A *proper* ancestry map of America

 

The United States is a settler country made up of myriad groups who have come here over the past few centuries seeking opportunity, fleeing persecution, or because they were forced to. Even as they've assimilated into broader American society, each group has left its own distinct impact on the culture, politics, economy, and cuisine of the USA in general and the region where they settled in particular. Country music emerged in the South from a blend of West African and Scots-Irish musical traditions. Italian restaurants and Irish pubs can be found on practically every commercial street in the Northeast. The progressive politics of Minnesota can partially be traced to the egalitarian, community-minded culture of the Germans and Scandinavians who settled there. People across America eat breakfast at Greek diners, lunch at Mexican restaurants, and Chinese takeout for dinner. We listen to Jewish-American comedians and African-American musicians on devices made by Indian-American engineers. In short, American culture is a mishmash of the cultures brought here by countless immigrant groups over the past four hundred years.

This map shows where each of these groups most heavily settled (and continue to settle). There are multuple layers to this. First, you have the indigenous people who were initially here. As this map shows, four centuries of genocide and disease have reduced them from dominating every congressional district in the country (before congressional districts existed, obviously) to only being a plurality in four. The other two groups here who never exactly came to the United States are the Cajuns of Louisiana and the Hispanos of New Mexico, who trace their roots back to the French and Spanish empires respectively. 

Then you have the people who came over during colonial times--settlers from the British Isles and enslaved West Africans. This migration was dominated by the English, who settled all up and down the eastern seaboard, although in distinct patterns. On the windy shores of New England, the Puritans tried to create their own Godly utopia free of the unjust hierarchies of Old England. In the humid lowlands of the South, aristocratic planters tried their best to duplicate those hierarchies, replacing the peasantry of England first with indentured servants and later with African slaves. In the hills beyond their plantations, the fiercely independent Scots and Scots-Irish settled in the Appalachian backcountry, where they could be as far away as possible from the authority of the British crown. The fertile plains of Pennsylvania, meanwhile, were largely settled by Germans, especially persecuted religious minorities such as the Mennonites and Hutterites.

In the 19th century, White America pushed westward, killing or displacing the original Americans in the process. As cotton production became extremely lucrative, Southern aristocrats started establishing new plantations further west and dragging their human property with them. By the mid-1800s, the vast fertile lowland stretching from Maryland to Texas was demographically dominated by enslaved Blacks. White Southerners of more humble means also joined in this migration, setting up smallhold farms in the piney woods of the Deep South, the hills of Tennessee and Kentucky, the Ohio River Valley, and the praries of the southern Great Plains. New England Yankees, meanwhile, created more prosperous farming and trading communities along the Great Lakes. German, Dutch, and Scandinavian immigrants did the same further west, thriving in the wide-open Great Plains and the cold forests of Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota.

At the same time, immigrants of lesser means poured into the slums of the industrializing cities. This wave started in the 1840s when Ireland was stricken by a famine that killed around a million people and sent another million fleeing, mainly to the port cities of the USA. In the coming decades, another two million Irishmen joined them in search of better economic opportunity. Around the same time, even more immigrants came from Germany, attracted by America's economic prosperity and political freedom. Many had the means to set up independent farms in the Midwest, but others wound up in industrial cities like Cincinnati, Milwaukee, and St. Louis. The nature of immigration shifted around the turn of the century. Starting in the 1880s, over two million Jews fled the pogroms and poverty of the Russian Empire for the slums of New York. America also recieved an influx of Italians the Northeastern cities and Slavs in the Midwestern ones. Many of these were temporary migrant workers looking to better their circumstances back home, but a good number settled permanantly in America.

In the 1920s, a wave of anti-immigrant sentiment led to restrictions being passed, bringing foreign immigration to an abrupt halt. After this, Black migrants seeking to escape the poverty and racism of the South replaced the huddled masses of Europe as the main source of cheap labor for Northern factories. Due to a combination of racism and bad timing, African-Americans and their descendants never escaped the urban ghettos in the same way many Whites did. During the mid-20th century, America went through a phase of unprecedented social mobility, and the grandchildren of slum-dwelling European immigrants became educated suburban homeowners. Discriminatory housing policies largely kept Black people out of these suburbs, while neglect, deindustrialization, crime, and car-centric planning made the cities where they were trapped increasingly unpleasant to live in. 

In the suburbs, meanwhile, the old distinctions between ethnocultural groups largely disappeared due to intermarraige and the rise of mass culture. As such, the different groups outlined on the map are largely meaningless in a present-day context, but they still reflect interesting historic patterns.

In the late 19th century, large numbers of Whites (especially New England Yankees) settled along the Pacific Coast in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California. California in particular has seen two centuries of relentless growth. The labor-intensive crops like grapes and strawberries that grow its valleys created an intense demand for migrant labor--first from Japan and the Philippines, later from the Dust Bowl-ravaged praries of Texas and Oklahoma, and from the 1950s onward overwhelmingly from Mexico. 

Further inland, another group of Yankees, followers of the maligned Latter-Day Saints movement (AKA Mormonism), found their haven on the shores of the Great Salt Lake and expanded outwards from there. Generally, though, the mountains and deserts of the inland west remained sparsely populated due to their isolation and harsh climate, with the exception of a few scattered mining towns. 

