Puerto Rican Identity – The U.S. Census and Race

Filled the census form
and was left shaking my head.
I don’t know my race.

Hispanics carry
the gene pool of the planet.
Europe Africa Asia ….

I marked three boxes
proclaiming my race to be
indeterminate.

Marking three boxes, incidentally, is permissible. However imperfect their designations are, I salute the Census Bureau for at least recognizing that some of us do not fit into the old either-or categories. Indeed, they go to great lengths to accommodate the question of Hispanic origin, with question 8 asking whether the Hispanic origins were Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban et al. That said, how does an Hispanic then answer the next question about race? Here are the options:

Question 9. What is Person 1’s race? Mark one or more boxes.

· White
· Black, African Am., or Negro
· American Indian or Alaska Native
· Asian Indian
· Japanese
· Native Hawaiian
· Chinese
· Korean
· Guamanian or Chamorro
· Filipino
· Vietnamese
· Samoan
· Other Asian
· Other Pacific Islander
· Some other race

I’ll stick with the question of Hispanic racial origin and not address why Asians got so many variants, and whites and blacks so few; or even why Koreans, for example, are now considered a race. At least the Bureau was trying to accommodate racial diversity. The problem for me is that because Hispanic racial mixture took place over centuries, identifying racial origin with certainty is difficult. My racial identification has always been problematic. Most people looking at me would instantly identify me as white. A careful look at my features, though, gives evidence that somewhere in my gene pool also existed the Africans and Amerindians who contributed to the genealogy of those now identified as Puerto Ricans.

I marked all three boxes, albeit with a lingering uncertainty about whether I was answering properly. I am not sure, for example, whether the decidedly Asian cast of some of my relatives' features has its origins in Puerto Rico's Taíno Indians or whether it is the result of cross fertilization occurring in the Canary Islands from which some of my ancestors came. The racial mix is there. Where it came from, I really can't say.

Responding to the Census question also made me uneasy because it prompted me to think of the shortfalls we Hispanics still have in our own racial self identification. Hispanics, who have been called The Cosmic Race because of our racial inclusivity, should glory in our broad racial heritage. We are in the vanguard, after all, in a world with increasingly permeable cultural and racial boundaries. Yet, if one looks at the race of actors appearing in popular telenovelas, arguably a substitute for prevailing attitudes, the preponderance of the Caucasian Hispanic is striking. Sometimes when I look at Spanish-speaking television, I feel as if I am in a time warp because the lack of racial diversity resembles what existed in English-speaking media back in the 1970s or earlier. Maybe by forcing a discussion among Hispanics about racial identity, the Census Bureau will have done us a great service.

Related Post:
Who Is Puerto Rican?