Go ahead and check Hispanic on your app, but it will not give you any advantage if your family is not low income.
I am Latina and my best advice to you is not to worry about this. Do your best to put together good applications and get great LORs. Buena Suerte.
Indeed. Wikipedia offers two articles on the topic that I found interesting and that others might find interesting too:
I was always given the definition of blood lines. In the Native-American lineage, it is blood lines. It was also that way when I went to college.
So what happens when you change your label to Hispanic?
Does your father’s Korean ancestry disappear and you automatically become “Hispanic”, and are no longer descended from Korean bloodlines, because it is no longer the flavor of the month?
“Hispanic”, when I was helping students with their applications-a couple of decades ago -was no, not based on “race”, but on parentage.
It was meant to help the minuscule numbers of kids, applying to colleges, whose parents were of URM lineages with limited means, unfamiliar with college prep, and had poor opportunities to enhance their educations.
Most of you wont agree with me and that’s okay.
The advantage to a person, to claim Hispanic/URM, is not the way it was defined before. There are hundreds of thousands of students now stating that they are Hispanic. The definitions have become muddied and admissions counselors look at the entire package presented by the student.
The Hispanic label is too divided and my friends, who are admissions counselors at private uni’s, aren’t really giving the label the weight it originally carried in the past.
Agree, with were integrated. Their ancestors mixed with the bloodlines.
I am originally from NJ, where there is a large Cuban population, but I wasn’t aware of the Cuban Chinese connection until my husband and I moved to Hoboken, where there were several Cuban Chinese restaurants. Most of the Chinese left Cuba over time, but there is still a small Chinatown in Havana.
Let’s leave the general discussion of what defined Hispanic for that thread
And leave this thread for answering the student’s question about their situation.
I am not sure that is true, and I don’t think it is the point. I was thinking about this some more - I have friends, for example, whose families emigrated from Europe to Latin America to escape the Nazis. They are white, so you may feel it would be inappropriate for them to describe themselves as Hispanic, but it would likely feel just as inappropriate for them to use another descriptor. That was the issue my son faced. He could, and did, legitimately check both the Pacific Islander and Asian boxes - one an URM category and the other one regarded as a kind of kiss of death on CC. Leaving either out felt illegitimate to him, so he elected to check them all and explain. For the OP to check Asian and not Hispanic might feel similarly weird, and I don’t like the idea that the OP must simply opt out to avoid the issue. As you say, the Hispanic identification likely will not impact the OP’s admissions chances, but that’s not the only way to look at this.