Numbers, Familias, Action: A Latina’s Reflection on the Futures of Young Children
As we continue to celebrate National Hispanic Heritage Month, Maria Romero takes a fresh look at 2020 Census racial and ethnic data, their implications for young children and their families, and what might be ahead for our familias.
by Maria Romero
Starting a family can turn anyone into their own personal futurist. Somehow it just becomes inevitable to think about the future. If you are like me, you might often find yourself wondering about the implications of social, economic, political, technological and environmental changes for those you love and how these newfound realizations might shape the decisions you make every day.
This practice is naturally very personal, so let me tell you a little bit about myself. I am a futurist, soon-to-be first-time mom and first-generation immigrant from Venezuela who became a United States citizen this summer. Ever since I moved to this country, I have grappled with the labels of being Hispanic. These identities can mean so many different things: your place of birth, where your family comes from, your heritage, etc. The nuances behind these widely used descriptors have made it difficult for some to recognize themselves and others as Hispanic. This National Hispanic Heritage Month, I would like to celebrate my roots by taking a fresh look at the 2020 Census racial and ethnic data, their implications for young children and their families, and what might be ahead for our familias.
From Numbers to Stories: 2020 Census
The U.S. population is more racially and ethnically diverse than it was in 2010. In fact, 40% of the total population self-identify as people of color, and 18.7% of the total population (62.1 million) self-identify as Hispanic, an increase of 23% from 2010. Knowing that immigration has been a foundational pillar in U.S. history, this shift should not come as a surprise, right?
My personal story fits well with the data and that narrative. I moved to the U.S. in 2015, so the 2020 Census was my first opportunity to participate. However, restrictions and anti-immigrant rhetoric during the second half of the 2010’s deterred many people from migrating in the first place or getting counted once they were here.
Over the past decade, the non-Hispanic White population decreased for the first time since the 1700’s while every other race and ethnicity increased. This flip means that most babies being born today are babies of color or multiracial.
For people like me, this new reality poses a set of questions and circumstances to consider:
What relationships will I have with my healthcare providers?
How will health providers respond to cultural differences?
How can I ensure culturally relevant learning experiences for my baby?
How involved will friends and family be in the development of this new life?
These are all questions that my non-Hispanic White husband and I have had to discuss openly because our frames of reference come from completely different contexts. For example, since I moved to the U.S. I have longed for a closer and more genuine personal interaction with my healthcare providers, like the one I was used to getting in Venezuela, but my husband has never had that experience so our expectations for our soon-to-be pediatrician were misaligned. At the community and institutional levels, these conversations will become even more necessary as we continue to witness changes in the country’s majority-minority dynamics.
In fact, Hispanic people are California’s, New Mexico’s and Puerto Rico’s largest racial or ethnic group. While the extent of this major shift and the ways it is perceived vary greatly from state to state and even county to county, there will be critical lessons that these frontrunners should share with the rest of the nation. For example, New Mexico’s governor, Michelle Lujan Grisham, established the Complete Count Commision for 2020 Census because “almost four in five Native Americans in New Mexico live in what are considered ‘hard-to-count’ Census tracts, as does more than half our Hispanic population.” Sharing these lessons will be particularly important as places where Hispanic people are becoming the majority explore racial and ethnic identities’ intersections with other important socio-economic factors such as income, geography and education level and uncover the hidden realities of many Hispanic people, who are easily lumped together for statistical purposes.
A Cautionary Tale About Numbers and Stories
Additionally, kids under five years old are usually the most undercounted age group. For example, in the 2010 Census about a million young children were not counted. This issue might seem harmless, but it has impactful ramifications for young children and their families: these data are used to allocate resources for critical publicly-funded programs such as Supplemental Nutritional Assistance Program (SNAP) and Children’s Health Insurance Program (CHIP) on which many families of color and Hispanic or families depend.
KnowledgeWorks and Capita’s Foundations for Flourishing Futures: A Look Ahead for Young Children and Families envisioned a future artifact (an object or practice) that represented the threats of undercounting.
While the analysis of undercounting in the 2020 Census has not yet been released, I expect it to be an issue. Along with anti-immigrant rhetoric and the usual undercounting of children under five, I anticipate that the uncertainty around personal interactions amidst the COVID-19 pandemic will also prove to have played a big role, especially for Hispanic households.
From Stories to Actions: Foundations for Flourishing Futures
“Communities with high numbers of noncitizen children and families cannot rely on their scorecards due to noncitizens’ underrepresentation in the 2020 Census as a result of anti-immigrant rhetoric.”
There is more to these numbers and stories than possibilities for the futures of young children and their families. We can draw upon that futurist voice in each of us to ask ourselves, “What do these projections and stories mean for me, my organization, my family and my community today?” To offer some guidance, I selected a couple of recommendations from the flourishing futures forecast that I find particularly relevant when thinking about the futures of my Hispanic community.
Engage in Inclusive and Responsive Design
While it has been critical to use the Hispanic label to shed light on the realities of Hispanic families, we must acknowledge that these descriptors tend to minimize complexity by using broad generalizations based on underlying assumptions. The Hispanic community is actually quite diverse. Our economic condition, educational level and races can vary greatly by origin. Even the makeup of the Hispanic communities across metropolitan areas differs widely from one place to the next:
Mexicans comprise more than two-in-three Hispanics in the Los Angeles and Houston metro areas, reflecting their majority share among the national Hispanic population. But in many other metro areas, other origin groups make up the largest share among Hispanics. Puerto Ricans are the largest group in the Orlando, Florida, metro area, while Salvadorans are the largest in the Washington, D.C., metro area. Cubans are the largest origin group in the Miami metro area.
Thus, to recognize the richness in this heterogeneous group that is the Hispanic community, we ought to push ourselves and others to challenge those sneaky blanket assumptions and stereotypes about what every Hispanic young child and their family need. It might surprise us how much we can learn when we not only listen to Hispanic people but also give them the opportunity to represent their interests directly in decision-making processes. For many of us, there is nothing more important in this world than our families.
Aim for Abundant and Equitable Flourishing
In the next decade, we might find ourselves and our country navigating the so-called minority-majority transition, in which the non-Hispanic White population continues to decrease while some makeup of other races and ethnicities drives overall population growth. Today, we can anticipate that this shift will uncover opportunities and challenges for young children, their families, their communities and society at large. However, we will not be able to recognize the abundance of opportunities if we continue to perpetrate and reproduce internalized patterns of oppression towards the “other.” It will not be easy, simple or fast, but one way to start this process is to embrace our own role in supporting other people’s futures. We can work to deepen our understanding of the interconnections between our families’ futures and those of others. More importantly, we can set in motion a mindset shift whereby equitable flourishing is not a zero-sum game equation.
From Actions to Reflections: My Own Journey
For me this is a personal journey as much as it is a societal one. After five years of living in the U.S., I still find myself grappling with what it means to be Hispanic or Latina. But one thing I am sure of is that I am proud of who I am, where I come from, the languages I speak, my family and our culture. And now I cannot wait to pass on everything I am and will be to my baby because I believe that this knowledge will be crucial to helping them flourish and find their own place in this world from a very young age.
Maria Romero is the Senior Manager of Strategic Foresight at KnowledgeWorks.