UC Irvine

Data from the U.S. Census shows Latinxs have become a significant portion of the American Indian or Alaska Native (AIAN) population, with over a fourth of the total AIAN population in the country also identifying as Latinx in 2021. However, scholars focused on Latinx racial identification have not sufficiently examined Latinx identification as American Indian, the only category in the U.S. Census for Indigenous populations. Indigenous peoples from Latin America make up a significant portion of the population of countries that are the top birthplaces of migrants arriving in the United States, such as Mexico. The Indigenous non-Indigenous boundary is also one of the most important racial boundaries in Latin America. Using Census data and interviews with Indigenous Latinxs, I show how the category of Hispanic/Latino and AIAN has been constructed and has changed in the past four decades in the U.S. Census and how Indigenous Latinxs make sense of ethnoracial categories used in the United States to count populations. My findings show that the Latinization of the AIAN category may be explained by a greater number of Indigenous migrants choosing the AIAN category, modifications in the Census that make it more inclusive of Indigenous peoples from Latin America, and changes in coding strategies. Furthermore, my interviews reveal that Indigenous Latinxs selected the Hispanic/Latino category, but did not feel they belonged to it due to experiences of discrimination from non-Indigenous Latinxs. My dissertation contributes to the growing body of scholarship on the transnational identities of Indigenous peoples in overlapping colonial contexts, such as the United States and Latin American countries.