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Counting the State: State Resistance and Federal Enumeration of Latinos 1930–1970

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 October 2023

Robin Dale Jacobson Open the ORCID record for Robin Dale Jacobson [Opens in a new window]
Robin Dale Jacobson*
Affiliation:
University of Puget Sound, Tacoma, WA, USA
*
Email: rjacobson@pugetsound.edu
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Abstract

Between 1930 and 1980, the U.S. census bureau moved from using a Mexican as a racial category to Hispanic as an ethnicity. In between, the census bureau tried multiple ways to count Mexican Americans, Spanish Americans, or Latinos. Each measure the bureau tried ran headlong into differing subnational understandings of ethnicity, race, and Americanness. To understand Latino racial formation in this critical period, then, requires looking to the states. This paper explores the census counts in the southwest states between 1930 and 1970. Contextualizing these numbers with a history of differing state policies on language, marriage, and political inclusion reveals the importance of state-specific understandings of race and identity to understanding United States racial formation.

Keywords

HispanicLatinoMexican-Americancensusracial identitySouthwestfederalismstate politics
Type
Research Article
Information
Journal of Race, Ethnicity, and Politics , Volume 8 , Issue 3 , November 2023 , pp. 397 - 420
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of The Race, Ethnicity, and Politics Section of the American Political Science Association

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Footnotes

I had the privilege of conceiving this project and later revising the final manuscript while in residency at the Whiteley Center. Some of the archival material came from research trips funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities. I am grateful to colleagues who have made this project better including Monica Dehart, Elizabeth Durden, Priti Joshi, Alisa Kessel, and the anonymous reviewers.

