldin pointed out in his <\/span>book<\/span><\/a>, lived in two worlds\u2014politics and science. Although the task of obtaining national statistics sounds purely scientific, the fact that the Census Bureau belongs to the federal government assigns political significance to the work.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n The dual identity of the census\u2014statistical tool versus social narrative\u2014reveals two conflicting goals of the census: how to make sure the census is statistically feasible and political representative. The conflicting dual identity of the census has continued causing confusion among respondents.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n According to <\/span>2014 research<\/span><\/a>, Hispanics were shown to be one of the most likely to change racial or ethnic identity from one census to the next. Researchers studied a subsample of 168 million Americans and found that 10 million self-reported that they checked different race or Hispanic-origin boxes in the 2010 census than they had in the 2000 census. The fluidity of those 10 million census answers challenged the statistical validity of the census data.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Moreover, <\/span>37%<\/span><\/a> of Hispanics \u2014 or 18.5 million people \u2014 checked \u201csome other race\u201d in the 2010 census. 2.5 million Americans who said they were Hispanic and \u201csome other race\u201d in 2000 switched to Hispanic and White in the 2010 census while another 1.3 million made the opposite choice.\u201cSome other race\u201d category, mathematically speaking, should be a small residual category designed for <\/span>overlooked<\/span><\/a> race categories. For those who checked \u201csome other race,\u201d many indicated that they did not identify with a specific racial group or think of Hispanic as a race.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Race isn\u2019t a black-or-white issue. The definition of one\u2019s racial identity is more subtle, depending on the circumstances. While the diversity in census racial and ethnic categories could be a pride asserted, for instance, in the Mexican civil rights movement, it can cause problems when the subjectivity of the terms caused ambiguity, as well as confusion, for both the general public and data experts.\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n <\/p>\n <\/p>\n There are a lot of motives for one to defy standard racial categories, and racial identity isn\u2019t always a unitary, or even positive attribute, which a citizen is eager to claim. Social Darwinism informed 19th and 20th-century notions of race, culminating in the system of racial registration of Jews and others, used by the Nazis in Germany. With the Holocaust in recent memory, many American Jews <\/span>objected<\/span><\/a> when a US census question on religion was proposed as a way to better understand the country\u2019s diversity. They were concerned that the government might use the data to monitor them.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n Nazis used racial registration to identify Jews. <\/span><\/i>Photo from Getty images.\u00a0<\/span><\/i><\/p>\n History proved that these fears were not unfounded. When the Japanese category was added in 1890, nobody anticipated that those data would be used to intern Japanese Americans during the Second World War. Although census data are supposed to be private, Congress suspended these rules in 1942 and used data from the 1940 census to locate Japanese-Americans. This legacy loomed over the Trump administration\u2019s 2019 attempts to insert a citizenship question. History teaches us that you never know whether the government will betray your privacy.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Martinez told me that the majority of the people in the Central Valley were mixed-status families. Mixed status families are families where one or more family members are U.S. citizens or green card holders, who are often children, and some are undocumented without legal immigration status, who are often parents. About <\/span>16.2<\/span><\/a> million people in the United States live in a mixed-status family, and California is the state that has the largest number of U.S. citizens in mixed-status families (1.5 million people).\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cIf there is a citizenship question included, it would put their families in a vulnerable situation because people believe that the census information that will be collected could also be utilized by the Trump administration for immigration enforcement purposes,\u201d said Martinez.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Martinez\u2019s concerns were corroborated by a <\/span>study<\/span><\/a> conducted in San Joaquin valley where a lot of Latino immigrants resided. The study showed that adding the citizenship question dramatically decreases willingness to participate in Census 2020 from 84% to 46% of all participants. Among the mixed-status families, legal residents\u2019 willingness to respond also reduced from 85% willingness down to 63%. In their comments on the surveys, many second-generation U.S.-born Latino citizen respondents considered the citizenship question to be divisive and racist.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n To make matters worse, the fear may never go away, despite the government\u2019s efforts to dispel people\u2019s doubts about the citizenship question. \u201cThe problem is that there have been anti-immigrant policies for many decades and years. It\u2019s not something that emerged with Trump,\u201d said Martinez.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n In Houston, Texas, the sharpest declines of self-reporters of the census were correlated strongly with the percent of the Hispanic population, said David McClendon, a data scientist working on census projects in Harris County, Texas.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Around 11% of the local population is not a U.S. citizen and 45% of Hispanics in Texas live with a non-citizen. Harris County stands out in terms of its racial diversity because nearly <\/span>70%<\/span><\/a> of the local population is non-White and low census response rates have been associated with fewer non-Hispanic Whites. The hint of a citizenship question on the census form threatens Texans, especially those who are living with non-citizens.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n McClendon and his colleagues decided to find out how bad the census response situation was among non-citizens in Harris County. To conduct the analysis, he used citizenship status information collected by the American Community Survey (ACS), a more detailed version of the census that has been sent out to about 3.5 million addresses every year. The facts were shocking: at least 20% of non-citizens had low response scores that exceed the national average in the 2010 Census.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n Distrust has been widespread among racial and ethnic minority groups in Texas, said McClendon. The levels of immigration enforcement were correlated with estimates of low response rates by the Census Bureau, as McClendon found out in his data analysis. His finding aligned with recent studies showing that Hispanic households who shared the fear towards immigration enforcement were less likely to trust the government as a <\/span>source<\/span><\/a> of public health information, as well as enroll in safety net programs in the U.S.\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\nBrooklyn, New York: Check the Box with Hesitation<\/b><\/h4>\n
But, his feelings about the census race box were mixed. Aguilar admitted that checking the<\/span> Hispanic origin box based on the norms brings him a sense of belongingness. Whenever he visited his family friends in Mexico, he felt regretful for not being fluent in indigenous languages or affiliated with a tribe.\u00a0<\/span><\/h4>\n
The power of language in connecting people made him believe that forming unity among Spanish-speaking people matters more than the inner differences. Hispanic or Latino populations have been disproportionately involved in poverty, said Aguilar, and the health resources in our communities are not the same as those in the White communities. <\/span><\/h4>\n
As a health worker, Aguilar\u2019s beliefs about forming unity by language stem from his real-life experience\u2014it\u2019s much easier for him to build connections with patients who speak Spanish and provide medical care against the clock. <\/span>But does the end to unifying immigrants justify the means of using uniform identification? Is this what the Census was designed to do?<\/span><\/h4>\n
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Conflicting Identities of Census: Statistical Tool or Social Narrative?<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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<\/p>\nFear toward Government-Backed Census<\/strong><\/h4>\n
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