The headlines evoke images of a horse race: "Hispanics Draw Even With Blacks In New Census" (Washington Post, March 7, 2001); "Census Figures Show Hispanics Pulling Even with Blacks" (New York Times, March 8, 2001). But as recently as 40 years ago, Latinos didn't even have a place at the starting gate, as far as the census was concerned.

I was 11 years old in 1960. My sharpest memory of that year was the census. Mom and Dad were sitting at the kitchen table, where they conducted all important family business. Two of my brothers and I buzzed around them like bees, trying to understand what this form was that was taking their attention away from us.

"White," Black" or "Other?"
"Why are we checking ?Other'?" I asked. This was my first lesson in racial and ethnic politics in America. I watched my father fill in the space provided next to the "Other" box with the phrase, "Mexican American." There were only three choices for self-identification on the 1960 census form. The government classified all Americans as either "White," "Black" or "Other." For a young girl in a working class neighborhood just outside of Detroit, Michigan, it was yet one more thing that made her and her family different from their neighbors.

It would be a long time before I learned how significant our national head count is in setting public policy, allocating resources and determining representation in Congress. The census is at the heart of all of these matters. That is why there has been disagreement about the methods used in the 2000 count. The release of the Hispanic data by the census bureau comes at the same time Congress is taking up President Bush's tax cut plan. As advocacy groups like the National Council of La Raza (NCLR) and the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities have already pointed out, there is a great deal at stake on a number of fronts.

It seems to me that the question of who should benefit when the government is experiencing surpluses must be weighed against how children and families are faring right now, before any proposed transfer of funds via tax cuts is undertaken.

A close look at the latest census data gives us a pretty complete picture of children and families, and regardless of which minority group you've wagered on to win the numbers race, the similarities between Latinos and African Americans are compelling.

Families Below the Poverty Line
There are slightly more African-American than Hispanic families living below the poverty line. For both communities, the fact that one in five families live in poverty is too large a percentage. When the census took marital status into account, the percentage of Hispanic married couples living below the poverty line was twice as high as that of African-American married couples. There was little difference between Hispanic and Black households headed by single adults; for both groups, nearly four of every ten female-headed households are living below the poverty line.

The percentage of Black and Hispanic children under the age of 18 living in poverty is nearly equal—33 and 30 percents respectively. Dismal as it is, this picture becomes even more bleak when the nearly ten percent of white children living below the poverty line are added. To get a sense of how the census bureau defines poverty, consider this example: for a family of four (three of whom are children under the age of 18), the poverty threshold is $16,954.

Family Income Levels
When you compare the detailed tables for family income, there is little difference between African-American and Latino families until you get to the $75,000-and-over bracket. Even then, the percentage of Black families is still only slightly higher than Hispanics (15.6 and 12.8 percents respectively). Nearly the same percentage of families for both groups have incomes less than $25,000 (39.7 percent for Blacks; 38.5 percent for Hispanics). Only slightly more Latino families have incomes between $25,000 and $74,999 (48.5 percent compared to 44.7 percent).

Again, significant differences occurred when marital status was taken into account. The percentage of families comprised of Black married couples with incomes of $50,000 or more is 50.8 percent, compared to 35 percent of Hispanic married-couple families at the same income level.

Gender is far more significant than race or ethnicity when you compare income levels. More than six of ten Hispanic and African-American families headed by females have incomes less than $25,000. Nearly the same percentages apply to Hispanic and African-American families headed by males with incomes of $25,000 or more (60.6 and 65.8 percents, respectively).

Education
The greatest challenge facing Latinos in this country is reaching parity in education. The census data show that the battle to reduce the numbers of Latinos who don't complete high school is failing. The percentage of Latinos 25 years of age and older who have less than a ninth-grade education is 27.3. That's more than one of every four Hispanics! By comparison, only 7.1 percent of African Americans fall into this category.

What is most disheartening about this is that Hispanic communities across the country have been addressing this issue for as long as I can remember. During the 1970s the bilingual education movement gained its greatest support from those who saw it as a tool to combat the high drop-out rate for Latino students. This is a very complex problem for a community which itself is very complex. Mexican Americans, the largest of the Hispanic ethnic groups, have the smallest percentage of high school graduates when compared to Puerto Ricans, Cuban and Central/South Americans.

This is precisely why Latino leaders like NCLR's Raul Yzaguirre are calling for greater federal investments in Head Start and early childhood development programs like the Family Start program in Denver, Colorado. "A large share of our nation's future economic growth will depend on the millions of Hispanic children in our school system, on the opportunities we give them, and on the priorities we set for ourselves today," said Yzaguirre in a recent statement on the census report.

Finding Common Ground
The census data is revealing the rich texture of America. For Black and Latino communities, the numbers paint a strikingly similar picture. Yet, from my perspective, leaders from both communities have done little to recognize our similarities and work together to remove the competitive tensions that characterize our relationship with each other.

When my 11-year-old mind processed how my father identified us in 1960 as neither "White" nor "Black" but as Mexican American, I began to imagine the possibility that we who did not fit neatly into those two designated categories could actually walk in both worlds. I was much too young to realize how na?ve a notion that was. During the next ten years and beyond, I learned how difficult it is to tear down the racial and ethnic barriers that divide all of us.

Changing cultural norms may be eroding these barriers. The 2000 Census is the first to recognize that a significant number of Americans, especially young people, identify themselves as multiracial. As more and more of us stake a claim in both the Hispanic and Black communities, it will increasingly difficult for national leaders to ignore the obvious—we are much stronger when we join together to make lives better for our children and families than when we act in isolation.