Hispanic and Latin Baby Names Becoming Less Popular - TIME: In May, the Pew Hispanic Center released a study of first-, second- and third-generation Hispanics in the U.S. — a look at how the Latin-American population has grown and assimilated over the past three decades. As recently as 1980, just 9% of U.S. kids under 18 were Hispanic, compared with 22% today. Only about a tenth of that population are first-generation Latin Americans — meaning they were born outside the U.S. More than half (52%) are second generation — born in the U.S. to at least one foreign-born parent; and 37% were born in America to American-born parents. By 2025, the study estimates that close to 30% of all American kids will have some Latino ancestry.
What happens, of course, when an immigrant group heads toward assimilation, is that each successive generation gets more educated (82% of first-generation Latin-American kids ages 15 to 17 attend school, compared with 97% of second-generation kids — hardly perfect but moving toward parity) and more proficient in the national language (by the third generation, 95% of Latino kids ages 15 to 17 speak English exclusively or very well). Another thing that happens is that parents start moving away from baby names like Guillermo and closer to names like William. "When [immigrant or later-generation] parents name their children, they are combining their own attachments and affinities with their hopes and aspirations for their children," says Guillermina Jasso, a sociology professor at New York University and a second-generation Hispanic American.
