Hispanics in Twenty-First Century America

Abstract

going a remarkable demographic transformation as a result of immigration from Latin America and subsequent childbearing among immigrant Latinas. In the past 40 years, Hispanics have been transformed from a small, regionally isolated, ethnically divided population into a national demographic force of great social, economic, and political import. In 1970, the Hispanic population of the United States stood at just 9.6 million people and comprised only 4.7 percent of the U.S. population. Nearly threequarters were native born and the population was dominated by three disparate and regionally segmented groups. Sixty percent of all Hispanics were of Mexican origin and concentrated in the southwest, primarily Texas and California; 15 percent were Puerto Rican and lived in the northeast, mainly in and around New York City; another 7 percent were Cuban, who unlike the prior two groups were overwhelmingly foreign born and concentrated in South Florida, mostly in greater Miami. In 1970, very few Hispanics traced their origins to Central or South America and immigration from the Dominican Republic had only just begun. Occupying separate geographic spheres, members of the three principal Hispanic origin groups rarely came into contact with one another, except in Chicago, the one metropolitan area that housed significant numbers of all three origin groups. Over the next four decades, this small, regionally divided and ethnically segmented population was radically transformed by mass immigration to the point where in 2010 it had grown to 50.5 million people and constituted 16.3 percent of the U.S.