Opinion ID: 3177408
Heading Depth: 4
Heading Rank: 1

Heading: “Hispanic” in Common Usage

Text: The parties and the District Court experienced some confusion in unraveling the legal definitions of “race” and “Hispanic,” thanks partly to the federal government’s less‐than‐straightforward use of those terms.12 The Census Bureau, following standards issued by the Office of Management and Budget (“OMB”), treats “Hispanic or Latino” as an ethnicity, the members of which may belong to any race.13 This bureaucratic definition, however, often fails to resonate with Hispanics themselves, who may hail from societies with quite different notions of racial identity.14 Nor is this definition entirely Such confusion has been enduring. See McCleskey v. Kemp, 481 U.S. 279, 12 316 n.39 (1987) (“[I]n our heterogeneous society the lower courts have found the boundaries of race and ethnicity increasingly difficult to determine.”). 13 See Hispanic Origin, U.S. Census Bureau (July 25, 2013), http://www.census.gov/topics/population/hispanic‐origin/about.html. The Census recognizes five races: “White,” “Black or African American,” “American Indian or Alaska Native,” “Asian,” and “Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” Race, U.S. Census Bureau (July 8, 2013), http://www.census.gov/topics/population /race/about.html. The government has differentiated “race” from “ethnicity” at least since Directive 15, issued by OMB in 1977. OMB’s 1997 race and ethnicity standards use the same distinction. See Karen Humes & Howard Hogan, Measurement of Race and Ethnicity in a Changing, Multicultural America, 1 Race & Soc. Probs. 111, 119 & n.5 (2009) (article by Census Bureau professionals). See Nat’l Research Council, Multiple Origins, Uncertain Destinies: 14 Hispanics and the American Future 41 (Marta Tienda & Faith Mitchell eds., 2006) (“Multiple Origins”). Puerto Rico provides one example of the potential absurdities generated by the imposition of North American racial taxonomies on Hispanic communities. After the United States acquired Puerto Rico in 1898, the percentage of Puerto Ricans classified as “white” grew with each decade of colonial rule, so that North American commentators hypothesized that the 12 intuitive to the mainstream media, which sometimes identifies “Latinos” with “blacks,”15 and at other times rounds “Hispanic” to “white.”16 In response to this enduring confusion, the Census Bureau island’s black population was disappearing (whereas Puerto Ricans were perhaps simply learning the hard consequences of being identified as non‐white in the United States). For sources, see José A. Cabranes, Citizenship and the American Empire 98 n.475 (1979) (“It is to be observed that while the census taken in 1887 shows a black population of 76,985, and that taken in 1897 reduces the figure to 75,824, the census of 1899 further reduces the figure to 59,390. If this decrease should continue for a number of years, the black race would eventually disappear from Porto Rico . . . . This is the only island in all the West Indies where the white population is so overwhelmingly in the majority. . . . In 1910 the colored population was 34.5 per cent of the whole; in 1920 it had declined to 27.0 per cent.” (quoting 22 Encyclopedia Americana 403 (1939))). In the 1950s, a growing recognition of the unreliability of Puerto Rico’s racial Census data, as well as the Puerto Rican government’s conviction that racial categorization was counterproductive, led the Census Bureau to stop collecting information about race in Puerto Rico altogether. (The practice resumed with the 2000 Census.) See Jorge Duany, The Puerto Rican Nation on the Move: Identities on the Island and in the United States 252‐53 (2002); Mara Loveman & Jeronimo O. Muniz, How Puerto Rico Became White: Boundary Dynamics and Intercensus Racial Reclassification, 72 Am. Soc. Rev. 915, 935 (2007). Debates about affirmative action, for instance, often merge “black” and 15 “Hispanic” into “minority.” See, e.g., Ford Fessenden & Josh Keller, How Minorities Have Fared in States with Affirmative Action Bans, N.Y. Times (June 24, 2013), http://www.nytimes.com /interactive/2013/06/24/us/affirmative‐action‐bans.html. 16 This tendency surfaced, for instance, in coverage of Ricci v. DeStefano, 557 U.S. at 557, in which the plaintiffs were eighteen firefighters, whom media reports often described as simply white, even though one of the plaintiff firefighters was Hispanic. See, e.g., Robert Barnes, Justices Rule in Favor of White Firefighters in Racial‐Bias Case, Wash. Post (June 30, 2009), http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp‐dyn/content/article/2009/06/29 /AR2009062901608.html. Academic discussion of the case sometimes makes the 13 is now considering whether to abandon separate taxonomies of “race” and “ethnicity” altogether: the 2020 Census may instead ask respondents to select the “categories” to which they belong.17 Small wonder, then, that the parties in this case have struggled with whether, or in what sense, Bermudez might be both white and Hispanic. Compounding the confusion, the relevant terminology has changed substantially over time. In 1930, but neither before nor since, the Census counted the “Mexican” race.18 It was not until the 1950s, same elision. See, e.g., Reva B. Siegel, Foreword: Equality Divided, 127 Harv. L. Rev. 1, 52 (2013). See D’Vera Cohn, Census Considers New Approach to Asking About Race— 17 By Not Using the Term at All, Pew Research Ctr. (June 18, 2015), http://www.pewresearch.org/fact‐tank/2015/06/18/census‐considers‐new‐ approach‐to‐asking‐about‐race‐by‐not‐using‐the‐term‐at‐all. 18 Until 1930, Mexicans had been presumed to be white. Enumerators for the 1930 Census, however, were instructed that “all Mexican laborers are of a racial mixture difficult to classify”; at the same time, Mexicans who were “definitely white, Negro, Indian, Chinese, or