So back in 2010 I did enumerator work for the census bureau, knocking on doors, asking people to fill out the form. That year, it was formatted with a race section that didn’t include a Latino option, but did have an “other: fill in blank” option, plus a separate “ethnicity” section where people could denote Latino ethnicity and the specific ancestral country. This worked in some cases, mostly when someone had one Latino parent and the other was some other race/ethnicity.
But the vast majority of the time, if someone selected Latino for the ethnicity section, they had me write in Latino or their national origin/ancestry as their race. So regardless of what makes sense academically, as a practical matter Latinos are going to say their race is Latino on the form so formatting it otherwise just makes it more inefficient.
Then it's weird in somewhere like Puerto Rico where, for the most part, everyone fills in Latino for ethnicity and then race basically is just a stand-in for skin color for darker skinned and lighter skinned folks. It's a mess, hard to use the same categories everywhere and have them mean anything near the same thing.
At this point it’s too late with how US Latinos identify “latino” as its own race after years of it being treated like one.
Tbf we don’t really call ourselves Latino in our countries either. In Guatemala we have Ladino in place of mestizo and other countries have their own names while others use mestizo. But for the most part we say our country of origin when speaking to each other Latin Americans.
It’s a legacy of how the Spanish did colonialism versus how the British did it. The British were much more hardline about interbreeding with the natives and the imported slaves, one drop rules about European purity. Whereas the Spanish, while brutal in their own way, didn’t have the same hang ups. So fast forward a few centuries, people start migrating up from Latin America to the U.S., Amerikkkans didn’t know to process a population that didn’t have that sort of strict racial categorizing. So everyone from a 95% Spaniard Puerto Rican to a Chicano gets flattened to “Latino.”
So back in 2010 I did enumerator work for the census bureau, knocking on doors, asking people to fill out the form. That year, it was formatted with a race section that didn’t include a Latino option, but did have an “other: fill in blank” option, plus a separate “ethnicity” section where people could denote Latino ethnicity and the specific ancestral country. This worked in some cases, mostly when someone had one Latino parent and the other was some other race/ethnicity.
But the vast majority of the time, if someone selected Latino for the ethnicity section, they had me write in Latino or their national origin/ancestry as their race. So regardless of what makes sense academically, as a practical matter Latinos are going to say their race is Latino on the form so formatting it otherwise just makes it more inefficient.
Then it's weird in somewhere like Puerto Rico where, for the most part, everyone fills in Latino for ethnicity and then race basically is just a stand-in for skin color for darker skinned and lighter skinned folks. It's a mess, hard to use the same categories everywhere and have them mean anything near the same thing.
At this point it’s too late with how US Latinos identify “latino” as its own race after years of it being treated like one.
Tbf we don’t really call ourselves Latino in our countries either. In Guatemala we have Ladino in place of mestizo and other countries have their own names while others use mestizo. But for the most part we say our country of origin when speaking to each other Latin Americans.
It’s a legacy of how the Spanish did colonialism versus how the British did it. The British were much more hardline about interbreeding with the natives and the imported slaves, one drop rules about European purity. Whereas the Spanish, while brutal in their own way, didn’t have the same hang ups. So fast forward a few centuries, people start migrating up from Latin America to the U.S., Amerikkkans didn’t know to process a population that didn’t have that sort of strict racial categorizing. So everyone from a 95% Spaniard Puerto Rican to a Chicano gets flattened to “Latino.”