Hispanic – Definitions in the United States:
The 1970 Census was the first time that a “Hispanic” identifier was used and data collected with the question. The definition of “Hispanic” has been modified in each successive census. The 2000 Census asked if the person was “Spanish/Hispanic/Latino”.
The U.S. Office of Management and Budget currently defines “Hispanic or Latino” as “a person of Mexican, Puerto Rican, Cuban, South or Central American, or other Spanish culture or origin, regardless of race.”
Because Hispanics can be any race, you need to look at their own self-identification. The breakdowns as per the American census are that somewhat over 50% of American Hispanics/Latinos identify as white, most of the rest as “some other race,” with a small minority as black, Native American, etc.
This came to mind when I saw this paper in BMC Genetics, Comparing self-reported ethnicity to genetic background measures in the context of the Multi-Ethnic Study of Atherosclerosis (MESA). The issue is that when you’re doing association studies between genes and diseases you want to control for population structure. For example, if disease X is found in Chinese Americans to a higher degree than the general population, then all the alleles distinctive to …