 Thank you all for being here tonight and thank you, Dr. Laura Ecomes for joining us tonight and celebrating your book and talking about this subject while we celebrate Latinx Heritage Month. I'm excited. The San Francisco Public Library acknowledges that we occupy the unceded ancestral homeland of the Ramitush Sholoni tribal people who are the original inhabitants of the San Francisco peninsula. We recognize that we benefit from living and working on their traditional homeland as uninvited guests. We affirm we affirm their sovereign rights as first peoples and wish to pay our respects to the ancestors, elders and relatives of the Ramitush community. And that link that I put in the chat box has a list to a great reading source of Bay Area, local Indigenous culture and resources and websites that you can check out and learn way more from. As I mentioned, this is part of our Latinx Heritage Month and we still have a lot of events coming up, including an in-person event. Yeah, and this is going to be at our main library. Please come on down the main library. And this is an October 12th on a Wednesday on a Tuesday. And it's going to be in the lower level in our Latinx community room and it's nice and big. We can space out. We can enjoy Tomas Monez and Michelle Gonzalez talking about their books, their history of Bay Area. Tomas is a new father after having grown children already and is in a new relationship. And Michelle Gonzalez was a drummer of a punk rock band. So lots of Bay Area history. If you've heard of Rad Dad, that is Tomas. So come on and check it out. We're also celebrating Filipino American History Month at the same time. On Saturday, we are having an author, Extravaganza, hot off the press, nine authors reading from their latest works. Come and check that one out. And we are celebrating for on the same page, which if you don't know what that is, that is our bimonthly read at San Francisco Public Library where we encourage all of San Francisco to read the same book at the same time. And for September, October, we are all reading the undocumented Americans book club is on October 25, the next day, and the author will not be at the book club. The next day, the author will be in convo with Jonathan Blitzer. So that's Karla Cornejo Bill of Incensio in conversation with Jonathan Blitzer discussing her book, The Undocumented Americans, and this book you can go pick up at all of the locations that are open, which are all of them. And there's many of them available for you to choose from. Just pick it right up off the shelf. And I want to talk about the amazing artist Lydia Ortiz who is our spotlight artist for Filipino American Heritage Month. Check out her Instagram. Come see her talk about her artwork on October 28 to 7pm in our virtual library. All right. So, again, thank you all for being here on this beautiful evening in the Bay we got finally got some cold weather. I want to introduce you tonight to Dr. Laura E Gomez. Gomez teaches at UCLA where she's affiliated with three diverse academic units. Her primary appointment is in law school. In 2000, she became the only she became only the second Latina tenured at a top 20 law school in the US. She's held joint appointments in the sociology department, a department consistently ranked in the top 10 nationally, and the Department of Chicana and Chicano studies and Central American studies, which she offers the nation which offers the nation's only PhD in Chicana and Chicano studies. Laura's book, inventing Latinos, the new story of American racism was named by NPR is one of the best books of the year. It's part history part guide for the future. And it's a groundbreaking examination of how Latinos new collective racial identity has changed the way race functions in our country. And I am going to turn it over. Oh, there will be time for q amp a so don't be shy get those q amp a in the question and answer function or the chat. Let's have a nice intimate night Philip that river of chat with your thoughts. And I'm going to turn it over now to Dr. Gomez. Thank you so much it is wonderful to be here virtually at the San Francisco public library. I'm a huge fan of libraries and huge fan of San Francisco so it's a wonderful match. And I agree I hope that we can have a lot of exchange as we as we move along so. I'm going to talk about inventing Latinos and the central conceit of this book is how should we understand Latinos in racial terms. I want to begin by just saying that Americans, by and large, whether we're talking about middle school and high school students whether we're talking about the people who run the nation's most powerful publishing and media businesses from whom most of us receive our information. How do. How do most Americans understand race, most understand the broad outlines of racial history in the US as being about the history of blacks and that the role that they have played in American history. And for example, there's common consensus about the basic storyline, we know that the first African slaves were imported into the original colonies and 1619. We know that slavery was protected and even enshrined in our Constitution. We know that we thought fought a civil war over slavery and that Lincoln issued the emancipation proclamation following that