@skieurope then perhaps you can clarify what it is that you mean when you say they are not in the same bucket? Because if you are simply meaning that they are not in the same economic buckets, that is true, and their ethnicity or race has nothing to do with that evaluation. But, if you are talking about an admissions evaluation based on enthicity/race then their are indeed in the same bucket and their economic status is unrelated.
There are two different boxes, race and ethnicity. My daughter was adopted into a US white family. She gets to check Asian on any application under race. She would not really get to check Asian if it was an ethnicity question about her family (but it is never asked). The only ethnicity question is ‘Latino/ white origin’ or ‘Latino/non-white’ and that is self-identifying.
If there is a special scholarship, that scholarship can ask whatever it wants about background.
But I don’t understand if the mother was adopted as a baby in a closed adoption there would be any information on her ethnicity. Race may be on the paperwork, but if it isn’t than everyone is just guessing by looking at her.
“Failure to act/look etc. Cuban doesn’t make her any less Cuban.” Right. But there’s the simple fact of the check box and then the holistic review. OP is free to claim Cuban.
“The college gets to check the hispanic box for either scenario, and that’s ultimately what they are tracking.” Tracking is a different matter than admitting holistically. In each individual case, after stats, rigor, ECs, how one comes across as a thinking and activated individual or not, they can look to see the perspective one brings. Any individual. No surprise, we’ve been saying this for a long time.
So, I’m simply curious how OP offers a perspective. It seems his mother knows she was born of a Cuban mother and I wonder what else she (and OP) were exposed to.
Because it is not simply “an admissions evaluation based on ethicity/race.”
And Puerto Ricans have no special advantage, either.
I hope this isn’t a case where posters think you check the box and get sent to final committee. All the holistic criteria apply.
“Holistic” is just a smokescreen. The real key is race, not ethnicity, so any bump for “Hispanic” is mixed, because what the colleges are really looking for is non-white Hispanic. Puerto Rican has historically been a big bump for admissions because of the massive underperformance of Puerto Rican students on traditional academic measures.
Race can be a huge advantage in elite college admission. There has been tons of research done on this. Start with Bok and Bowen, The Shape of the River (1998), which among other things pointed out that in the absence of affirmative action certain non-white demographics would only constitute 1% of Harvard’s entering class (rather than 10% at that time - that’s a 1000% advantage for checking the right box by the way). That was written by the then President of Harvard University. You can also start reading in the literature about “achievement gaps” and you will see which races/ethnicities are being targeted by affirmative action policies.
Holistic is real. Dismiss it at your own risk. Don’t send your kid off applying uninformed as to what “whole” matters.
IME, PR is no special bump. Yes, sure, any adcoms can make a note when a kid is URM. But at the top schools, the process is more than catching a URM/any URM, regardless of strengths and match. For our own kids, be properly informed, so to help them maximize their chances. Btw, 1998 is ice ages ago, in admissions. Even ten years is.
But let’s stay on topic and there’s only one thread that allows assumptions and bold statements about race.
Again, about holistic admissions, it’s worth keeping some historical perspective. At the time of The Shape of the River, twenty years ago, Harvard had been touting its “holistic” admissions for more than 60 years. And yet in that book, which ran to over 500 pages, no metric was discussed other than SAT + GPA. Not one. Twenty years is a blink of an eye for an institution almost 400 years old, and is not even very long in comparison with the “holistic” admissions era, which started in the 1920s.
No one is saying that race is the sole criterion for admission at any school. It’s not enough - of course - simply to check a box and be admitted.
However, for certain groups, race is critical to the admissions decision - much more than a mere “bump” in an otherwise holistic process. In this thread I am just suggesting that identifying as Cuban is unlikely to have much of an effect, unless one can identify as Afro-Cuban or Native American (and there are exceptionally few Cubans of Native American descent).
@labegg That’s the thing - nothing is unrelated for schools that evaluate holistically. It is similar to users who ask hypotheticals about 2 students that differ in one aspect, but all other things are equal. All other things are never equal.
As other users have said, one can choose to believe or disbelieve a college that says they evaluate holistically; I’m not getting involved in that argument.
As I said before, where the law allows, the college will determine how much of a bump, if any, it will give any hook. A college can choose to give different levels of bump to 2 different Cuban-Americans (or 2 different African-Americans, etc.); that does not make one applicant less Cuban/Latin@/hispanic than the other.
As with most users’ comments on this site, feel free to mentally add “in my opinion” at the end of each sentence. 
I was born in a country where the vast majority of people are a single race. A race that I am not. Can’t see a BC helping in any way.