Salvadorans Now 4th Largest Latino Group in the US

According to 2010 census figures released last week, 1.6 million Salvadorans currently live in the United States and they are now the fourth-largest Latino group in the country following Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans.


Analysts had been expecting Salvadorans to outnumber Cubans after the most recent census but that was not the case even thought they did jump over Dominicans. However, the article also notes that, if anything, the census underreported the number of Salvadorans and Central Americans more generally because many are here illegally and are therefore more difficult to count. Cubans, on the other hand, are nearly all here legally.

The rest of the article sounds plausible but I can't say I know of any empirical evidence to back the claims up.

Those who hope the higher numbers translate into the political and economic influence reached by Mexican-Americans in California and Caribbean Latinos elsewhere say they still have work to do.

"Numbers give you a certain kind of power, but of course, you have to transfer that quantity of numbers into quality," said Ramon Cardona, a Salvadoran immigrant and director of Richmond's Centro Latino Cuzcatlan. "One big advantage that Cubanos have is a lot of them came from the elite powers in Cuba, they knew how to run systems, how to run private enterprise and government institutions. In the case of Salvadorans, that was not the case. We had to forge and educate ourselves here, underground. That takes a couple generations to get the know-how and move into those kind of ranks."

Does anyone know of any studies that measure the the power of the Salvadoran American community in business and politics? And has the Cuban American community benefited from the fact that many were from upper class backgrounds more so than the fact that they were put on a path to citizenship and had access to resources that many other Latino groups do not?


I'll just end it with this happy ending from one woman who fled the war and resettled in California.

Sonia Garcia moved to the Bay Area from El Salvador as an 8-year-old in the 1980s, and she was always one of the few Latina girls at her Dublin schools. Today, she said one can find pupusas -- the quintessential Salvadoran dish of stuffed corn tortillas -- at restaurants from Brentwood to Mountain View. Garcia's family opened their own Livermore restaurant, La Pupusa House, a few years ago.

"We're leaders by nature," she said. "We're go-getters. We're businesspeople. We survived a civil war. Coming to America is like a walk in the park."

And in case you were wondering, Guatemalans make up the sixth largest Latino group coming in at one million.