war. We understand that the radical Republican Congress, incidentally without any representation from the Confederacy and acted the 1314th and 15th amendments to the Constitution, essentially remaking the Constitution during the reconstruction era. And we know that the promise of those amendments was stopped by the Supreme Court in Plessy versus Ferguson in 1897, which itself ushered in and protected Jim Crow, or what we know as segregation by law in every state of the Union. And we know that mass protest by African Americans and their allies forced Congress and to presidents to enact the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act in the 1960s. We understand and I think agree on that basic outline of histories, you know, we could not that everybody in the United States agrees about everything that I just said but there is a basic consensus about that history. So what do you know about the history of Latinos and their racial oppression in this country. What is the crucible of Latino racialization in the US that that I think that we Latinas Latinos Latinx understand and experience at a visceral level. I think many Latinos answers those questions. It was published in August 2020 but I finished writing it just as we went into pandemic lockdown in March of 2020, and well before the tragic murder of George Floyd by Minneapolis police on Memorial Day. So what I'd like to do is give you a sense of the four substantive chapters of the book. I know that in a talk of this length it might be better to just focus on one chapter, but I want to try to give you as much of the kind of sense of this broad history of Latinos and this broad sociology of Latinos and racism in the US or what I call anti Latino racism. To do that, I think we have to get a taste of these four major chapters which span continents and span centuries. So, in chapter one entitled, we are here because you were there. To survey the long history of US Empire in northern South America. We must understand imperialism and immigration as part of the same continuum, and our immigration law and policy should reflect that fact. Of course we know that it doesn't today. So, even though US intervention in Latin America took different forms. There are several variations of imperialism. And so I want to just talk a little bit about the, I'll focus in this section on Central America. But that's just one example I could talk about the Spanish Caribbean, I could talk about Mexico, but I'll focus on Central America to illustrate the nature of this chapter of the book. The, the intensity and cumulative nature of US imperialism in Central America is staggering. It's staggering in time, take for example, Nicaragua from 1916 when Marines occupied Nicaragua for 20 years, gunboat diplomacy was the euphemism at the time. In 1936, when the US installed Samosa as dictator, allowing him and his sons to control Nicaragua for for more than four decades. To 1990, when President Reagan ordered 20,000 troops to Nicaragua, along with a covert operation to support the anti Sandanista Contras. The strategy was to train Central Americans police forces and militaries to have our military train those forces. We trained at least 60,000 Latin American military officers at the School of the Americas over six decades from 1940 to 2000. In Nicaragua, the Samosa regime slaughtered 50,000 people in the 1970s. 50,000 of Nicaragua's 3.5 million population, which would be the equivalent to 5 million casualties in the US today, just while we're on the subject of passing milestones and thinking about 700,000 dead from COVID. So the story that I was telling in Nicaragua can be repeated in in other countries of the region. We know, for example that that in El Salvador, although there wasn't a 1916 invasion of the US. There was an increasing Cold War fervor fervor that led us in 1961 to support our right wing presidential candidate there. And in the 1980s, we provided $6 billion to the Salvadoran military and it grew from 15,000 to 52,000 in a few years. And you probably know that it was those death squads that murdered 75,000 people, mostly indigenous Salvadorans in the 1980s. And it was those kinds of events that brought the migrants and that are still bringing migrants to our door today. So whether it was corporate capitalism in Guatemala, a covert operations in El Salvador, or overt military occupation in Nicaragua. Those effects of the United States being an empire or what produced the dislocation in those countries, and then the movement to the United States movement that we label as undocumented immigration or as unjustified asylum immigration. In chapter two, I talk about what I call idealized mestizaje. And I talk about how that has spawned anti black and anti Indian racism within the Latino community. So here I want to focus on the Spanish Caribbean. If we think about Central America, if we if we think about the 62 million Latinos today in the United States, almost seven out of 10 of them are Mexican American. Another 10% are Central American, and another 17% are from the Spanish Caribbean, Puerto Rican Cuban and Dominican. So, in speaking about the Spanish Caribbean. And again, I could talk about Mexico I could talk about the Central American and tell some version of this story but when