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- The total economic output of Latinas in the U.S. in 2021 was $1.3 trillion.
- That’s bigger than the economy of Florida.
- For more than a decade, Latinas have outpaced their male and non-Hispanic peers in economic growth and educational attainment.
For five years now, researchers from California Lutheran University in Thousand Oaks and UCLA have charted the economic success of Latinos in the United States, with their annual Latino GDP report.
Now they’ve uncovered what they describe as an even bigger success story: that of Latinas, who outpace both their Latino male and non-Latino peers in a number of economic measures.
Oxnard College hosted an event April 15 on the first Latina GDP report, with remarks by two of the authors: Matthew Fienup, the executive director of CLU’s Center for Economic Research and Forecasting; and David Hayes-Bautista, the director of the Center for Latino Health and Culture at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.
Their team is also behind the Latino GDP report, which looks at the economic contributions of all Hispanic residents of the United States, male and female. Both studies have found a number of what Fienup called “economic premiums” — areas where Latinos perform better than the rest of the country, such as labor force participation and growth in total economic output.
“No matter how impressive those premiums seem, when we apply this methodology and calculate the U.S. Latina GDP, we find premiums that are even larger,” Fienup said.
For example, the gross domestic product, or GDP, produced by Latinas in the United States was $1.3 trillion in 2021, the most recent year for which complete statistics are available. GDP refers to the value of all goods and services produced in an economy, and the figure for U.S. Latinas means that if they were a state of their own, its economy would be slightly bigger than Florida’s and smaller than only California, Texas and New York.
Even more impressive is the growth in Latinas’ economic productivity. From 2010 to 2021, the Latina GDP grew at an average of 3.8% per year, faster than that of Latino men and of the U.S. as a whole, which grew at a rate of 1.8% per year in that period.
In 2021, the number of U.S. Latinas with a bachelor’s degree or higher hit 3.9 million, more than double the total 11 years earlier. In the same period, the number of non-Hispanic women with bachelor’s degrees grew by 38%.
And Latinas are more likely than other women in the U.S. to work outside the home: More than 60% of Latinas were in the labor force in 2021, compared to 58% of non-Hispanic women. Latinas passed other U.S. women in labor force participation in 2010 and have been widening the gap ever since, according to the Latina GDP report.
Perhaps related to their gains in education and workforce participation, Latinas saw their incomes grow by 46% from 2010 to 2021, when adjusted for inflation, a growth rate that was 2.5 times that of non-Hispanic women in the U.S.
In a panel discussion that followed Fienup’s and Bautista’s presentations, Nancy Mendez, a lawyer in Oxnard, said a growing number of her clients are Latina business owners, including one who owns a construction company.
“I’m seeing a lot of that, women who are not having the traditional roles we think of, but who are expanding and broadening themselves,” she said.
During his remarks, Bautista drew a line between the current economic success of Latinas and 300 years of Spanish rule of what is now Mexico, Central America, and the southern and western United States, including California, Texas and Florida. In the English colonies and the early United States, married women were economically controlled by their husbands. But in New Spain, married women could own property and businesses and enter into contracts on their own, Bautista said, and they kept those rights when those territories became part of the United States.
He pointed to the first documented Latina businesswoman in the New World: Francisca de Vera, an innkeeper in St. Augustine, Florida, in the 1580s. He also cited records from Tuscon, Arizona, in the 1880s that showed that “Latinas were grocers, investors, bankers.”
The current economic vitality of U.S. Latinas is tied to the last major wave of Hispanic immigration to the United States, from the 1970s to the 1990s, Bautista said. Those immigrants are now retirement aged, and their daughters are far exceeding their parents in terms of educational and professional accomplishments.
Another panelist, Vanessa Calderon, is a living example of that phenomenon. Her mother came to the United States from Mexico as part of the bracero program for farm workers and never had any formal education, while Calderon is now an assistant principal at Channel Islands High School.
“I am who I am because of my mother,” Calderon said. “My mom, even if she never had an opportunity to attend school, she took it upon herself to learn to read and write. When I decided to become a high school teacher I told her, ‘Mom, you didn’t get a chance to go to school, but you’re going to have a teacher in your family.'”
Tony Biasotti is an investigative and watchdog reporter for the Ventura County Star. Reach him at tbiasotti@vcstar.com. This story was made possible by a grant from the Ventura County Community Foundation’s Fund to Support Local Journalism.