Japanese” were to be counted in those respective categories. After the 1930 Census, Mexican‐Americans—backed by the Mexican government—successfully lobbied to eliminate the “Mexican” category, largely because many civil rights, including the right to become an American citizen, depended on whiteness. See Humes & Hogan, ante note 13, at 117; cf. Morrison v. People of State of Cal., 291 U.S. 82, 85 (1934) (noting that “[t]he privilege of naturalization is confined to aliens who are ‘free white persons, and to aliens of African nativity and to persons of African descent,’” a definition that excluded people of Chinese, Japanese, Indian, American Indian, and Filipino descent (quoting 8 U.S.C. § 359)); id. at 95 n.5 (“There is a strain of Indian blood in many of the inhabitants of Mexico as well as in the peoples of Central and South America. . . . Whether persons of such descent may be naturalized in the United States is still an unsettled question.”). 14 however, that the federal government consistently started tracking other Spanish‐heritage groups, under the denomination of “persons of Spanish surname”19—a term that seems workable only if one ignores the possibility of intermarriage or the prevalence of “non‐ Spanish” surnames in Spanish‐speaking countries.20 As a result, many writers quickly adopted alternative terms that remain current today: “Hispanic” and “Latino.”21 The stakes of Mexican‐Americans’ “whiteness” were evident in a seminal Fourteenth Amendment case, Hernandez v. Texas, 347 U.S. 475, 479 (1954), which found that “persons of Mexican descent constitute[d] a separate class in Jackson County, [Texas,] distinct from ‘whites,’” whose systematic exclusion from juries was unconstitutional. For a summary of the Census Bureau’s protean efforts to classify 19 Hispanics, see the Appendix to this opinion. We note here that in the 1950 and 1960 Censuses, the federal government tracked only “white persons of Spanish surname.” In other words, when Title VII was enacted in 1964, “Hispanics” were presumptively white. 20 For example, the Chilean patriot Bernardo O’Higgins; the Dublin‐born governor of Spanish Louisiana, Alejandro O’Reilly (who also designed the fortifications of San Juan, Puerto Rico); Vicente Fox, the former President of Mexico; and any number of Argentine presidents, including Arturo Frondizi, Néstor Kirchner, and Mauricio Macri—not to mention the Catholic Church’s first Latin American pope, Jorge Bergoglio. The use of Spanish surnames for purposes of group identification was already under attack by the early 1950s. See Hernandez, 347 U.S. at 480‐81 (using “persons with Mexican or Latin American surnames” to draw demographic conclusions); id. at 480 n.12 (“The State challenges any reliance on names as showing the descent of persons in the County. However, just as persons of a different race are distinguished by color, these Spanish names provide ready identification of the members of this class.”). The choice between “Hispanic” and “Latino” occasionally provokes 21 anxiety. See Nate Cohn, Speaking of Identity: Choosing Between Latino and Hispanic, 15 N.Y. Times (May 23, 2014), http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/24/upshot/speaking‐ of‐identity‐choosing‐between‐latino‐and‐hispanic.html. As we have previously observed, the terms reflect “nuanced differences of perspective” regarding personal or ethnic identity. Latino Officers Ass’n, N.Y., Inc. v. City of New York, 196 F.3d 458, 460 n.1 (2d Cir. 1999). “Hispanic” emphasizes links to the language, people, or culture of Spain. “Latino” avoids that connection to the “Mother Country” and points instead to “Latin” America, a geographic entity fostered, ironically enough, by French imperialists who hoped to gain influence over the region by emphasizing historical and linguistic ties between France and the former colonies of Spain and Portugal. Id. Despite occasional attempts to make one label more “correct” than the other—see, e.g., Henry Fuhrmann, Usage: ’Latino‘ Preferred over ’Hispanic‘, L.A. Times (July 28, 2011), http://latimesblogs.latimes.com/readers/2011/07/latino‐ preferred‐over‐hispanic‐in‐most‐cases.html—both terms have respectable pedigrees. The Oxford English Dictionary records “Latino” as first appearing in English in 1946, but the word does not seem to have entered widespread use until the 1960s, see Multiple Origins, ante note 14, at 52 n.1. “Hispanic” began to be used in its modern ethnic sense in politics and public affairs at about the same time. See, e.g., Br. of Amicus Curiae Louis J. Lefkowitz, Att’y Gen. of State of N.Y., at 39, Katzenbach v. Morgan, 384 U.S. 641 (1966) (Nos. 847, 877), 1966 WL 115487. (The word itself has a much longer history in other contexts, as suggested by institutions like the Hispanic‐American Historical Review (founded 1918) and the Hispanic Society of America (founded 1904).) The idea that Hispanics formed a recognizable political bloc apparently did not emerge until the 1960 presidential election, when the Associated Press ran a two‐sentence report that Senator John F. Kennedy had formed a national “Viva Kennedy” campaign to court “Spanish‐ speaking communities.” Kennedy Seeks Spanish Vote, N.Y. Times, Sept. 12, 1960, at 22; see also Bonnie Angelo, Bob Kennedy Tells How His Brother Did It, Newsday, Nov. 10, 1960, at 5 (reporting the “new political development” of forming “clubs” to court voters “of Spanish extraction”); Peter Kihss, City Spanish Vote at a Record High, N.Y. Times, Nov. 2, 1960, at 30 (reporting Kennedy’s predicted dominance among New York’s “Puerto Rican and Spanish‐speaking community”). Federal courts began using both “Hispanic” and “Latino” in the early 1970s. See Officers for Justice v. Civil Serv. Commʹn of City & Cty. of San Francisco, 371 F. Supp. 1328, 1332 (N.D. Cal. 1973) (first reported use of “Latino”); Moss v. Stamford Bd. of Educ., 16