we focus on the Spanish Caribbean. And it allows us to see the ways in which an earlier empire, the Spanish Empire shaped race relations in in Latin America, and then how that has shaped to some extent, anti Latino racism in the United States. When the Spanish arrived in the Americas, 500 years ago, there were 80 million indigenous people, but only 10 million survived Spanish contact Spanish genocide and Spanish enslavement. And those 10 million indigenous people at the time were joined by unwillingly joined by 12 million African slaves, whom the Spanish imported via the Caribbean and then throughout the rest of the Americas including North America. And what's important to know for this part of my story is that, unlike the British, where there was an effort to contain mestizaje, or interracial marriage and sexual unions. Under Spanish colony colonialism. There was, there was not a effort to stop that mixture. And many of us can see that today in our, our faces in our, our, the range of faces that we see in our families. But, but I don't, I want to be careful not to romanticize mestizaje, because I also want to emphasize that, along with this racial mixture came what we might think of as colorism, a preference for lighter skin, closer to white looking people, and specifically anti black and anti indigenous racism among Latinos. So, in effect, as we think about, as we think about Caribbean Latinos, generally, we see a significant component of African ancestry, but we also see a denial of being black. So for example, only in the year 2010 did the Dominican, Dominican census actually count how many people in the country were black. And there was, instead, prior to that, an effort to deny the nation's blackness, partly because the Dominican Republic shares an island with Haiti. And it was the mythology, the national mythology of the Dominican Republic was and largely is that Haiti is black, and the Dominican Republic is Indian, or Indian, right. It's a really different way of thinking about India than we might think about it in San Francisco in Los Angeles where I am right in terms of thinking about indigenous people. But it was a way to distance themselves from Dominicans. For example, we still see the effects of this history in the United States, if you look at the 2000 and the 2010 census. And I don't have the precise data from the 2020 census yet, but I'm going to talk about the 2020 census a little later. The 2000 census and the 2000 census, more Dominicans in the US than any other Latino national origin group identify as black. But that's still only 8% of Dominicans who identify as black, even though I would argue, many of those of us who are not phenotypically black would identify them as black, right. So we see these complexities that come out of the history of Spanish colonialism and that then are transported into the US. I don't want to just say like transfer to the US as if there's not then an interaction, because then, you know what we have is we have the white supremacy of the Caribbean and Latin America interacting with the white supremacy of the United States and we have these complex layers of racism and anti Latino racism. One more one more example that I want to give in this chapter from this chapter and chapter two is to move to Mexico. Many of you might be familiar with the idea of La Raza Cosmica from Jose Vasconcelos who was a Mexican philosopher who wrote in the 1920s that Mexico was the greatest nation because it had the five major races of the world, but they were all combined into one into one cosmic race into one sort of completely Mestizo race. And what I talk about in this portion of the book that that very idea of the valorization of Mestizaje that in order to be Mexican. One has to be Mestiza or Mestizo itself was a way of repressing and subordinating Afro Mexicanos and indigenous Mexicanos who did not wish to simulate to assimilate. Right. And so, that's a little bit about what I get into in chapter two just to give you a sense of the complexities of Latino racial identity and when I talk about the 2020 census I'm going to come back to some of those themes. Chapter three is entitled the elusive quest for whiteness. And here I want to focus most specifically on Mexican Americans, although the chapter also covers Puerto Ricans. I mentioned earlier that by far Mexican Americans are the largest component of Latinos in the United States. And Mexican Americans are also the longest present national origin subgroup of the United States. So for example, we trace our history, those of us who are Chicanos who are Mexican Americans trace our history in the United States to the, the incorporation of Texas and Texas statehood in 1845. Or to the invasion of Mexico in 1846 and then the subsequent forceful taking of half of Mexico's territory, all of California, all of what we know of as the Southwest and even some of the kind of center west. As far north as parts of Wyoming, Utah, Colorado. And so, you know, when we, we think about Mexican Americans, then it's not surprising that eight out of 10 of them are our citizens, a higher group from either than either Central Americans or Spanish Caribbean's. So, in a previous book that I wrote manifest destinies, the making of the Mexican American race. I wrote