Today I’ll cover the final three racial categories, starting with American Indian and Alaska Native. This category is different than the others: the other heritages represent people who immigrated to the US from other countries, whereas American Indians were already here when the other immigrants arrived. It’s also different because of the system of tribal sovereign nations (“reservations”). For a given tribe, the highest concentration census tracts are found in the tribe’s sovereign nation, which is totally expected. For example, 94.1% of the residents of Census Tract 9400.14, in Navajo County, Arizona, have Navajo Nation heritage; not surprising, since this tract is smack in the middle of the Navajo reservation. And so on down the list: the most concentrated census tract for each tribe is in the tribe’s sovereign nation. So there really isn’t anything interesting to see by listing the tracts the same way I’ve done for other heritages.
That doesn’t me there isn’t interesting analysis to be garnered from the tract-level data. It just doesn’t fit the way I’m doing the rest of heritages, and so it will have to wait for another day.
Next, Native Hawaiian/Pacific Islander.
| Heritage | Tract | County | State | Pct | National |
| Native Hawaiian | 9400.06 | Honolulu | Hawaii | 92.1% | 0.21% |
| Samoan | 102 | Hays | Texas | 30.7% | 0.08% |
| Marshallese | 102.01 | Washington | Arkansas | 22.1% | 0.02% |
No surprise that the highest concentration of Native Hawaiians are in a tract in Hawaii. In fact, the first 386 tracts in this list are in Hawaii. The first tract not in that state is in Nevada, south of Las Vegas, with a mere 5% Native Hawaiian population. Still, it’s enough for the area to be called Hawaii’s Ninth Island.
The Samoan population in San Marcos, Texas consists of international students at Texas State University. That tract is the campus and its environs. In general, more Samoans live in Hawaii than anywhere else (per capita), but that one neighborhood in Texas is the most dense.
There’s a surprising community of those with Marshall Island heritage in Springdale, Arkansas. They started coming in the 1980s, at first for jobs in the local Tyson foods plant. Lurking behind all of this is the sad legacy of US nuclear testing in the South Pacific.
The “Other Race” category is for races and origins that don’t fit the categories defined by the US Census. Three of these meet my 20% cut off:
| Heritage | Tract | County | State | Pct | National |
| Cabo Verdean | 5115 | Plymouth | Massachusetts | 39.2% | 0.03% |
| Brazilian | 3831.01 | Middlesex | Massachusetts | 33.9% | 0.16% |
| Guyanese | 158.02 | Queens | New York | 31.1% | 0.06% |
People from Cape Verde, an island nation off the coast of Senegal, have been immigrating to the US since the 1800s. The first wave came on whaling boats and mostly settled in New Bedford, Massachusetts, which at the time was a major whaling port. Another wave started coming after the relaxing of immigration laws in the 1960s. This group originally settled in the Boston area, then later moved to Brockton.1This article claims that a single person started the move from Boston to Brockton:
Luis Martins, the owner of one of Brockton’s busiest real estate brokerages, was raised in a Cape Verdean community in Boston’s Dorchester neighborhood. In 1986, Martins’ grandfather sold his triple-decker to cash in on rising property values, Martins said, relocating the family to Brockton. Close to 40 other Cape Verdean families followed around the same time, Martins said. The “old” and “new” Cabo Verdean enclaves can be seen here:
The census does not consider Brazilian heritage as Hispanic, since Brazil was settled by Portugal. So the Brazilian numbers end up in the “Other Race” category, rather than the Hispanic ethnicity groupings. Even though many of those with Brazilian heritage consider themselves Hispanic/Latino, the Census does not. This is a complicated issue that is covered nicely in this article. In any case, the ex-mill towns of Framingham and Marlborough, outside of Boston, have been revitalized by immigrants from Brazil over the past 40 years.
People from Guyana are listed in the Other Race category presumably because the heritage for that country includes a several backgrounds: indigenous, African, and Asian Indian. The Queens borough of New York has a large population of Guyanese heritage, especially in the Richmond Hill neighborhoods. Most Guyanese in the US are in NYC, but there is a decent sized pocket upstate in Schenectady, recruited there 20 years ago.
