Texas more than one-third Hispanic
Washington - More than a third of Texas residents are Latinos, according to new figures from the U.S. Census Bureau, which show that Hispanics have also increased their presence significantly in Oklahoma, Illinois and South Dakota.
Texas was the state whose total population grew the most between 2000-2010, by 4.3 million people, or 20.6 percent, to more than 25 million, second only to California.
Sixty-five percent of that demographic increase was due to Hispanics, which now number 9.46 million.
In the last decade, Latinos have gone from 32 percent of the Texas population to 37.6 percent, compared with 45.3 percent whites, 11.3 percent African Americans, 3.8 percent Asians and 1.8 percent other races.
Census figures show that Hispanics predominate more and more in the youth demographic of Texas, representing 48.3 percent of state residents under 18, up from 40.5 percent in 2008.
Meanwhile young whites have dropped from 42.6 percent of Texas's under-18 population to 33.8 percent.
That demographic shift increases Hispanics' chances of becoming the largest group in the state by 2015, as many experts predict.
In Dallas County, the state's second-most-populous, Hispanics already make up 38.3 percent of the more than 2.3 million inhabitants, while whites represent 33.1 percent of the total.
The same trend can be observed in the other two most populous counties in Texas: Harris, where Houston is located, along with Tarrant, Bexar and Travis.
The Census Bureau, which gradually publishes detailed statistics on each state, also revealed this week the demographic composition of Illinois, South Dakota and Oklahoma, which share in the growth trend of the Hispanic population in the 13 states whose statistics have been released up to now.
Among them, the most significant change took place in Illinois, where Hispanics have overtaken blacks as the biggest minority, with 15.8 percent of the population - more than 2 million inhabitants - compared with 14.3 percent of African Americans.
In Oklahoma, the Hispanic population has grown by 85 percent over the last decade, but still numbered only 332,000 habitantes en 2010, 8.9 percent of the total. And even after a decade of rapid growth, Latinos made up only 2.7 percent of the population of South Dakota.