about the late 19th century racial dynamics that arose with the taking by force, right, via this, this war and this imperialism of, of Mexico's foreign territory. And what happened to those 115,000 people non non indigenous or partly indigenous Mexicans who lived in this territory that the US took by conquest. Those people became citizens under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and they became US citizens at a time when only whites were allowed to become citizens in the US. And so I use the term in that book off white to describe those people's sort of ability to claim a certain kind of whiteness, and that kind of goes back to that messy so here that we were talking about, and the fact that the, that Mexican Americans and other Latinos, very limited claim, very limited claim to, to European to Spanish ancestry was enough to give them this special treatment. This particular favorable treatment compared to African Americans at the time, who were not allowed to to even become citizens under the dread Scott case of 1856, for example. So, Mexican Americans received this huge advantage. And yet I want to fast forward to a naturalization case of 1907, called in Ray Rodriguez that was decided in San Antonio, Texas, and a naturalization case is a case where an individual who is not a citizen is seeking to become an American citizen. And this person, this should have been a routine kind of a case the person had, Mr. Rodriguez had lived inside born citizen children. But the case became controversial, because in 1907, San Antonio, white San Antonio elites were disagreeing over what whether Mexican Americans should be allowed to become part of the, the polity part of the citizenry. There was a group of, of white citizens who believe that Mexican Americans should not be allowed to naturalize and to basically we're talking about voter fraud, and too many Mexicans voting. And there was another group, agricultural, agribusiness basically interest, who said, No, we need Mexican workers, and therefore, we're going to have to allow them to become citizens. And what's fascinating about this case is that the judge goes through a, a discussion of whether or not Mr. Rodriguez was white. And he has a cultural anthropologist come in and testify. And the anthropologist says, he doesn't look white to me, you know, he looks like an Indian. And Mr. Rodriguez says, Oh, no, I'm not an Indian, you know, I'm a pure bled Mexican, whatever, whatever that is. And in the end, the judge decides that this prior precedent of the Treaty of Guadalupe de Algo is, is enough to grant Mr. Rodriguez this citizenship in a sense that he was white enough for naturalization. Now, one might think that that case in 1907 was this kind of victory reaffirming after, after the Treaty of Guadalupe de Algo in 1848 reaffirming Mexicans inclusion, you know, sort of on the white or the off white side of the ledger as opposed to the black side. But the fact is that it was actually the beginning of a new kind of racialized oppression of Mexican migrants in the form of immigration enforcement. And specifically in 1917, the creation of the first temporary worker program by Congress, which allowed basically Mexicans to come in and work for a short time, but did not allow them to become citizens. And then infamously, we got the Brasero program during World War Two, and which brought all of these Mexican Americans, maybe some of your parents, those of you in the audience came in, or grandparents came in the 40s, 50s or 60s through that program and again, not invited to become part of the nation, just invited to provide labor. And so the illustration that I'm providing here is that there's kind of a back and a forth that there were times in US history when Mexican Americans were relative to African Americans getting benefits of citizenship. And there were other times where Mexicans were excluded from citizenship, especially compared to the post civil war situation where there were African Americans who were allowed to become, you know, at least African American men who were voting, right, and who were receiving those educations in segregated black colleges and universities, but who were receiving those educations right so I'm just getting at some of the complexity here. I'm happy to take more, more questions about it. But I do want to just suggest that this history of Mexican Americans seeking to claim that they were white begins to break down after World War Two. And that is because Mexican American men fought disproportionately in World War Two and died in battle disproportionately in World War Two. And those who survived came home, usually to the Southwest, and were met with severe discrimination. And even some of those who died came home and were met with that discrimination in that their families were not allowed to bury them or hold their funerals and white whites only funeral homes. So you really start to see, so you start to see that, that breakdown after World War Two, and then in the 1960s, the late 1960s and the 1970s, with the rise of the Chicano movement itself, drawing a lot of inspiration from the black civil rights movement. You see a further breakdown and a further embracing by Chicanos of, of their non white status as their status as people of color. So today, we are seeing some of these trends visible in the 2020 census, in an even stronger direction. And I want to, I want to turn to chapter four to talk about, about those dynamics. So chapter four is titled, to count, we must be counted. The census plays a central role of making race by creating and defining racial categories. But it also illustrates the social construction of race because census categories change over time, right, they're not carved in stone. We don't have the same racial categories on the census today that we did in 1950, that we did in 1900, that we did in 1850. At a metal, a metal level, the census helps define the nation and who, who in the nation is valued, and who is devalued. And so I want to talk about three key census moments involving Latinos. 