This page provides data for Hispanic national origin groups in 1990, 2000, and 2010 for this metropolitan region. For a national overview report on these groups, see report. Hispanics have been classified by their responses to the census’s Hispanic origin question, which asks people to list a specific origin such as Mexican or Puerto Rican. Data here for 2000 include the US2010 Project’s reallocation of many people from the “other Hispanic” category (which was overstated in the 2000 Census) to specific origin groups. The methodology is explained in detail in the national report.

For data on segregation and neighborhood characteristics we combine Central American and South American origins because these measures require using tract-level data, and the samples for specific Central and South American groups are often too small to yield reliable values.

Three segregation measures are used here. The Index of Dissimilarity (D) is the most common measure. It summarizes how differently one group is distributed across census tracts than another group. More specifically it shows how what percentage of members of one group would have to be relocated to tracts where they are currently under-represented in order to achieve an even distribution. A value of 0 means there is no segregation; a value of 100 means that there is total apartheid, no overlap between where members of one group and the other group live.

The exposure measures are more intuitive. They calculate the racial/ethnic composition of the census tract where the average group member lives. For example, if exposure of Mexicans to non-Hispanic whites were 40.0, that means the average Mexican lives in a tract that is 40.0% non-Hispanic white.

Average neighborhood characteristics are just like these exposure measures, but they show other features. Regardless of the variable shown, the value shows what the neighborhood of the average group member is like. Formally it is a weighted average of neighborhood values, weighted by the number of group members in the tract.