Tuesday 17 May 2016

I am Hispanic, born here in the USA. My father was born in Mexico, and my mother in the USA. What ethnicity (White) and race (Hispanic/latina) am...

The answer to this depends on whether you are talking about race and ethnicity as defined by the US Census Bureau or as defined by social scientists.  The answer also depends on your own ideas about who you are.


According to the Census Bureau, there are five racial categories.  They are white, black, Asian, American Indian and Pacific Islander.  To the Census Bureau, Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity.  (You can also pick...

The answer to this depends on whether you are talking about race and ethnicity as defined by the US Census Bureau or as defined by social scientists.  The answer also depends on your own ideas about who you are.


According to the Census Bureau, there are five racial categories.  They are white, black, Asian, American Indian and Pacific Islander.  To the Census Bureau, Hispanic is not a race but an ethnicity.  (You can also pick “some other race.”)  In this view, a person can be of any race while being ethnically Hispanic.  Therefore, you would pick what race you consider yourself to be and then say (on a separate question) that you are Hispanic.  You would pick your race based on what you look like and what your parents look like as there are people from Mexico with a variety of different skin colors and physical appearances.


To social scientists, the answer about your race would probably be similar.  To social scientists, race is based on physical appearance and on ancestry.  The vast majority of Mexican citizens are either mestizo or Amerindian so you would probably say that you are Amerindian or that you are mixed race.  You do not say what race your mother is, so it is hard to be any more specific.  (Because my mother is white and my father is from the Philippines, I typically say that I am mixed race when I fill out forms.)


Ethnicity, to social scientists, is about your culture.  With this, it is impossible to know how you would characterize your ethnicity because I cannot know how you dress, eat, speak, etc.  As I teach in a district that is more than 2/3 Hispanic, I know that you can have people who would probably all be classified the same in racial terms but who have very different cultural practices. If you speak Spanish a lot and eat things like menudo, you might say you are ethnically Hispanic.  If you do not speak Spanish much (or not at all) and you never eat Mexican food outside of a restaurant, you might say you are ethnically American.  (Most people would use “American” rather than “white” (when discussing ethnicity as a white person could be ethnically Russian, French, etc.) 


So,  the answer here depends to some degree on what you look like and to some degree on what you feel like/how you identify culturally.

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