1930 to 1940 is the first moment. The second moment is 1970 to 1980. And then 2020 is the third moment that I want to talk about. So this in 1930. The census included Mexican as a race category. Now this was not the first time that a national origin had been included as the race category, because Chinese had been already added as a race category, and Japanese had already been added as a race category, and even a religious category had been added, Hindi. So, but the, the, the, the three standard race categories had been white Indian, meaning Native American, and black, but then there were periods of time. Prior to the Civil War, and then even around the turn of the 20th century, where there were multiple black categories right so it wasn't just black, it was in many of those censuses it for example. It was also mulatto, and also quadrune, one quarter black and octarune terms that are offensive to us today, but that reflected changing ideas about how we would categorize blacks. So what, what happened that led the census to add this category of Mexican as a racial category in 1930. It's very similar to why this the census had added the category of Chinese in 1880. Because there was increasing labor competition between whites and Mexicans, increasing immigration after the Mexican Revolution and the, the, the way that pushed so many Mexicans to immigrate north. And the, the additional reality was that the data on where Mexicans lived that was generated from the 1930 census was actually used to deport as many as 1 million Mexicans and Mexican Americans. Mexicans deported to Mexico and Mexican Americans, citizens who were deported to Mexico during the 1930s because of the depression. So, so because of this massive repatriation in fact in Los Angeles County, one third of Mexican Americans either were forcibly repatriated to Mexico or self deported term that we, we know, infamously know from the Trump era. And so this actually led Mexican American civil rights leaders to demand that Mexican be removed from the census racial categories in the 1940 census. So then you get the 1940 census and you go all the way through the 1970 census without there being any, any Latino or Mexican American or any other national origin subgroup counted as a racial category. What happens in the second period that I've identified 1970 to 1980. So, in, once the 1970 results come out, the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Foundation, mild death sued the federal government alleging that there was a severe undercount of Mexican Americans in the 1970 census. Now, in the end, the lawsuit was not successful in, in, in itself, right so Maldiff did not win that loss of lawsuit, but Maldiff won the war in that there was that was the start of this tremendous pressure, pressure that ended up eventually also being brought to bear in Congress on the president to eventually push for 1980s edition of a count of Hispanics Latinos. Now, the way that that was brought into the census is actually something that will look familiar to all of you, because it has it had to, it had to do with something we call the Hispanic ethnicity question. So, instead of Hispanics, which was the most popular pan pan ethnic term for, for Latino national origin groups at the time. Instead of that being added as a racial category, there was a separate question asked, are you are you not Hispanic, right. Now, let's keep in mind something else. In 1970. You and I, if we had been filling out censuses at that time, I was, I was around in 1970 but I was not filling out the census. We would not have been filling out our census and deciding what racial group we belong to. We were not self identifying on the census instead. A third party enumerator would go house by house and fill out and basically interview someone in that house, usually a head of household. Usually that was a man and say, okay, who lives in this house. And then that third party enumerator would not ask what their race was, they would just decide what their race was. So in 1970 that changes and we have self identification. And then there was an additional change in 1980, which is that Latinos are for the first time counted the first time other than the 1930, which was only Mexicans, right. We're seeing as a real victory for Latino civil rights leaders, community organizers and politicians because we could begin to say if we were counted, we are here. We are part of the nation, we are going to be counted. Right. In particular, we could