Opinion: Latinos are getting out of the ‘other’ box on the U.S. census

The next census in the United States will allow people to identify as Latino/Hispanic as well as other categories under the heading of race/ethnicity. For decades, the U.S. census has maintained separate questions for Latino origin and race, forcing Latinos to choose from options such as white, Black, American Indian, Asian and “other” under the race rubric. But there are many — approximately 70%, based on the Census Bureau’s testing of the new question design — who do not see themselves in these categories and prefer “Latino” alone to describe their race. Perhaps one of the most publicly shared stories of this racial Latino discrimination is the story of Felix Longoria, whose body was returned to his home state of Texas in 1949 after he died fighting for his country in World War II, only to be denied burial in his hometown because the funeral home and cemetery were for “whites only.” In my book on Mexican Americans in Texas, nearly all of the Mexican American respondents I interviewed who lived through the civil rights era recalled facing extreme forms of discrimination such as attending separate schools and seeing signs on restaurants that said things such as “No Dogs, Negros or Mexicans.” Discrimination against Latinos continues today, and both older and younger Mexican Americans in my study spoke of racist encounters in the workplace, with police, in schools. She is the author of “Mexican Americans and the Question of Race,” and she served on the U.S. Census Bureau’s advisory committee on race and ethnicity from 2014 to 2020.