Speaking Spanish in the US. Janet M. Fuller

Figure 2.1 Percentage of the population age five and older that speaks Spanish at home

      Data – ACS 2017 One-year estimate; Map – Social Explorer.

National Origin Groups

      As we stress repeatedly in this book, people who speak Spanish are extremely diverse. In the previous sections we saw that Spanish-speakers include people born in the US as well as immigrants. We now look at the national origin groups that make up the Spanish-speaking population in the US. Because the US Census Bureau does not produce statistics on language use for specific Latinx subgroups, in Table 2.1 we present the relative size of the largest national origin groups as a way to approximate the make-up of the Spanish-speaking population (but it’s not a perfect proxy, as we explained above!). The data are based on responses to the Census Bureau’s question on Hispanic Origin (see Chapter 5). To be clear, national origin does not mean ‘nationality,’ but rather something along the lines of ‘ethnicity’ (we discuss ethnicity further in Chapter 5). Thus, the national origin groups listed in Table 2.1 and elsewhere in this book include people born in the US (whether offspring of immigrants or descendants of lands incorporated by the US) as well as people born elsewhere.

      As can be seen in Table 2.1, Mexicans and Mexican Americans make up the largest share of Latinxs by far. However, this percentage has decreased since peaking in 2008, and the Latinx population has become increasingly diverse (Flores, 2017).

      There is also a great deal of geographic diversity, and the proportion of each national origin group varies in different parts of the country. For example, in Arizona the vast majority (89%) of Latinxs are of Mexican origin, in Florida the most common Latinx national origin groups are Cubans (29%) and Puerto Ricans (21%), in New York they are Puerto Ricans (29%) and Dominicans (23%), and in Virginia they are Salvadorans (23%) and Mexicans (23%) (ACS 2017 One-year estimates). (Those interested in specific national origin groups or geographies, can perform customized searches using the US Census Bureau’s online data tool at https://data.census.gov).

      In addition to geographic distribution, demographic statistics also reveal other differences among Latinx national origin groups. For example, the poverty rate among Guatemalans, Hondurans and Dominicans is 28% but only 16% among Argentineans (vs. 25% for Latinxs overall and 16% for the general US population) (López & Patten, 2015). The percentage of Latinxs who were born outside the US is declining for all national origin groups, but the intergroup differences are notable: in 2013, 69% of Venezuelans and 65% of Peruvians were foreign-born while only 33% of Mexicans were (López & Patten, 2015). Finally, Mexicans had the lowest median age (26), while Cubans had the highest (40), which is higher than the mean both for all Latinxs (28) and for the general US population (37) (López & Patten, 2015). Demographic profiles for each of the 14 largest Latinx groups are available on the Pew Research Center’s website (http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/15/the-impact-of-slowing-immigration-foreign-born-share-falls-among-14-largest-us-hispanic-origin-groups). While these statistics reveal overall trends, we want to stress yet again that there are individual differences and variation within national origin groups.

      Latinxs and Spanish-speakers in the US are also ethnoracially diverse, as a result of the multifaceted history of conquest, colonization, slavery and immigration across the Americas, as well as Latinxs’ varied personal and family histories and life experiences within the US. Table 2.2 shows the Census Bureau’s statistics on the racial make-up of the Latinx population. As we will discuss in depth in Chapter 5, the Census Bureau considers ‘Latino’ to be an ethnic, rather than a racial, identity. In that chapter, we critically examine the construct of race, the Census Bureau’s race and ethnicity questions and the ethnoracial classification of Latinxs.

      We want to note that, in contrast with the Census Bureau’s ethnoracial statistics that show roughly two-thirds of Latinxs’ racial identity as White, a recent Pew Center survey found that two-thirds of Latinxs consider their Latinx background to be part of their racial identity and roughly one-third consider themselves to be of ‘mixed race’ (González-Barrera, 2015). Further, despite the small percentage of Latinxs who identify themselves as Black or African American on the Census Bureau’s surveys, approximately one-quarter of Latinx respondents on a recent Pew survey classify themselves as ‘Afro-Latino, Afro-Caribbean, or Afro-[country of origin]’ (López & González-Barrera, 2016). These discrepancies highlight the constructed, contextual and contested nature of ethnoracial and