begin to get sort of our fair share of resources because we know that census data is used to deliver federal funding in particular federal funding related to infrastructure related to schooling and anti poverty resources, and so forth. So we see this question emerge in 1980. But we don't see the incorporation on to the race question. So the pattern that we start to see. And it happens in 1980 happens in 1990 90 in 2000 in 2010 is that we see about equal numbers of Latinos, those who identify yes they are Latino on the census. About equal numbers choosing to say that they're on the race question, white, as our choosing to say that they are some other race. Okay, let me just say that again to make sure we're all on the same page. So from 1980 through 2010. We have a basic pattern that it's a slightly more than, than half but roughly half Latinos are saying they're white on the census, and are saying that there's some other race and then we have some others who are saying they're indigenous and they're black. Okay, but as I said before, giving you the example of the Dominicans, those numbers were not particularly large. Okay, but this changes with the data we've just gotten in 2020. And I want to talk about that under, and this is not from the book because this data wasn't in the book but it's it's a heading that I have titled how Trump tried to break the census and ended up fixing Latinx racial consciousness. How Trump tried to break the census and ended up fixing Latinx racial consciousness. So there's two parts of this discussion. And actually part a here is in the book, because it is the three wrong headed census moves that the Trump administration made. And then part B, which is the new data that we have from 2020 is why we should be, why should we should be paying attention to the 2020 Latino race data and what it tells us about Latino racialization in the United States. The three stupid things that the Trump administration did vis-a-vis the census. Number one, Trump rejected the Census Bureau's painstakingly researched recommendation to combine the Latino ethnicity question with the race question into one question. And that would involve having that one race question and having the option to say, my race is Latino, Latina, Latinx. Okay. So Trump rejected that. Number two, Trump tried to add a citizenship question, which would have been its first appearance on a census since 1950. Although the Supreme Court refused to allow the change due to an administrative law technicality, the months long talk about the proposal in the press and social media likely led some Latinos and others to skip the census. And there are, there are some early signs that there is also an an undercount. And the third thing that Trump did is that after the data had been collected, Trump directed the Census Bureau to exclude undocumented persons from the overall count. Now, there was a big problem because the census said, well, how could we possibly know who is documented or undocumented? We didn't ask that question. And the census also said, this doesn't make any sense. This is something that is against the law. We can't do that because the Constitution says it's our job as the Census Bureau to count all persons living in the United States. The Constitution doesn't say count all census, all citizens every 10 years, count all voters every 10 years, or count all adults every 10 years. It says count all persons every 10 years. And we count all persons for the purpose of redrawing congressional districts every 10 years. So part B, what are three ways that our early 2020 census results show the racialization of the nation's 62 million Latinos changing. There are three big changes in Latinx self identification from 2010 to 2020 that I'd like to talk about. Number one, the number of what I call census white Latinos is down by 15 millions. I call those Latinos who select the white box on the census, census white Latinos. And my implication in doing so is that those Latinos don't actually think they're white. Of course, some of them, no doubt do. But the research shows that the vast majority of Latinos who default to white on the census race question. For example, one study showed that only 2% of those Latinos who choose white think that other people see them as white. Census white Latinos went from 50% of all Latinos in 2010 to 20% in 2020. Second, second big change, the increase in other race Latinos. This makes the second largest race in the United States, other after white. Okay, so let me just say that again. So what's the biggest race in the in the census in the US, according to the 2020 census, it's still white. What's the second biggest race. It's other. That's the second biggest race. And 98% of those who choose other race on the census are Latinos who are not satisfied with their options because they didn't get that combined question that the Census Bureau researched and recommended because also that if they had Latinos as a race option, all of those people who are choosing other race would have gone into that Latino race category. Okay, so the third trend from 2020 is that there's a big increase in the number of Latinos who are choosing one or more races. So that was that number was about 3% of Latinos. I think that's right. Sorry, I