References

References

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Burma, JH (1954[1968]) Spanish-Speaking Groups in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
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De Genova, N and Ramos-Zayas, AY (2003) Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
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Gratton, B and Gutmann, MP (2000) Hispanics in the United States, 1850–1990: estimates of population size and national origin. Historical Methods 33, 137–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gratton, B and Merchant, EK (2015) An immigrant’s tale: the Mexican American Southwest 1850 to 1950. Social Science History 39, 521–550.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gratton, B and Merchant, EK (2016) La Raza: Mexicans in the United States Census. Journal of Policy History 28, 537–567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gritter, M (2017) Elite leadership, people of Mexican origin, and civil rights: Dennis Chavez and the politics of fair employment. Congress & the Presidency 44, 143–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/07343469.2016.1263977 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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Gutiérrez, D (1995) Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
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Hochschild, JL and Powell, BM (2008) Racial reorganization and the United States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, half-breeds, mixed parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican race. Studies in American Political Development 22, 59–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humes, K and Hogan, H (2009) Measurement of race and ethnicity in a changing, multicultural America. Race and Social Problems 1, 111–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobson, RD, Tichenor, D and Durden, TE (2018) The South West’s Uneven welcome: immigrant inclusion and exclusion in Arizona and New Mexico. Journal of American Ethnic History 37, 5–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobson, RD and Tichenor, D (2023) States of immigration: making immigration policy from above and below, 1875–1924. Journal of Policy History 35, 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplowitz, CA (2003) A distinct minority: LULAC, Mexican American identity, and presidential policymaking, 1965–1972. Journal of Policy History 15, 192–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeman, J (2018) Becoming Hispanic: the negotiation of ethnoracial identity in US Census interviews. Latino Studies 16, 432–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longmore, TW and Hitt, HL (1944) A demographic analysis of the first and second generation Mexican population in the United States: 1930. Southwest Social Science Quarterly 24, 138–149.Google Scholar
Márquez, B (2014) Democratizing Texas Politics: Race, Identity, and Mexican American Empowerment, 1945–2002. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
McMaken, R (2020) A Study in Decentralization: Colorado’s Two Sets of Marriage Laws: Mises Institute. Available at mises.org/power-market/study-decentralization-colorado-two-sets-marriage-laws.Google Scholar
Menchaca, M (2008) The anti-miscegenation history of the American Southwest, 1837 to 1970: transforming racial ideology into law. Cultural Dynamics 20, 279–318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374008096312 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molina, N (2014) How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
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Ngai, MM (2004) Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Nieto-Phillips, J (2008) The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Nobles, M (2000) Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noel, LC (2014) Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
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Omi, M and Winant, H (1994) Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd Edn. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Orozco, CE (2009) No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Pascoe, P (2010) What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Perlmann, J (2018) America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prewitt, K (2013) What Is Your Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Powers, J (2008) Forgotten history: Mexican American school segregation in Arizona, 1900–1951. Equity and Excellence in Education 41, 467–481.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodriguez, CE (2000) Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Ruiz, VL (2001) South by Southwest: Mexican Americans and Segregated Schooling, 1900–1950. OAH Magazine of History 15, 23–27.10.1093/maghis/15.2.23CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schildkraut, DJ, Jiménez, TR, Dovidio, JF and Huo, YJ (2019) A tale of two states: how state immigration climate affects belonging to state and country among Latinos. Social Problems 66, 332–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schildkraut, DJ, Jiménez, TR, Dovidio, JF and Huo, YJ (2021) States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Schor, P (2017) Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, CW, Kreitzer, RJ and Suo, F (2020) The dynamics of racial resentment across the 50 states. Perspectives on Politics 18, 527–538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Telles, E (2018) Latinos, race, and the U.S. Census. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 677, 153–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tichenor, DJ and Jacobson, R (2020) Tenuous belonging: diversity, power, and identity in the U.S. Southwest. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46, 2480–2496.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vargas, Z (2007) Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Varsanyi, MW (2020) Hispanic racialization, citizenship, and the Colorado border blockade of 1936. Journal of American Ethnic History 40, 5–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallman, KK (1998) Data on race and ethnicity: revising the federal standard. The American Statistician 52, 31–33.Google Scholar
“Appendix B: Instructions to Enumerators.” 1933. 1930 Census: Volume 2, Population Statistics by Subjects: 1396–1402.Google Scholar
