Do you remember the lists of colonialist racial classifications you studied during your requisite Geography unit on a Latin American country in elementary school? (Ours was Bolivia.) "Creole" (American-born European), "Indian" (Native), "Negro" (African), "Mestizo" (mixed European and Native), "Mulatto" (mixed African and European), "Zambo" (mixed African and Native)... and there were all those -oon words, indicating what part non-European you were if you had an African ancestor. Octoroon is the one I remember: one African great-grandparent out of eight. There were other terms that measured other types and degrees of racial mixing, but i don't remember them all.

All the people of these racial descriptions are Hispanic, if they speak Spanish or Portuguese as their first language. It matters where your culture originates. If it originates on the Hispanic Peninsula, in Europe, then you are Hispanic.

People like Alberto Fujimori, who was born in Lima, speaks Spanish and has been president of Peru, are more difficult to define because they fall outside of those traditional, and very incorrect, categories I listed up at the top. Is he ethnically Japanese because he is racially Asian, or is he ethnically Hispanic? I'd say the latter, but some would disagree.

For more information about how the US Census gathers data about race and ethnicity, see the Greater New Orleans Community Data site's page on race and ethnicity.

For more information on Hispanic victims of violent crime (alas, no graphs), see the Department of Justice's Office of Justice Programs page on victim characteristics, ethnicity paragraph. I haven't found anything on the perp profile at this site yet.

This set of three graphs on trends in gun violence from the OJP is rather interesting. 400,000 incidents is still appalling, but represents a substantial drop. Please note that these are "non-fatal" incidents. Gun-related homicides are not broken out in the graphs above these on the same page. You have to go to OJP's "Homicide Trends/Weapons Used" page for that.

When looking at the percentage figure of white-on-white gang killings, please don't immediately jump to the conclusion that the percentage is chiefly due to Hispanics being counted as whites. There are plenty of white gangs out there, including motorcycle gangs, skinheads, and the ever-lovely syndicate players in three-piece suits that we identify by the general, if inaccurate, term "Mafia". If you figure that these, too, count as gangs, that percentage figure suddenly doesn't look strange at all.

Regards--
Mary Anne