The Multiracial Boom Was a Latino Story All Along
A ME/RG Special Report
America finally learned to count its mixed-heritage families. The biggest surprise had been standing in line the whole time.
Every American family knows the moment. You are filling out a form for school, or the doctor, or the state of Texas, and you arrive at the little boxes that want to know what you are. For millions of families, this is where the pen stops. The question assumes an answer the family does not have. Somewhere, decades ago, someone decided that the whole braided history of human ancestry could fit into five checkboxes and a category called “Some Other Race,” which is the government’s way of writing a shrug.
Then came the 2020 census, and the shrug got interesting. Between 2010 and 2020, the number of Americans the census counted as two or more races jumped from about 9 million to 33.8 million. That is not a typo. One in ten Americans, up from about three percent a decade before. Headlines announced a multiracial boom, as if nearly 25 million people had wandered in from somewhere.
Here is the part the headlines mostly missed: the engine of that boom was Latino. The number of Hispanic or Latino Americans counted as multiracial grew from about 3 million to 20.3 million, which means Latino answers now account for roughly three-fifths of the entire multiracial count of the United States. The “new” mixed America turns out to be, in large part, the oldest mixed America we have.
This should surprise exactly no one who has met Latin America. For five centuries, Indigenous peoples, Europeans, Africans, and Asians have been building families together, from Mexico City to San Juan to Sao Paulo. Spanish has an everyday word for mixed heritage, mestizo, because mixture there is not an edge case. It is the population. When people from that world arrive at an American form that asks, in effect, “fine, but which one are you really?”, the honest answer is often: yes.
The numbers show what that mismatch does. In 2020, 43.6 percent of Hispanic respondents either checked “Some Other Race” alone or skipped the race question altogether. More than 19 million Latinos chose Some Other Race by itself, quietly turning what was meant to be a leftover box — an official response on the census form, though not one of Washington’s five minimum race categories at the time — into one of the largest racial responses in the country. Even the man running the count knew the feeling. Robert Santos, the first Latino director of the Census Bureau, has said that for forty years he checked “Some Other Race” and wrote in mestizo, like a man patiently correcting the same test question his whole life.
Now, a confession about the numbers, because this community deserves the truth and not just the fireworks. Researchers who dug into the 2020 spike found that most of it came from changes in how the census asked its questions and processed the answers. The bureau started reading more of what people actually wrote in the boxes instead of trimming it away — under the new processing, a person who checked White and wrote in Mexican could land in the tables as both White and Some Other Race, multiracial by bookkeeping — and multiracial tabulations among Hispanics rose roughly sevenfold largely for those reasons. Some observers treat this as a debunking. It is the opposite. Twenty-five million people did not materialize in 2020. They were there all along, describing themselves in their own words, while the instrument filed their answers under miscellaneous. The stars were always there. Someone finally cleaned the telescope.
The good news is that the telescope is being rebuilt. In March 2024, the federal government revised its standards for race and ethnicity data for the first time since 1997. The old two-question format, which asked about Hispanic origin and race separately and then acted baffled by the results, is being replaced with a single combined question. You will be encouraged to check every box that applies. A new Middle Eastern or North African category was added. Federal agencies now have until September 28, 2029, to comply — a deadline that has already slipped once, so write it in pencil — which means the 2030 census should be the first in American history where a mixed Latino family can answer the form without calling a family meeting.
Not everyone is celebrating, and the concerns deserve a fair hearing. Advocates for Afro-Latinos, the roughly six million American adults with African roots and Latin American heritage, worry that a combined question could blur Black Latino identity at exactly the moment it needs visibility — because, as researchers and advocates keep documenting, discrimination tends to follow skin color no matter how the boxes are arranged. Counting people well is not a problem you solve once. It is a promise you keep renewing.
Which brings this home. Texas is home to more than five million multiracial residents, second only to California. Yet here, “Latino” often gets treated as a single flat category, as if sixty-some million people shared one story. Look closer at almost any Latino family tree in this state and you will find one of the most mixed-heritage populations in the hemisphere, deserving to be seen in full. That is why ME/RG exists: to say plainly that mixed Latino families are not a footnote to America’s multiracial story. They are most of it. This post is the first in a series about what changed while we were all busy living our lives: the new census rules, the research on growing up mixed, the schools question, and the voices of people who have been answering “what are you?” with grace their whole lives. Pull up a chair. There is room at this table for every part of you.
References
1. U.S. Census Bureau. Racial identification for the self-reported Hispanic or Latino population: 2010 and 2020 Census. Washington (DC): U.S. Census Bureau; 2023. Available from: https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/hispanic-origin/racial-identification.html
2. Ventura IM, Flores RD. The “rise” of multiracials? Examining the growth in multiracial identification in the 2020 U.S. census. RSF: The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences. 2025;11(1):44-64. Available from: https://www.rsfjournal.org/content/11/1/44
3. Office of Management and Budget. Revisions to OMB's Statistical Policy Directive No. 15: standards for maintaining, collecting, and presenting federal data on race and ethnicity. Fed Regist. 2024 Mar 29. Available from: https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/2024/03/29/2024-06469/revisions-to-ombs-statistical-policy-directive-no-15-standards-for-maintaining-collecting-and
4. Office of Management and Budget. Announcing timeline extensions for SPD 15 implementation. 2025 Sep 26. Available from: https://spd15revision.gov/content/spd15revision/en/news/2025-09-26-bulletin.html
5. Pew Research Center. About 6 million U.S. adults identify as Afro-Latino. 2022 May 2. Available from: https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2022/05/02/about-6-million-u-s-adults-identify-as-afro-latino/
6. Pew Research Center. Measuring the racial identity of Latinos. 2021 Nov 4. Available from: https://www.pewresearch.org/race-and-ethnicity/2021/11/04/measuring-the-racial-identity-of-latinos/
7. KFF. Revisions to federal standards for collecting and reporting data on race and ethnicity: what are they and why do they matter? 2024. Available from: https://www.kff.org/racial-equity-and-health-policy/revisions-to-federal-standards-for-collecting-and-reporting-data-on-race-and-ethnicity-what-are-they-and-why-do-they-matter/
8. U.S. Census Bureau. 2020 Census illuminates racial and ethnic composition of the country (press release). 2021 Aug 12.
9. The Washington Post. Census chief prioritizing better count of non-White populations (profile of Director Robert Santos; source of the mestizo write-in account).
10. U.S. Census Bureau. 2020 Census redistricting data, Table P1: race (state counts for residents reporting two or more races). 2021.