[pessimizer]

> The US was 3% hispanic in 1960 and 84% white.

You're going to need a good reference for that one, just because categories have changed, plenty of hispanics have identified as white when they thought it would help and when they could pass, and because plenty of non-citizens don't respond to these types of surveys unless specifically targeted, although I'm sure that there would be methodologies that could attempt to account for them if the investigator intended to.

tl;dr methodology is important when trying to estimate the population of hispanics in the US, especially in 1960. Specific references would be helpful.

[adventured]

Sure thing. Good references on this data are very, very easy to come by. If you want to dispute the hispanic numbers, based on the facts, the burden is on you to prove the prevailing authority numbers are wrong.

"Since 1960, the nation’s Latino population has increased nearly ninefold, from 6.3 million" (the US population was 180 million in 1960, that's 3.5%)

"The foreign-born Latino population has increased to nearly 20 times its size over the past half century, from less than 1 million in 1960 to 19.4 million in 2015"

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2017/09/18/facts-on-u-s-latinos/

Here's information showing the US was only about 4% hispanic in 1965 (11% black, 84% white).

http://www.pewhispanic.org/2015/09/28/modern-immigration-wav...

All the reference points line up to my information being approximately correct. For example, there were 2.1 million Mexican immigrants in the US as recently as 1980. By 2006, that was 11.5 million.

https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/mexican-immigrants-u...