The race of Hispanics

According to the FBI, I am white. 

I work at an immigration law firm, where I help to fill out forms and also do FBI checks. Here is the list of race categories from the FBI handbook on how to do fingerprints.

Here's the link to the handbook: http://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/fingerprints_biometrics/guidelines-for-preparation-of-fingerprint-cards-and-association-criminal-history-information

As you can see, under the white category is Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Cubans, etc, "regardless of race." That little last bit at the makes it pretty clear that they just didn't know what to do with us.

I also run into this problem when filling out forms. This little bit is taken from the DACA form, taken straight from the immigration website

http://www.uscis.gov/sites/default/files/files/form/i-821d.pdf <--you can go here to see the form and here: http://www.uscis.gov/i-821d to read about it.

This is a form I had to fill out myself, and this was the question was one that still plagues me. For 15 I could quite confidently check Hispanic/Latino. But what about 16? I'm none of those. Not in my eyes at least. 

The same thing happened with the 2010 census. Here's a link to it: https://www.census.gov/schools/pdf/2010form_info.pdf

As you can see, they ask you if you are Hispanic and then also to check a race category. While at least the census gave us an "other" box, we had to fill it in ourselves. And what could we put? There was a lot of confusion in our community at that time. We had no idea what the hell we were supposed to put. Some people just put Latino again, some mestizo, which what Spain called the child or a white person and a Native american, though by now most of us are who knows what generation of mestizo and who knows what percentage is white and what is Native American.

So a fun lesson to be learned here is that when looking up how many white people are in the United States, be sure to make sure it's the "non-hispanic white" answer. 

Here are some articles about the chaos the 2010 census created and how some of us just went ahead and marked ourselves as white.

http://www.cnn.com/2014/05/29/opinion/liu-study-hispanics-favor-whiteness/

http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/22/upshot/more-hispanics-declaring-themselves-white.html?abt=0002&abg=0