First person of color to head Census

President Joe Biden on Tuesday said he would pick the president of the American Statistical Association to lead the U.S. Census Bureau as it works toward releasing data from the 2020 census that will be used for redrawing congressional and legislative districts. If confirmed, Robert Santos, who is Mexican-American, would become the first person of color to serve as a permanent director of the Census Bureau, the nation’s largest statistical agency. Santos currently is vice president and chief methodologist at the Urban Institute.

The San Antonio native is an expert in survey sampling. He has 40 years of experience in survey design and social science and policy research.

In a 2019 speech, Santos related how his family’s story tracked that of many U.S. Latinos, as the percentage of native-born Hispanics in the U.S. has increased over the decades. His Spanish-speaking grandparents came from Mexico, but by his generation he was speaking only English.

“It’s this language loss that lead to personal conflict in my journey of identity: How could I call myself a Latino or Mexican-American if I am a monolingual English speaker?” he said. “Well guess what, I wasn’t alone being monolingual English speaker then, and the situation is more pronounced now.”

He described himself as an aspiring hippie coming out of high school in the early 70s, but he knew he wanted to study mathematics. He earned an undergraduate degree in mathematics at Trinity University in San Antonio in 1976 and a master’s degree in statistics at the University of Michigan in 1977.