“Color or Race, Nativity and Parentage.” 1930. Census: Volume 2. Population, General Report, Statistics by Subjects, Chapter 2.Google Scholar
“Nativity and Parentage of the White Population Mother Tongue.” 1943. U.S. Census of Population: 1940, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Characteristics of the Population.” 1953. 1950 Census of Population, Vol. 2, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Persons of Spanish Surname.” 1953. U.S. Census of Population: 1950, Vol. IV, Special Reports, Part 3, Chapter C, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Persons of Spanish Surname.” 1973. Census of the Population: 1970 Subject Reports PC(2)-1D, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC: pp. IV–VI.Google Scholar
“Data on the Spanish Ancestry Population.” 1975. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses From 1790 to 2000.” Report Number POL/02-MA(RV) 2002.Google Scholar
Dennis Chavez letter to Pvt. Joe A. Chavez (no date) Box 93 Folder one. Dennis Chávez Papers 1917–1963, MSS 394, Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, University of New Mexico Libraries.Google Scholar
Nestor Montoya Letter to Merritt C. Mechem. May 22, 1921, Merritt C. Mechem Papers, New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico.Google Scholar
Northrop, Vernon letter to Corrington Gill “Report on Santa Fe, New Mexico, Oct 27–29 Inclusive” November 1, 1933, RG 69 FERA State Files, New Mexico, 406.2. 1933 National Archives Building, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Spanish Americans at Largely Attended Mass Meeting in Old Albuquerque, Denounce Alleged Discriminations Against Their People at the University; Give Governor 24 Hours To Oust Those Responsible for Racial Questionnaire,” Albuquerque Journal, April 28, 1933, p. 1. Richard Martin Page Papers, 1931–1938, MSS 161, Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Folder 1; “Page Defends Action on Racial Survey,” Albuquerque Journal, May 4, 1933, p. 1.Google Scholar
Anderson, BRO (1991) Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.Google Scholar
Benton-Cohen, K (2009) Borderline Americans: Racial Division and Labor War in the Arizona Borderlands. Cambridge: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Burma, JH (1954[1968]) Spanish-Speaking Groups in the United States. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.Google Scholar
Calderón-Zaks, M (2011) Debated whiteness amid world events: Mexican and Mexican American subjectivity and the U.S.’ Relationship with the Americas, 1924–1936. Mexican Studies 27, 325–359.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
De Genova, N and Ramos-Zayas, AY (2003) Latino Crossings: Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and the Politics of Race and Citizenship. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Fox, C and Guglielmo, TA (2012) Defining America’s Racial Boundaries: Blacks, Mexicans, and European Immigrants, 1890–1945. The American Journal of Sociology 118, 327–379.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Garcia, MT (2007) Review of Kaplowitz, LULAC: Mexican Americans and national policy. Pacific Historical Review 76, 112–114.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gratton, B and Gutmann, MP (2000) Hispanics in the United States, 1850–1990: estimates of population size and national origin. Historical Methods 33, 137–153.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gratton, B and Merchant, EK (2015) An immigrant’s tale: the Mexican American Southwest 1850 to 1950. Social Science History 39, 521–550.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gratton, B and Merchant, EK (2016) La Raza: Mexicans in the United States Census. Journal of Policy History 28, 537–567.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gritter, M (2017) Elite leadership, people of Mexican origin, and civil rights: Dennis Chavez and the politics of fair employment. Congress & the Presidency 44, 143–156. https://doi.org/10.1080/07343469.2016.1263977 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Guglielmo, TA (2006) Fighting for Caucasian rights: Mexicans, Mexican Americans, and the transnational struggle for civil rights in World War II Texas. The Journal of American History 92, 1212–1237.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Gutiérrez, D (1995) Walls and Mirrors: Mexican Americans, Mexican Immigrants, and the Politics of Ethnicity. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Hattam, V (2005) Ethnicity & the boundaries of race: rereading Directive 15. Daedalus 134, 61–69.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Hochschild, JL and Powell, BM (2008) Racial reorganization and the United States Census 1850–1930: Mulattoes, half-breeds, mixed parentage, Hindoos, and the Mexican race. Studies in American Political Development 22, 59–96.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Humes, K and Hogan, H (2009) Measurement of race and ethnicity in a changing, multicultural America. Race and Social Problems 1, 111–131.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobson, RD, Tichenor, D and Durden, TE (2018) The South West’s Uneven welcome: immigrant inclusion and exclusion in Arizona and New Mexico. Journal of American Ethnic History 37, 5–36.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Jacobson, RD and Tichenor, D (2023) States of immigration: making immigration policy from above and below, 1875–1924. Journal of Policy History 35, 1–32.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Kaplowitz, CA (2003) A distinct minority: LULAC, Mexican American identity, and presidential policymaking, 1965–1972. Journal of Policy History 15, 192–222.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Leeman, J (2018) Becoming Hispanic: the negotiation of ethnoracial identity in US Census interviews. Latino Studies 16, 432–460.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Longmore, TW and Hitt, HL (1944) A demographic analysis of the first and second generation Mexican population in the United States: 1930. Southwest Social Science Quarterly 24, 138–149.Google Scholar
Márquez, B (2014) Democratizing Texas Politics: Race, Identity, and Mexican American Empowerment, 1945–2002. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
McMaken, R (2020) A Study in Decentralization: Colorado’s Two Sets of Marriage Laws: Mises Institute. Available at mises.org/power-market/study-decentralization-colorado-two-sets-marriage-laws.Google Scholar
