On April 10, I attended a talk by Jennifer Leeman (Research Sociolinguist @Census and Assistant Professor @George Mason) entitled “Spanish and Latino/a identity in the US Census.” This was a great talk. I’ll include the abstract below, but here are some of her main points:

• Census categories promote and legitimize certain understandings, particularly because the Census, as a tool of the government, has an appearance of neutrality

• Census must use categories from OMB
• The distinction between race and ethnicity is fuzzy and full of history.
  • o   In the past, this category has been measured by surname, mothertongue, birthplace
    o   Treated as hereditary (“perpetual foreigner” status)
    o   Self-id new, before interviewer would judge, record

• In the interview context, macro & micro meet
  • o   Macro level demographic categories
  • o   Micro:
    • Interactional participant roles
    • Indexed through labels & structure
    • Ascribed vs claimed identities
• The study: 117 telephone interviews in Spanish
  • o   2 questions, ethnicity & race
  • o   Ethnicity includes Hispano, Latino, Español
    • Intended as synonyms but treated as a choice by respondents
    • Different categories than English (Adaptive design at work!)
• The interviewers played a big role in the elicitation
  • o   Some interviewers emphasized standardization
    • This method functions differently in different conversational contexts
  • o   Some interviewers provided “teaching moments” or on-the-fly definitions
    • Official discourses mediated through interviewer ideologies
    • Definitions vary
• Race question also problematic
  • o   Different conceptions of Indioamericana
    • Central, South or North American?
• Role of language
  • o   Assumption of monolinguality problematic, bilingual and multilingual quite common, partial and mixed language resources
  • o   “White” spoken in English different from “white” spoken in Spanish
  • o   Length of time in country, generation in country belies fluid borders
• Coding process
  • o   Coding responses such as “American, born here”
  • o   ~40% Latino say “other”
  • o   Other category ~ 90% Hispanic (after recoding)
• So:
  • o   Likely result: one “check all that apply” question
    • People don’t read help texts
  • o   Inherent belief that there is an ideal question out there with “all the right categories”
    • Leeman is not yet ready to believe this
  • o   The takeaway for survey researchers:
    • Carefully consider what you’re asking, how you’re asking it and what information you’re trying to collect
• See also Pew Hispanic Center report on Latino/a identity

 ABSTRACT

Censuses play a crucial role in the institutionalization and circulation of specific constructions of national identity, national belonging, and social difference, and they are a key site for the production and institutionalization of racial discourse (Anderson 1991; Kertzer & Arel 2002; Nobles 2000; Urla 1994).  With the recent growth in the Latina/o population, there has been increased interest in the official construction of the “Hispanic/Latino/Spanish origin” category (e.g., Rodriguez 2000; Rumbaut 2006; Haney López 2005).  However, the role of language in ethnoracial classification has been largely overlooked (Leeman 2004). So too, little attention has been paid to the processes by which the official classifications become public understandings of ethnoracial difference, or to the ways in which immigrants are interpellated into new racial subjectivities.

This presentation addresses these gaps by examining the ideological role of Spanish in the history of US Census Bureau’s classifications of Latina/os as well as in the official construction of the current “Hispanic/Latino/Spanish origin” category. Further, in order to gain a better understanding of the role of the census-taking in the production of new subjectivities, I analyze Spanish-language telephone interviews conducted as part of Census 2010.  Insights from recent sociocultural research on the language and identity (Bucholtz and Hall 2005) inform my analysis of how racial identities are instantiated and negotiated, and how respondents alternatively resist and take up the identities ascribed to them.

* Dr. Leeman is a Department of Spanish & Portuguese Graduate (GSAS 2000).