Texas to officially become a minority-majority state

Texas will officially become a majority-minority state for the first time based on 2010 census estimates.

The switch occurred in 2005 and its source includes both Hispanic immigration from Mexico as well as black migration from other parts of the United States.

Texas joins Hawaii, California, New Mexico and the District of Columbia as states and a federal district lacking a majority of whites who are not Hispanic. Eight more states, led by Arizona, Maryland, Nevada and Georgia, have shares of non-Hispanic whites nearing the tipping point of 50 percent.

The Southern U.S. region — primarily metropolitan areas such as Atlanta, Dallas, Houston, Miami and Charlotte, N.C. — accounted for roughly 75 percent of the population gains among blacks since 2000, up from 65 percent in the 1990s, according to the latest census estimates. The gains came primarily at the expense of Northern metro areas such as New York and Chicago, which posted their first declines in black population since at least 1980.

The recent census figures for blacks refer to non-Hispanic blacks, which the Census Bureau began calculating separately in 1980.

In all, about 57 percent of U.S. blacks now live in the South, a jump from the 53 percent share in the 1970s, according to an analysis of census data by William H. Frey, a demographer at the Brookings Institution. It was the surest sign yet of a sustained reverse migration to the South following the exodus of millions of blacks to the Midwest, Northeast and West in the Great Migration from 1910 to 1970.

Historically, the South was home to roughly 90 percent of the nation's blacks from 1790 until 1910, when African Americans began to migrate northward to escape racism and seek jobs in industrial centers such as Detroit, New York and Chicago during World War I. After the decades-long Great Migration, the share of blacks in the South hit a low of about 53 percent in the 1970s, before civil rights legislation and the passage of time began to improve the social climate in the region.

The current 57 percent share of blacks now living in the South is the highest level since 1960.

The migration of blacks back to the South has also been seen locally, but Odessa NAACP president Gene Collins said it hasn’t been to the same degree.

“There will not be a major cultural shift,” Collins said.

Collins said some blacks are retiring in Odessa and others are coming for job opportunities, but an increase in the number of black children in Ector County hasn’t been seen. Ector County Independent School District communications director Mike Adkins said the most recent number of black students in ECISD was 5.3 percent and that number hasn’t seen any major changes in the last few years.

The ECISD student body was 63.9 percent Hispanic at the end of last year, Adkins said, though the trend of an increasing Hispanic student body was not new to ECISD.

“It is increasing a little bit each year,” Adkins said.

In the 2000 census, Odessa was 41.4 percent Hispanic; the Hispanic population of Texas then was found to be 32 percent compared to 36.9 percent in 2009 estimates.

Hispanic Chamber of Commerce President Manny Puga said demographic changes were changing many different aspects of life.

 “Almost 65 percent of all new businesses are being opened by Hispanics today,” Puga said.

Additionally, there has been an increase in talk shows aimed at Hispanics and a new bilingual newspaper set to be opened by Dos Mundos Newspaper in the spring, Puga said.

LULAC representative Carol Uranga said the population increase comes mainly from Mexicans coming legally to Texas from Mexico and participating in the census.

However, there are also some Mexicans and Mexican-Americans coming from other states for jobs, Uranga said.

“I don’t know that we’ve seen a drastic change,” Uranga said of the population shift’s impact.

Despite the increasing numbers, there has not been a lot of political activism from the Hispanic community, which Puga said was due to a lack of political activism in Mexico. And many first-generation immigrants continued that trend in the United States.

“They really don’t believe in that system,” Puga said.

Puga said that trend might change with subsequent generations.