Hispanics in New Mexico

A demographic study with R and TidyCensus

Motivation

This article will explore some interesting aspects of New Mexico’s racial demographics using R and the TidyCensus package. The US Census Bureau makes an amazing amount of data available to the public on https://census.gov. The site allows you to easily search for and download demographic information with myriad variables and geographic subsets. The site also provides an API for programmatic access, and R is fortunate to have the TidyCensus package to easily grab data of interest to the programmer.

New Mexico has relatively large Native American and Hispanic populations. Nearly half of New Mexico residents are Hispanic, compared to a national average of around 20% (we’ll calculate it later). The profile of Latinos in New Mexico, however, is very different from the rest of the country, as we shall see.

Not only is the Hispanic population of New Mexico uniquely large in percentage terms, it is also unusual in terms of national identity of the Hispanics. Unlike Latinos in most of the rest of the country, many Hispanics in New Mexico do not identify at all with Latin America, but directly with their European ancestry.

The rest of this article will explore the Hispanic population in New Mexico and the historical context which explains this particular situation. Along the way, I will show how to use the R package tidycensus to access the wealth of data on https://census.gov.