“It’s Not About Numbers, It’s About Power”: How Latino Young Adults Imagine the Ethnic and Racial Demographic Future of the United States

Abstract

The ethnoracial composition of the United States has been changing rapidly in recent decades, a trend expected to persist into the foreseeable future. While quantitative studies have investigated individual attitudes about these shifts, we know little about Americans’ more nuanced and complex views about the projected growth of Latinos, Blacks, Asians, and others in the United States and the decline of non-Hispanic Whites over the next 25 to 30 years. Drawing from research about ethnoracial demographic sentiments, the sociology of the future, and U.S. generations, we offer the first qualitative exploration of how Americans imagine the country’s ethnoracial demographic future. Our analyses of intensive interview data gathered from 91 U.S.-born Latinos aged 18 to 29 in Arizona in Winter 2021 focus on how Latino Gen Z and Millennials talk about this future. Latino young adults express optimism about a more heterogeneous nation in 2050 and imagine impacts on diversity, politics and political power, and racial discrimination. However, their optimism is tempered by skepticism about whether population growth among people of color will lead to lasting and meaningful changes, given U.S. history and existing structural inequalities. Latino Gen Z and Millennials also express concerns about current and future White responses to these population dynamics. Understanding how young adults in the United States envision the country’s ethnoracial demographic future has important social, political, and economic implications.