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By Staff Writers, teleSUR
teleSUR
Thursday, Jul 9, 2015
While the Latino population might have outgrown their white counterparts in the U.S., they continue to face high rates of poverty and criminalization.
After losing California to the United States in the Invasion of Mexico in 1847, Latinos appear to be claiming back California in a paradoxical shift in history, as they now officially outnumber non-Hispanic whites in the state, the U.S. Census Bureau confirmed Wednesday.
Confirming a long-expected demographic shift, the Census Bureau released late June that as of July 1, 2014, about 14.99 million Latinos live in California, outgrowing the 14.92 million non-Hispanic whites in the state.
State demographers had previously estimated the change to take place in 2013, but slow population growth defied projections.
"This is sort of the official statistical recognition of something that has been underway for almost an entire generation," Roberto Suro, director of the Tomás Rivera Policy Institute at USC, said according to the LA Times.
While the large and diverse Latin American communities have outnumbered whites in the state of New Mexico since 2003, current statistics now make California the largest state in the U.S. without a white majority.
The United States, which has a Latino population of 55.4 million, is now also the second largest Spanish-speaking country in the world, just before Mexico, according the Cervantes Institute.
The announcement comes after a series of controversial anti-Mexican and anti-Latino remarks made by the Republican presidential hopeful Donald Trump. The billionaire business giant has stirred a backlash among U.S. Latino communities in recent weeks, prompting corporations like NBC and Macy’s to break relations with him.
In a letter published on Huffington Post, U.S.- Honduran actress America Ferrera thanked Donald Trump for his “racist” remarks, adding will ”serve brilliantly to energize Latino voters and increase turnout on election day against you and any other candidate who runs on a platform of hateful rhetoric.“
However, a Latino majority has not been accompanied by greater socio-economic prosperity. In fact, statistics reveal that Latino communities continue to be plagued with disproportionate incarceration rates, high poverty levels, unequal access to healthcare. Latinos also face high rates of precarious legal statuses and threats of deportation.
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