The Implications of Choosing “No Race” On the Salience of Hispanic Identity: How Racial and Ethnic Backgrounds Intersect among Hispanic Adolescents

Abstract

Using data from the National Longitudinal Study of Adolescent Health (Add Health), a nationally representative sample of youth from 7th to 12th grades, we examined how racial and ethnic identification overlap among Hispanic adolescents. We evaluated the relative proximity between race and ethnic identifiers among Hispanics. Empirical analyses suggest that the racial identification of other students at school has a significant impact on the odds of choosing particular racial identifiers. Both Hispanic and non-Hispanic schoolmates' racial identification is related to the racial identification of Hispanic adolescents. We also find evidence that both ethnicity and race are distinct stratifiers among Hispanics. Overall, our findings support the notion that Hispanic may be a more meaningful “racial” identity than black, white, or other, but we also find that racial identification and ethnic background are still important and meaningful dividers among Hispanic youth.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Special acknowledgment is due to Ronald R. Rindfuss and Barbara Entwisle for assistance in the original design.

Research supported by a grant from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) (R01 HD38704-01A1) to Dr. Grace Kao. This research uses data from Add Health, a program project designed by J. Richard Udry, Peter S. Bearman, and Kathleen Mullan Harris, and funded by a grant P01-HD31921 from the NICHD, with cooperative funding from 17 other agencies. Persons interested in obtaining data files from Add Health should contact Add Health, Carolina Population Center, 123 W. Franklin Street, Chapel Hill, NC 27516-2524 (http://www.cpc.unc.edu/addhealth/contract.html).

NOTES

Notes

¹ We use the word “Hispanic” instead of “Latino” or “Latin American” throughout our article primarily because it most closely resembles the question asked by Add Health. The question asked is “Are you of Hispanic or Spanish origin?”

² The data do not allow us to differentiate between ethnic background and national origin. We use ethnic background or ethnicity throughout the article as it most closely follows the wording of the survey question.

³ Mexican and Chicano respondents are collapsed into one category, “Mexican,” throughout the article. Although respondents from Puerto Rico are U.S. citizens by birthright, we determined their nativity status by using the same criteria employed for the rest of Hispanic national origins.

⁴ We believe that the multiracial identity of Hispanics is a complex question that needs to be explored in its own right, so we have omitted these respondents from our analyses. Tables on the socioeconomic characteristics of multiracial Hispanics are available upon request.

⁵ Although Puerto Ricans have U.S. citizenship, we believe that youths born in Puerto Rico more closely resemble first-generation Hispanic youth, and those who are born in the United States to mothers who were born in Puerto Rico are more similar to second-generation Hispanic youth.

⁶ Unfortunately, parents' education is the only proxy available in the questionnaire for socioeconomic status. We have chosen mother's education because there is less missing data, and because mothers play a more important role in the socialization of children than do fathers.

⁷ We have also run alternative models in which we control by the proportion of students of the same race and Hispanic origin only, and others in which we only include the proportion of same race (non-Hispanic). The coefficients of the predictive models do not change significantly. The tables are available upon request.