Puerto Ricans
Article
Puerto Ricans is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between May 01, 2024 and July 03, 2025. The archive places it in contexts such as “They combined Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans”; “They combined Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans … into the new race ‘Hispanic’”; ""since 1964, when Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were the three equally-sized groups"". It most often appears alongside Chinese, MeToo, StopAAPIHate.
Metadata
- Category: Concepts
- Mention count: 2
- Issue count: 2
- First seen: May 01, 2024
- Last seen: July 03, 2025
Appears In
Related Pages
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- Chinese (2 shared issues)
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- [[entities/concept/metoo|#MeToo]] (1 shared issues)
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- StopAAPIHate (1 shared issues)
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- StopAAPIHate (1 shared issues)
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- 23andme (1 shared issues)
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- 9-11 (1 shared issues)
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- @alextisyoung (1 shared issues)
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- AAPI (1 shared issues)
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- Aborigines (1 shared issues)
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- ACE twin model (1 shared issues)
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- ACX (1 shared issues)
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- Afghanistan-Pakistan border (1 shared issues)
External Links
Source Context
Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.
They combined Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans - previously three different groups that had been viewed as “white lite” along the same lines as Italians - into the new race “Hispanic”, adding in all of South and Central America for good measure. Then, under pressure from black activists who were worried that some blacks would reclassify as Hispanics and they’d lose constituents, they declared Hispanics to be an “ethnicity” that you could have along with a different race. So a white Spaniard from Spain and a white Spaniard from Mexico got treated as different ethnicities, but a white Spaniard from Mexico and a Mayan from Mexico got the same ethnicity.
The point about “Hispanics” is better taken, and you can read more about the case here. But since 1964, when Mexican-Americans, Cuban-Americans, and Puerto Ricans were the three equally-sized and equally-interesting groups, the Hispanic community has become dominated by Mexican (and Central American) immigrants, who do form a pretty natural grouping. People are just as happy to talk about Latinos (and Latinx) as Hispanics. I’m not sure we can attribute this one to the government either.
Inline links: you can read more about the case here
So maybe there’s more of a role here for problems [2] and [3], about the difficulty of applying a score trained on Europeans to non-European populations? My question there is - shouldn’t this produce nonsense results, rather than results which reflect the populations’ real-world IQs? I think the counterargument here would have to be that by coincidence or colonialism, the populations with the furthest genetic difference from Europeans also happen to have the lowest real-world IQs (for social reasons) - or at least that this trend holds in a vague enough way to produce the vague correlation seen on the graph. There’s some evidence for this - this Piffer’s application of EA4 predicts that Chinese (real average IQ 105) have the same educational attainment as Puerto Ricans (real average IQ 82). So maybe it’s just showing average genetic distance from its European sample after all, and Chinese and Puerto Ricans are about equally distant on average? This wouldn’t explain why the predictor correctly finds that Ashkenazi Jews come out highest, but that could be because their “European” sample did include Ashkenazi Jews, and so here problem [1] does come in.