A large portion of the U.S. Latino population does not identify with any of the racial categories in the current census, according to new 2020 Census Bureau data that shows “major changes” in how Americans who identify as Hispanic report their race.

While nearly 60 percent of the 54.6 million Americans who identified as Hispanic reported belonging to a racial group, such as white or black, more than a third (35.5%) of them chose "some otherrace”. This category is not currently recognized as a race by the federal government, according to the NBC News story.

The findings come as the Biden administration is considering allowing Americans to check off “Hispanic or Latino” as their race as well as their ethnicity as part of new proposed classifications for the next census. Currently, the census considers race and ethnicity as two distinct categories, and Americans are asked about them in census forms in two different questions, NBC said.

The proposal to include Latino/Hispanic as a "race" has been explored for more than a decade, because Latinos “have been telling the Census Bureau that the [current] question didn’t really work for a lot of people," Jens Manuel Krogstad, a senior writer and editor at the Pew Research Center focused on Hispanic demographic trends, told NBC News.

“A central issue is that the average Hispanic doesn’t necessarily see the difference between race and ethnicity”, he said. At the same time, a growing number of Latinos who are multiracial or have mixed backgrounds do “view their Hispanic identity as part of their racial identity,” Krogstad said.

In the 2020 census, 19.4 million Latinos identified as belonging only to “some other race”, followed by 9.6 million who identified only as white, 1.4 million who identified only as American Indians and Alaska Natives, and 960,080 who identified only as black or African American. Another 4.45 million Latinos did not respond to the racial question in the 2020 census.

The figures showed previous Census Bureau surveys showing that “a large proportion of the Hispanic population does not identify with any of the current racial categories of the Office of Management and Budget (OMB)”, according to the Bureau. More than 18.6 million self-identified Hispanics reported belonging to two or more races, according to recent census data.

“The Office of Management and Budget, which provides guidance on how government agencies should collect race information to manage federal programs, has accepted public comments on proposals on census ratings and is expected to make a decision next year”, NBC notes.

“While 54.6 million Americans identified as Hispanic in the 2020 census, the department estimates that a total of 62.1 million Latinos live in the country, according to 2020 census data”.