don't have it right written down right here but was about I think it was about 3% in 2010, and it's like triple that for 2020. Now, the to me what these three 2020 results show is that the vast majority of Latinos have left behind the idea, perhaps the dream or the pipe dream of becoming white, or pretending to be white in America. Now, there's a lot more that needs to be explored. I don't have the data yet to be able to, for example, tell you, is it younger or older Latinos who are choosing to say that they're not white. Is it Latinos who live in California versus Florida is it Central Americans versus Cuban Americans. Right, we don't have all of that data yet, although I can make some pretty good guesses based on what I've seen in the past and I'm happy to answer those questions. But the bigger point and I'm going to end on this point is, why are these changes occurring. What is it that happened after 2010 and before 2020 that made the difference. Number one, the Trump effect. Everything from spewing hatred from his campaign announcement at Trump power in 2015 to Trump's follower Patrick crucius driving 12 hours from Dallas to El Paso in August 2019 to slaughter invading Hispanics. Right, the Trump effect made it crystal clear that Latinos in this country are not white. But there's also an affirmative recognition, I think that has occurred. In particular with the massive social protest of the summer 2020 against police violence and other forms of systemic racism. The 2020 census data signals to me that Latinos are collectively casting their lot with African Americans as people of color with all that represents about who we are in this nation. So much I'd be happy to answer your questions. Oh, thank you Laura there's so much there. That is. Yeah, Trump is done too much. Okay, we do have several questions. And they kind of go together and actually this person's question kind of aligns with myself I, you know as a public servant, I did a lot of work on the census. Prior to the pandemic, and I became very disheartened you know like working on this it's just so much effort and so much went into it and then it just felt so flawed and so broken. And, you know, it's so hard to pump everyone up, get your count here and I just kept feeling oh my God this I'm like forcing people into taking this flawed thing, but our question here is, they, this person to has worked in the census and to be such a flawed system. Do you think with the pandemic and political climate Trump that the census 2020 is completely inaccurate. Well I don't think it's completely inaccurate I do think that there's an undercount. And the question is, and you know, every state is now having to do its redistricting right California's redistricting commission is in the process of doing that. That's probably what happens. In fact every county is doing it to right and then the statewide commission is redoing it. And so, what's happening right now is that we're figuring out, we're starting to estimate how big is the undercount. And then there's the other problem that the questioner might be getting at which is, look, we're just not very satisfied with these questions with these choices, right, and there is that problem but but the way that I've always seen the other race. Latinos is kind of a protest. And I'm one of those other race Latinos when I fill out the census, you know. So, to the set to in it to the extent that we don't like the options then we're voting by choosing other we're just like, I'm not going to play your game census Bureau. And you know there's a really long in in kind of devastating back story to what the the census Bureau has done in the past with these other race Latinos for example, if you go back to 1990. The census would do something that was called hot decking, which was if somebody said that they were other. They would basically then go and look at other Latinos in their household to see if they said they were white or black. And, and move the person who said they were other into whatever category other people in their household said they would work or even worse they would say. Okay, the people in this house say that they're Latino and say that they're other, but the people next door say that they're Latino and they're white so we're just going to call these people white. You know, there. So, in a sense, everybody else filling out the senses had self identification, but these people's choices were being invalidated now the senses in 2000. And that's one reason that the senses was saying we need to combine these questions so that we actually get rid of that other protest vote. So, you know, those two things are happening. Yes, there is an undercount. I guess the data is flawed, but I also think these 15 million people who in 2010 were white, but in 2020 are either other, or their multiple races. Those are the same people, but something happened in their heads where they're saying, Okay, census, you're going to give me those options. I'm going to do something different with it, because I know who I am. And I know what Trump is saying about people and I know, you know, who my alliances are with and I know that I'm racially oppressed systematically the way say African Americans are and so forth. Yes, I am reminded of Tommy orange who was