Menchaca, M (2008) The anti-miscegenation history of the American Southwest, 1837 to 1970: transforming racial ideology into law. Cultural Dynamics 20, 279–318. https://doi.org/10.1177/0921374008096312 CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Molina, N (2014) How Race Is Made in America: Immigration, Citizenship, and the Historical Power of Racial Scripts. Berkeley: University of California Press.Google Scholar
Mora, GC (2014) Making Hispanics: How Activists, Bureaucrats, and Media Constructed a New American. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Ngai, MM (2004) Impossible Subjects: Illegal Aliens and the Making of Modern America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Nieto-Phillips, J (2008) The Language of Blood: The Making of Spanish-American Identity in New Mexico, 1880s–1930s. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press.Google Scholar
Nobles, M (2000) Shades of Citizenship: Race and the Census in Modern Politics. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Noel, LC (2014) Debating American Identity: Southwestern Statehood and Mexican Immigration. Tucson: University of Arizona Press.Google Scholar
Novkov, J (2008) Bringing the states back in: understanding legal subordination and identity through political development. Polity 40, 24–48.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Omi, M and Winant, H (1994) Racial formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd Edn. New York: Routledge.Google Scholar
Orozco, CE (2009) No Mexicans, Women, or Dogs Allowed: The Rise of the Mexican American Civil Rights Movement. Austin: University of Texas Press.Google Scholar
Pascoe, P (2010) What Comes Naturally: Miscegenation Law and the Making of Race in America. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Google Scholar
Perlmann, J (2018) America Classifies the Immigrants: From Ellis Island to the 2020 Census. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Prewitt, K (2013) What Is Your Race?: The Census and Our Flawed Efforts to Classify Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Powers, J (2008) Forgotten history: Mexican American school segregation in Arizona, 1900–1951. Equity and Excellence in Education 41, 467–481.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Rodriguez, CE (2000) Changing Race: Latinos, the Census, and the History of Ethnicity in the United States. New York: New York University Press.Google Scholar
Ruiz, VL (2001) South by Southwest: Mexican Americans and Segregated Schooling, 1900–1950. OAH Magazine of History 15, 23–27.10.1093/maghis/15.2.23CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schildkraut, DJ, Jiménez, TR, Dovidio, JF and Huo, YJ (2019) A tale of two states: how state immigration climate affects belonging to state and country among Latinos. Social Problems 66, 332–355.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Schildkraut, DJ, Jiménez, TR, Dovidio, JF and Huo, YJ (2021) States of Belonging: Immigration Policies, Attitudes, and Inclusion. New York: Russell Sage Foundation.Google Scholar
Schor, P (2017) Counting Americans: How the US Census Classified the Nation. New York: Oxford University Press.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Smith, CW, Kreitzer, RJ and Suo, F (2020) The dynamics of racial resentment across the 50 states. Perspectives on Politics 18, 527–538.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Telles, E (2018) Latinos, race, and the U.S. Census. The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 677, 153–164.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Tichenor, DJ and Jacobson, R (2020) Tenuous belonging: diversity, power, and identity in the U.S. Southwest. Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 46, 2480–2496.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Vargas, Z (2007) Labor Rights Are Civil Rights: Mexican American Workers in Twentieth-Century America. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.Google Scholar
Varsanyi, MW (2020) Hispanic racialization, citizenship, and the Colorado border blockade of 1936. Journal of American Ethnic History 40, 5–39.CrossRefGoogle Scholar
Wallman, KK (1998) Data on race and ethnicity: revising the federal standard. The American Statistician 52, 31–33.Google Scholar
“Appendix B: Instructions to Enumerators.” 1933. 1930 Census: Volume 2, Population Statistics by Subjects: 1396–1402.Google Scholar
“Color or Race, Nativity and Parentage.” 1930. Census: Volume 2. Population, General Report, Statistics by Subjects, Chapter 2.Google Scholar
“Nativity and Parentage of the White Population Mother Tongue.” 1943. U.S. Census of Population: 1940, United States Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Characteristics of the Population.” 1953. 1950 Census of Population, Vol. 2, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Persons of Spanish Surname.” 1953. U.S. Census of Population: 1950, Vol. IV, Special Reports, Part 3, Chapter C, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Persons of Spanish Surname.” 1973. Census of the Population: 1970 Subject Reports PC(2)-1D, U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC: pp. IV–VI.Google Scholar
“Data on the Spanish Ancestry Population.” 1975. U.S. Government Printing Office, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Measuring America: The Decennial Censuses From 1790 to 2000.” Report Number POL/02-MA(RV) 2002.Google Scholar
Dennis Chavez letter to Pvt. Joe A. Chavez (no date) Box 93 Folder one. Dennis Chávez Papers 1917–1963, MSS 394, Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, University of New Mexico Libraries.Google Scholar
Nestor Montoya Letter to Merritt C. Mechem. May 22, 1921, Merritt C. Mechem Papers, New Mexico State Records Center and Archives, Santa Fe, New Mexico.Google Scholar
Northrop, Vernon letter to Corrington Gill “Report on Santa Fe, New Mexico, Oct 27–29 Inclusive” November 1, 1933, RG 69 FERA State Files, New Mexico, 406.2. 1933 National Archives Building, Washington, DC.Google Scholar
“Spanish Americans at Largely Attended Mass Meeting in Old Albuquerque, Denounce Alleged Discriminations Against Their People at the University; Give Governor 24 Hours To Oust Those Responsible for Racial Questionnaire,” Albuquerque Journal, April 28, 1933, p. 1. Richard Martin Page Papers, 1931–1938, MSS 161, Center for Southwest Research and Special Collections, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, New Mexico, Folder 1; “Page Defends Action on Racial Survey,” Albuquerque Journal, May 4, 1933, p. 1.Google Scholar