I never thought of myself as Hispanic. Then I moved to the US
A new Pew Research Center analysis asks who counts as Hispanic. For many Mexicans, the answer only arrives after they cross the border — sometimes shouted by a stranger.
I was on the phone with my mother — in Spanish, of course — when a woman who was clearly having a bad day shouted “f—ing South American” at me. My first impulse was to correct her: North American, actually. But I knew precision was beside the point. She wasn’t pointing at my exact origin; she was pointing at my culture.
And yes, unlike her, I am not Anglo-Saxon. So what am I?
The moment I became Hispanic
It is the question the Pew Research Center asked this month in its survey “Who Is Hispanic?,” published at the start of Hispanic Heritage Month. Pew’s answer suggests that it depends on who is counting.
Mine is that I only became Hispanic when I crossed the border.
It sounds naive, but until then I had no idea how many labels I could carry. It was, on a much smaller scale, a Frantz Fanon moment.
Fanon was a Martinican psychiatrist trained in France in the mid-20th century. In “Black Skin, White Masks” (1952), he recounts how a child in the street pointed at him and cried out, “Tiens, un nègre!” The moment forced him to confront everything his skin color meant in the France of his time. It opened a body of work on how such labels are produced by racial violence — territory I won’t step into here.
Labels and how they’re given
One detail of Fanon’s account stays with me, though. He argues that in Martinique, Antilleans did not think of themselves as Black; the label was waiting for them in Europe. Mine was waiting for me in the United States.
If we’re going by labels, I am North American (the region, not the country). I’m also Latin American, Mexican and chilanga, from Mexico City — and, to be precise, from the south of the city.
Why I’m moving to Washington and embracing Mexico’s cultural diplomacy
I know that people who did not grow up in an urban setting like mine are often far more aware of their ethnic origin, especially where an Indigenous language is still alive. Think of Oaxaca and the Mixe, Zapotec, Mixtec or Triqui peoples. I’ll confess that I was always more conscious of my socioeconomic context than of my ethnicity.
The state that made us Mexican
For those of us raised in cities, that blind spot is largely the legacy of the post-revolutionary state. After a decade of war, it decided that the best way to calm the waters was to insist that we were, above all, proud to be Mexican.
To make that true, the state launched an intense education campaign whose first goal was for everyone to speak Spanish, because once you erase the language that sets people apart, you erase the distinction between them. But the shift had started long before.
Around 1820, as Mexico was becoming independent, an estimated 60% of the population spoke an Indigenous language. By 1900, the figure was 15.4%. In the 2020 census, it was 6.1% of Mexicans aged three and older — and 87% of them also speak Spanish.
The project had a name for what it wanted to produce: a generalized mestizo. Anthropologist Manuel Gamio’s “Forjando Patria” (1916) and former education minister José Vasconcelos‘ “La Raza Cósmica” (1925) turned mixture into national identity.
So when I say I was never aware of my ethnicity, that is not entirely accurate. The state gave me one. I simply never noticed it, because the dominant category never needs to be named.
The painted castes
Mixture is not new in Mexico. Under Spanish colonial rule, a hierarchy of castas gave a name to each combination of Spanish, Indigenous and African ancestry, and that name could limit access to offices, guilds and rights. Historians note that daily life was more fluid than the system suggests, but the categories carried weight.
The independence movement explicitly rejected them. Miguel Hidalgo‘s 1810 decree abolished slavery and the tribute paid by the castes. In 1813, José María Morelos’ “Sentimientos de la Nación” called for abolishing “the distinction of castes.” The Plan of Iguala of 1821 declared all inhabitants citizens, regardless of origin.
From that era we keep the 18th-century casta paintings: picturesque and, to our eyes, a little terrible. Perhaps that is why it unsettles me when a society asks me to identify with a label. In Mexico, those labels still shape a person’s prospects. A 2016 survey by INEGI, Mexico’s national statistics agency, found that among Mexicans who placed themselves in the lightest skin tones, 10% had no schooling at all; among those in the darkest tones, the figure was 20.2%.
Who counts as Hispanic?
In the United States, the category was born as an administrative tool. Fifty years ago, Congress ordered the government to count Americans of Spanish-speaking background with roots in Mexico, Puerto Rico, Cuba, and Central and South America. The criterion is not geographic but linguistic — and, at bottom, colonial. Brazilians, Portuguese, Belizeans and Filipinos are left out.
The state does not always accept what people declare. If someone writes “Mexican” in the race question without checking the Hispanic box, the Census Bureau counts them as Hispanic anyway. If someone checks “Other Hispanic” and writes “Irish,” the bureau recodes them as non-Hispanic.
The race question itself fits poorly. In 2024, 23.4 million single-race Hispanics chose “some other race,” and most wrote in a nationality such as “Mexican” or “Latin American.” For those of us raised on mestizaje as national identity, race and nation are the same answer.
Most revealing is how Hispanics describe themselves. According to Pew’s 2025 survey, 53% use their family’s country of origin, 27% use “Hispanic” or “Latino,” and 18% simply say “American.” Most of the people the category covers prefer not to use it for themselves.
One figure seems to contradict my story: 97% of immigrants with Hispanic ancestry identify as Hispanic. I don’t think it does. The survey measures whether you accept the label when it is offered, not whether it existed for you before you arrived. The question assumes you have already crossed the border.
I also understand why the term exists, and why being counted matters to many. In a 2021 Pew survey, 57% of Latino adults said skin color shapes their daily lives at least somewhat.
A society of societies
I know the United States is a different case: a country made of many societies, with different customs coexisting in the same space. In 2024, its immigrant population reached a record 50.2 million, or 14.8% of residents. The only other time the share was that high was 1890.
The Census Bureau’s own breakdown shows how these labels overlap. Of the 341.8 million people it estimated for July 2025, 72.3% are counted as White alone, 13.5% as Black, 6.9 percent as Asian, 2.1% as American Indian or Alaska Native, 0.3% as Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, and 4.9% as two or more races. Hispanics, 20.5% of the population, are counted on top of those races rather than beside them, which is why non-Hispanic Whites are only 56.1%. The official estimates carry no “some other race” category at all — the box where millions of Hispanics write in their nationality.
The Hispanic population, now 70.1 million, is itself a federation of nationalities. In 2021, it included 37.2 million people of Mexican origin, 5.8 million Puerto Ricans and 2.5 million Salvadorans, with five other origin groups above 1 million each. “Hispanic” holds all of them in a single box.
Naming is classifying
When someone shouts my origin at me in the street — what a casta painter might have labeled mestiza — I become aware of what my features say, and of everything they tell another person before I open my mouth.
In 1952, the same year Fanon published his book, Jorge Luis Borges wrote in “The Analytical Language of John Wilkins” that every classification of the universe is arbitrary and conjectural. To name something is already to sort it.
So the question is not whether I am Hispanic. By the government’s definition, I am. The question is why it matters to name me that way — and what that classification says about us, and about those who do the classifying.
María Meléndez is a writer and art historian. She works at the Mexican Cultural Institute of the Embassy of Mexico in Washington, D.C.
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