our one city one book he's like, everyone should just put indigenous on the senses. You know, let me just say this, I don't want to I wanted to get the other questions but it's a fascinating thing that I left out of my talk because I just was saving time but what happened in 1970 when we went to self identification, the number of Native American people in the United States went up by 40%. I don't know if that was all a good thing. But so, so I might push back on him but I understand his sentiment. Yes, he writes from sentiment for sure. And then other people in the audience are saying the same thing that by checking other, they felt like it was a protest in a small way. And, yes, exactly. And that other has become the default choice because you know, what else are they going to do. Well for Latinos. Yes, but not other other member 98% of those choosing other Latino. They're not from other groups. Yes. Our one audience member says, she remembers checking other when there was just the choice of Asian, because there was no other choices under Asian. That was a while back. Good for you. Okay, here we have a question. I appreciate. And appreciation. Is it privileged, it's a privilege to be here, like back in college. Wow. And with a UCLA professor what a treat Dr Gomez thank you for your time and commitment to knowledge. And thank you as a feel for the invitation. Well thank you. That's really nice of you we appreciate that we were definitely talking about academics in the public sector and we definitely appreciate you coming out here tonight for that and yeah, thank you for the nice comment. Okay, and here's a question that comes up a lot for us in the library and it's definitely kind of a hot hot issue right now is, what do you think of the term Latin X, and how do you, what's the difference this other questions kind of tying in what what difference between Latino, Latina Latin X. I figured that question would come up so I didn't put it in my remarks because I figured we'd talk about it now so I'm really glad that you guys brought that up. So, let me distinguish first between terms that are what we might refer to as national origin subgroups so if somebody says they're Cuban American. They say they're Salvadoran they say they're Mexican Mexican American. Those are national origin subgroups and most people would prefer to be called by that term and call themselves by that term. But there are times when it is useful or necessary to talk about all of those groups together. So then we need a, a pan ethnic terminology and so the older kind of more popular term was Hispanic. That has long been replaced by Latino in California, although if you go to New Mexico you go to Arizona you go to Texas. That would not necessarily be the case. Hispanic would still be in heavy use. Now, more more recently there's been a critique of the term Latino, because it has that Oh at the end and in Spanish, we know that the Oh is signifying a masculine identity, as opposed to Latina, right. And Latin X is seen as a non binary terminology right so I often use them interchangeably or sometimes I say alright Latina slash X slash or you know there's you see this all this variation. Interestingly, although Latin X is picking up some momentum. There was a recent survey that showed that only 4% of Latinos preferred the term Latin X. And partly that's because it's, it's a term that's more used. I hear it a lot on the UCLA campus. It's getting up some popularity. But if you go and ask somebody's grandparents, I don't know. There can be young grandparents too so yeah that might not be the right terminology but but various places where people are just like, No, I'm not going to use that term and some people get really upset about it. But it is a dilemma for San Francisco Public Library and other entities what term do we use. And, you know, I think I think we will continue having creative differences and and conversation about it. Absolutely we will. I started back at SFPL in 2019 and at that time, we called it Latin Hispanic Heritage Month, which I think is the official kind of term still. Well actually, I think the official term still is Hispanic heritage. Yeah it is. And you know that by the way that has been the terminology for about 30 years. Yeah that's a long time. That's a long time. You know at that time we definitely started delving into about what are we going to change this what are these connotations and this is the first time that we have actually changed it to the Latin X Heritage Month. And it has not been without kickback for sure. So, trying to you know incorporate everybody and you know as a public sector serving everybody and encompassing all is not easy. It's definitely not easy and yeah it's the it's kind of a mixed bag but the older folks seem to be like, you know, hanging on, hanging on. I remember my grandfather hating the term Hispanic, you know he did not go for it did not did not. Right, friends, thank you so much. Dr Laura Gomez we so appreciate you sharing your amazing wisdom and knowledge with us here in the public library community and friends and audience members we appreciate you for always being here with us tonight, and we'll see you soon. And thank you so much and get Laura's book and I'm going to do that screen share.