Mexicans Change Face of U.S. Demographics

A new census study of America’s Latinos dramatizes the pivotal role that people of Mexican ancestry are playing in reshaping the nation’s demographic makeup.

People of Mexican lineage, who two decades ago were largely confined to the Southwest, California and Chicago, are now settling around the country and gaining ground in numbers on such long-established groups as German Americans and Irish Americans, mostly the offspring of earlier waves of immigration.

Mexicans accounted for 58.5% of the 35.3 million Latinos reported in census 2000. The census totals, first released in March, found that the Latino population jumped 57.9% in the previous decade, more than four times the rate of the U.S. population growth.

The new national study, issued Wednesday as a supplement to the March report, confirmed years of anecdotal evidence that Latinos have moved briskly into the Midwest, South and East. The greatest rate of growth was in the Midwest, where Latinos--7 in 10 of them Mexicans--grew by 80% to 3.1 million.

Half of the nation’s Latinos continue to live in two states: California and Texas. Southern California is home to four of the top 10 communities of at least 100,000 nationwide that boast the highest concentrations of Latinos. No. 1 is unincorporated East Los Angeles, where 96.8% of residents are Latino. Further down are Santa Ana (7th), El Monte (8th) and Oxnard (9th).

More than 1 in every 14 U.S. residents now traces his or her ancestry to Mexico. The actual proportion is likely higher, taking into account an acknowledged census undercount of Latinos and another factor: Millions who identified themselves as Latino, Hispanic or Spanish on census forms failed to specify their national heritage, but many, if not most, are likely of Mexican background.

“The Mexican-origin population is what’s driving the growth in the Hispanic population,” noted Jeffrey Passel, a demographer at the nonpartisan Urban Institute in Washington. “And I think these numbers actually mask the degree to which the Mexican migration is driving this.”

The study documented the relative youth of U.S. Latinos, especially those of Mexican ancestry, compared to the rest of the U.S. population.

The median age for the nation’s Latinos, 25.9, is almost 10 years below the national median, 35.3. The median age of Mexicans nationwide is 24.2 years. It is 27.3 years for Puerto Ricans, 29.2 for Central Americans, 29.5 for Dominicans and 40.7 for Cubans.

Mexican immigrants, who overwhelmingly settled in California during the 1980s, reached out in the last decade to job opportunities in the South and Midwest, working in poultry plants, slaughterhouses and restaurants, as well as harvesting tobacco and other crops. Latinos now make up almost one-quarter of the population in some counties of North Carolina, Georgia, Iowa, Arkansas, Minnesota and Nebraska.

“Mexican immigration has gone from being a regional phenomenon to very much a national phenomenon,” noted Douglas Massey, a sociologist at the University of Pennsylvania who views it as part of the larger process of North American integration. “You can’t link all the other aspects of the economy--trade, transport, border traffic--and not expect those linkages to include people as well.”

Despite the Mexican ‘predominance, the study also documented the diverse backgrounds of the Latino population, which is often viewed wrongly by outsiders as an ethnic monolith.

People of Central American or South American heritage accounted for, respectively, 4.8% and 3.8% of the Latino total. The largest group among the Central Americans was Salvadorans, with substantial populations in Southern California, Houston, Washington and New York, while Colombians, settled mostly in the Northeast, were the largest single South American constituency. (The Census Bureau plans to release more detailed breakdowns of the Latino population in each state in the coming weeks.)

Both Central and South Americans, with large influxes of new immigrants, surpassed the aging Cuban population, concentrated in South Florida, who represent 3.5% of the nation’s Latinos. Those who trace their origins to the Dominican Republic stood at 2.2% of all Latinos, mostly in the Northeast.

The numbers showed both a geographical dispersion of Latinos and a continued concentration in traditional areas.

While California is now one-third Latino, about one-quarter of its overall population is of Mexican ancestry. People of Mexican backround also represent about one-quarter of all Texans.

Only sparsely populated New Mexico, where 42% of inhabitants described themselves as Latino, boasted a higher percentage of Latinos than California.

More than 1 in 5 Latinos live in just four counties: Los Angeles (4.2 million); Cuban-dominated Miami-Dade (1.3 million) in Florida; Harris County, Texas, which includes Houston (1.1 million); and Cook County, Ill., which includes Chicago (1.1 million).

The 20.6 million who reported Mexican ancestry are still fewer than the descendants of some earlier waves of European immigrants. Current census numbers for other groups are not yet available, but in 1990, people of German heritage numbered 58 million, Irish 38.7 million and English 32.6 million. Italian Americans numbered 14.7 million.

Some experts theorize that the booming economy in the latter half of the decade attracted more illegal immigrants than previously thought, pushing Latino numbers above census projections by about 2.5 million. (Census data breaking down the foreign-born population are not scheduled to be released until next year.)

Latinos in 2000 represented 12.5% of the nation’s residents, bringing them roughly even with the country’s black population. That marks a decisive demographic crossroads with broad cultural and political ramifications in a nation where relations between black and white have long held center stage.

Latinos are considered an ethnic group for census purposes and may be of any race. Almost half of those who reported their ethnicity as Latino reported their race as white.

People of Mexican descent, their numbers buoyed by large-scale immigration beginning in the 1970s, have long been the largest single component of the nation’s heterogenous Latino population. However, today’s study clarifies just how big a role the nation’s expanding multitudes of Mexican Americans played in what some have called the Latinoization of the United States.

The data gap makes it impossible to say with precision what percentage of Latinos are immigrants or what proportion are citizens.

Previous surveys indicated roughly 60% of Latinos were U.S.-born, with great variations from group to group. (Puerto Ricans, for instance, are U.S. citizens.)

The rate of immigration plays a decisive role in Latino population growth: A large number of native-born Latinos are in fact the children of new immigrants, who themselves tend to be young and have comparatively high fertility rates.