WASHINGTON, D.C - Afro-Latinos are a growing part of the Black immigrant population in the US and now make up about 2 percent of the U.S. adult population.
Sisters Mar and María Cruz, two Afro-Puerto Rican Bomba dancers. (Photo by Armando Aparicio of KQED)That’s according to a new Pew Research Center estimates based on a survey of U.S. adults conducted from November 2019 to June 2020. Ana Gonzalez-Barrera, a senior researcher focusing on Hispanics, immigration and demographics at Pew, said Afro-Latinos in the US are put at about 6 million nationally and make up 12 percent of Latino adults, even though almost one-in-seven do not identify as Hispanic or Latino. That’s more than a Census count that puts the number at 1.2 million.
Pew Research Center asked adults to self-identify as Afro-Latino independently from other questions on race or ethnicity, which they said yielded a higher share of respondents who identify as Afro-Latino than by counting as Afro-Latino anyone who identifies as Hispanic and Black in a two-step race question format like the one used by the Census Bureau in the decennial census and its other surveys.
Pew found that following interesting data:
Afro-Latino adults are considerably younger and less likely to have attended college than the overall U.S. adult population.
In 2020, three-in-ten Afro-Latino adults were ages 18 to 29, compared with two-in-ten of all U.S. adults. Among all U.S. adults, about three-in-ten have graduated college, a share about twice as high as among Afro-Latino adults.
Afro-Latino adults have different origins than Latino adults overall. Afro-Latinos are also more likely to be of Puerto Rican or Dominican origin and less likely to be Mexican than Latino adults overall.
Pew’s own research also found that Afro-Latinos who identified as Hispanic or Latino were more likely than other Latinos to say they would be seen as multiracial or mixed race (12% vs. 4%) or Black (7% vs. 1%), according to a different Pew Research Center survey of Latino adults conducted in March 2021. By contrast, Afro-Latinos were less likely than other Latinos to say they would be seen as White (7% vs. 19%)
The same March 2021 survey of Hispanics found that Afro-Latinos who identify as Hispanic or Latino are more likely to say their skin color is darker than other Hispanic adults.
The survey asked Hispanic adults to identify the skin color that best resembled their own based on a version of the Yadon-Ostfeld skin-color scale in which respondents were shown 10 skin colors that ranged from light to dark. Among Afro-Latinos, 37% selected a color between five and 10 on the scale, which are darker skin colors. This compares with just 15% of Hispanics overall and 12% of those who do not identify as Afro Latino. Conversely, Afro-Latinos (60%) were less likely than other Hispanics who do not identify as Afro-Latino (83%) to select lighter skin colors – between one and four on the scale.
Afro-Latinos also report similar experiences with discrimination as other Latinos
For the most part, similar shares of Afro-Latinos who identify as Hispanic or Latino and other Latinos say they have experienced at least one discrimination incident.
About six-in-ten Afro-Latinos (61%) say they personally experienced at least one of eight discrimination incidents asked about on the March 2021 survey of Latino adults, while 54% of Latinos who do not identify as Afro-Latino say the same. Overall, about half (54%) of U.S. Latino adults say they experienced at least one discrimination incident in the year prior to the survey.
The shares of three discrimination experiences – being criticized for speaking Spanish, being told to go back to your country, and being called offensive names – are about the same as in 2019, the year before the coronavirus outbreak in the U.S.
Afro-Latinos are more likely to report experiencing two of the eight discrimination experiences included in the survey. More Afro-Latinos than other Latinos say they have been unfairly stopped by police during the year prior to the survey (22% vs. 8%). Similarly, about three-in-ten Afro-Latinos say they have been criticized for speaking Spanish in public, compared with about two-in-ten Latinos who do not identify as Afro-Latino. These are the only two discrimination experiences where the differences between Afro-Latinos and other Latinos are statistically significant.
The most reported instance of discrimination among both groups is people acting as if they thought they were not smart – 43% of Afro-Latinos say this, as do 34% of other Latinos.
Apart from discrimination, Afro-Latinos are also more likely than other Latinos to have had conversations with family during their upbringing about the potential challenges they might face due to their race or ethnicity. About four-in-ten Afro-Latinos say their family talked to them about this when they were growing up often (12%) or sometimes (27%).
Meanwhile, about a quarter of Latinos who do not identify as Afro-Latino say they talked about this topic with their families often (7%) or sometimes (18%).
