"As you can see, it will not be an easy task for the Haitian to fill properly the census form," LaFortune wrote in an e-mail.
The concept of identity can change over generations. LaFortune concedes that while some Haiti-born U.S. residents identify with Latinos, younger U.S.-born Haitians have grown up with a different understanding of what it means to be Latino.
A generation gap likely explains why 56,000 people wrote in "Negro" on the 2000 form, enough to prompt Census officials to include the word alongside "Black" and "African-American" in 2010, said Florida-based Census spokeswoman Pam Bellis.
Efforts to push the federal government to recognize specific communities have grown since the 1960s, when residents began filling out the forms on their own, said Ann Morning, a sociology professor at New York University.
The Census Bureau first included the option "of Spanish heritage" in 1970, then added the term "Hispanic" a decade later. Before 2000, Native Hawaiians were counted as American Indians. That Census also was the first to offer the option of identifying with more than one race.
Now there's more recognition of diversity within the Black community, Morning said.
"For so long, Black meant a particular kind of ethnic identity a native-born descendent of slaves who had been in the South generations ago," she said. "Now people are increasingly realizing there are other kinds of African descent."
