"The central, unifying theme of this book is that Hispanics in the United States are an incredibly diverse group about which no easy generalizations can be made. This may sound like a non-finding, but in fact Bergad and Klein elaborate with an impressive wealth of empirical detail just what such diversity means. They explore the diversity of the Latino population along four axes, fundamentally: class (as expressed by income and human capital indicators such as education), geographic location, immigrant status, and gender. The authors have produced, from the raw material provided by U.S. Census databases, an impressive collection of tables, graphs, and maps that illustrate in great detail the demographic history of U.S. Latinos since 1980.

This is a remarkable achievement in that it required assembling, processing, and analyzing data from what is sometimes an unfriendly source (the census IPUMS files). The great advantage of this book is that the authors assume no specialized statistical knowledge on the part of the reader. Although, the work which went into generating the knowledge presented in the book evidently required the use of advanced statistical methods, the authors were able to present the data with remarkable clarity and accessibility. Thus, readers from all kinds of fields will benefit from this analysis, not only those with advanced statistical knowledge." – Csar J. Ayala, University of California, Los Angeles.