Since the release of Latino1 subgroup population data by the Census Bureau in 2001, many Latino advocacy and community organizations, planners, and scholars have suspected that the official census enumeration represents a severe underestimate of the Latino-origin group populations in all parts of the country, most noticeably in California, New York, and Florida.2 They had expected the census to reflect a huge increase, not a drop, in every Latino-origin group, considering that the nation’s total Latino population grew over the last decade. Instead, the counts of so-called new Latino groups, such as Dominicans, Colombians, Ecuadorians, Peruvians, and other minor Latino groups were far below what had been expected (Suro 2002; Hernández and Rivera-Batiz 2003).3

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