In the days after the 2012 presidential election, pundits and the popular press attributed Mitt Romney's loss to Barack Obama to the GOP candidate's failure to capture the Latino vote. Bloggers opined about “Romney's Latino Beating” (Ryan Campbell, The Blog, Latino Voices at the Huffington Post, November 11, 2012) and the “GOP's Hispanic Nightmare” (Matthew Yglesias, Slate, November 7, 2012). Romney, the headlines blared, did not understand the Latino community. Perhaps he and his campaign staff should have read Latinos in the New Millennium by Luis R. Fraga and his colleagues. Even at more than 430 pages, this book is sure to become required reading for future campaigns on both the right and left.

This book is based on the 2006 Latino National Survey (LNS), a telephone survey conducted in Spanish and English over eight months, beginning in the fall of 2005 and ending in the summer of 2006. The survey is breathtaking in its scope. With more than 150 distinct question items (and 275 variables), the average interview length clocked in at more than 40 minutes. The sample includes more than 8,500 respondents in 15 states. Over the past 15 years, it has become typical for surveys to include large enough samples of Mexican, Puerto Rican, and Cuban Americans to conduct a meaningful analysis with each group separately. The Latino National Survey was much more ambitious, however. It includes sizeable samples of Dominican, Salvadoran, Guatemalan, Columbian, and Ecuadoran Americans as well.

Analyzing and organizing so much data is no easy task. Further, designing a survey and writing a book on such a study with no fewer than six coauthors is challenging, too, but the result is truly impressive.

Although labeled an almanac, the book is much more than a handbook or reference guide to Latino public opinion. It begins with a description of stereotypes and misconceptions about the Latino community and uses the empirical power of the survey results to dismantle these common assumptions. For example, in the first chapter, the authors confront the assumption that “Latinos are isolated from mainstream society” and “Latinos are predominantly conservative” and discover response patterns from the LNS that force one to reconsider these frequent overgeneralizations. One of the strongest arguments in the book, and one woven throughout the 14 chapters, is that careful attention to systematic, empirical data of the scope and quality of the LNS allows for a much more accurate portrayal of Latino communities than has been possible before. Further, although the authors provide broad, anchoring assessments of the Latino population as a whole, they also consistently disaggregate the survey results by nativity and citizenship status. This cut at the data reveals new ways of understanding Latino communities. As such, this book should encourage commentators and observers to be more responsible in their assessments and reporting.

As one might expect of a book based on a very large study, it covers a range of topics, from Latino identities, intergroup relations, and transnational connections to partisanship and education. Although I learned something new in each of the chapters, I found those on Latino identities and Latino gender dynamics to be especially engaging.

According to a recent U.S. Census Bureau brief, The Hispanic Population: 2010 (Sharon R. Ennis, Merarys Ríos-Vargas, and Nora G. Albert, “The Hispanic Population: 2010 (C2010BR-04),” 2011), “federal standards mandate that race and ethnicity (Hispanic origin) are separate and distinct concepts and that when collecting these data via self-identification, two different questions must be used” (emphasis in original). As such, the U.S. Census asks all respondents if they are of “Hispanic, Latino or Spanish origin,” as well as if they identify as “White, Black or African American, American Indian or Alaska Native, Asian, and Native Hawaiian or Other Pacific Islander.” Similarly, the LNS respondents answered separate questions about respondents' Latino/Hispanic origin and racial identity, but they were also asked, “Do you feel that (Latinos/Hispanics) make up a distinctive racial group in America?” Responses to this question, unavailable on government forms, reveal that government categories fail to reflect Latino identities in full. Nearly three-fourths of all U.S.-born respondents consider Latinos a racial group. Further, the authors find that among foreign-born respondents, naturalized citizens are more likely to view Latinos as a racial group (53%) than noncitizens (37%). They conclude that assimilation may go hand in hand with racialization, underscoring the power of racial formation in the United States.

In a chapter entitled “Latinos and Gender Role Attitudes,” the authors provide perspective on the attitudes held by LNS respondents toward pay equality for women and men, child care, political leadership by women, and contraception. The authors present data from the LNS that challenge the assumption that Latino men embrace a negative form of machismo characterized by male dominance and the insistence that men occupy the primary position in terms of household resources and family decisions (Ancieto Aramoni, “Machismo,” Psychology Today 5 [1972]: 69–72). For instance, the LNS reveals that a majority of men and women disagree that “Mothers should be more responsible for caring for their children than fathers.” Further, although women appear to be more strongly in favor than their male counterparts, fully 80% of men who participated in the LNS agree that men and women should receive equal pay for the same jobs. The authors note that, “for every gender-role question asked on the survey, the majority of respondents supported the egalitarian position” (p. 417). These findings go a long way towards undermining the stereotype that Latinos hold conservative gender role attitudes.

There are other research areas upon which the LNS findings shed new light. For example, in a section on workplace discrimination, the authors present statistics on respondents' experiences with wage theft and underpayment for work performed. They find that most respondents are paid for the work they were promised, although about 5% of first-generation respondents report that they were not paid at all for work completed. In the realm of politics, the study explores areas that do not receive a great deal of attention in traditional surveys, such as access to bilingual materials and knowledge about the nuts and bolts of political participation (“Do you know how and where to register to vote”).

The book is based primarily on descriptive statistics. As such, when the authors present seemingly striking findings about the Latino population, questions are likely to arise, and rearise, among readers about how the Latino population compares to the general U.S. population or to other groups and about how particular associations between variables of interest might hold up in a multivariate context. These are important questions, but the point of the book is not to answer these queries but, indeed, to raise them. A generation of scholars has already begun to do so, as evidenced by a fast-growing list of articles and publications that make use of the LNS to investigate more deeply such topics as linked fate among Latinos, civic participation and hometown associations, and Latinos' attitudes toward black Americans.

Latinos in the New Millennium succeeds in painting a comprehensive, nuanced portrait of Latinos in the United States while at the same time suggesting that there are meaningful ties around identity, experiences of migration, transnational links, political values, and policy attitudes that bind this diverse community together. Each chapter also underscores a central argument about the importance of empirical data for understanding Latino populations in the United States. This argument is framed best by the authors at the beginning of the book when they emphasize the necessity of exploring the accuracy of common stereotypes and the question “What hard evidence can be brought to bear on this large, growing, and complex population that would help us situate the group in the American polity?” (p. 1). One can no longer understand the American polity itself without attention to the hard evidence about Latino populations introduced in this book.