In the mid-20th century, this changed. Cars, air conditioning, and improved irrigation made mass settlement in previously inhospitable western areas possible. Thanks to cheap land and warm weather, the cities there became attractive destinations for middle-class easterners, creating a booming "Sun Belt". A similar process took place in parts of the Southeast, especially Florida. There was no particular ethnic charachter to this migration--by this point, those old distinctions between groups were largely irrelevant. For the purposes of this map, this means English-Americans are the largest group by default in majority-White areas. 

Most of the Whites who moved to the Sun Belt were quite prosperous, so someone else had to be brought in to do all the dirty work. That someone else was right across the border. Mexicans had lived in the southwestern US before it was even part of the US. Many migrated northward in the early 20th century to work on the farms, mines, and railroads. But it was from the 1970s onward that people started absolutely flooding across the US-Mexico border. By now, Mexican-Americans number over 40 million, and are the plurality ethnic group in most of California, Nevada, Arizona, and Texas (all states that were once part of Mexico). Their presence is increasingly felt beyond these borderland states--wherever their are jobs Americans don't want to do, whether in cleaning, construction, or farm labor, Mexicans and Central Americans flock in to do them. 

But contrary to what some gringos seem to think, there's more to the Latino population than just Mexicans. Puerto Rico has been a US colony since 1901, putting its people in a unique position to migrate freely to the mainland, including in the period from 1921-1965 when most other immigrants were kept out. During those years, Puerto Rican migrants overwhelmingly settled in NYC; in the late 20th century, they went to mid-sized Northeastern industrial cities like Allentown and Hartford; nowadays, most new arrivals end up in Orlando and its suburbs. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 allowed a much broader variety of Latinos to immigrate. Huge numbers of people from the two other large Spanish-speaking islands of the Caribbean--Cuba and the Dominican Republic--made their way to Miami and New York respectively. And though they're too scattered to appear on this map, Guatemalans and Salvadorans are a rapidly growing presence throughout the US.

The 1965 law also opened reimmigration to the inhabitants of the vast continent of Asia, who had been almost completely shut out by the 1921 restrictions. Things have changed a lot since then--around 25 million Americans now have a full or partial Asian background. Unlike previous waves of immigrants, many Asians come to the US already posessing skills and education. This is particularly true of Indian-Americans, who are largely concentrated in areas such as the Bay Area and Northern Virginia where tech jobs are plentiful. Chinese immigrants, who come from a broad variety of socioeconomic backgrounds, have established a presence in almost every major American city, most prominently New York and San Francisco. And just as Indonesians migrate to the Netherlands or Algerians to France, people from America's former colony of the Philippines have been coming in huge numbers for decades. 

The 1965 law also reponed immigration to southern and eastern Europeans, and in the last few decades of the 20th century, there was a resurgance of immigration by Portuguese and Poles in particular. Migrants from across the West Indies have flocked to the US in such large numbers that in many islands, more than a third of the population currently lives abroad. And African immigrants, while still not numerous enough to show up on this map, are a rapidly growing presence.

My map good, other ancestry maps bad

If you've seen an ancestry map before you may have noticed that mine looks quite different than most. Here's a good example of how they typically look:

So why does my map look so different? Well, because all the others are b a d. The US Census uses self-reported ancestry, which is extremely inaccurate for several reasons. Here's a brief list of what's wrong with the maps you usually see, and how I've fixed those problems.

Problem: People whose families came over centuries ago understandably might not know from where. This results in British ancestries (English, Scottish, and Welsh) being grossly underreported, since the Brits largely came over to the US way back in colonial times, so their descendants have lost any connection to their foreign roots. As a result, only in three states--Vermont, Maine, and Utah--do a plurality of people report English ancestry. This seems more than a little suspicious, given that Britain was the country that, y'know, colonized the US. This undercount is also partly because English descent has long been seen as the "standard" or "generic" American ethnic background, so in today's day and age people prefer to report a more exciting heritage. In particular, German ancestry has become the standard response for White people who don't know their ethnic background--50 million people self-identify as German-American, which is almost twice as many as identify as English-American and which makes people of German descent a plurality in 22 of 50 states. While it's true that massive numbers of Germans immigrated to the US during the 19th and 20th centuries, there's no doubt that this is a massive overestimate. "German" is just the generic White ancestry--it's what people guess they are when they don't know their background, even though in most cases the correct answer is English. In the South, where relatively few Germans settled, many people simply describe their ancestry as "American". In a way, this is the most accurate description there is--Americans are American, no matter where their ancestors came from. But for the purposes of this map, it's pretty useless.

Solution: This one had to be attacked from several directions. For one, I counted most people who describe themselves as "American" as English (or Scottish if they live in Appalachia). In addition, many Southerners self-describe as Irish-American, but they're mainly descendants of Protestant Scots-Irish who came during the 18th century rather than Catholic famine refugees who came during the 19th, so I classified them as Scottish. I also took about half of any district's "German" population and added it to the English. Anyone who isn't sure and lists themselves as "unclassified" is categorized as English-descended as well, because that's most likely what they are.

Problem: Some ancestries are absent on the census form-- for example, "Jewish" and "African-American" are not options, despite being very distinct ethnic backgrounds. Neither is any Native American nation or tribe. Just as US history would be incomplete without these groups, so would any ancestry map.

Solution: Accounting for American Indians was rather simple--I just used the number of people in the district who listed their race as such, although this does unfortunately mask the diversity between different tribes and nations. Similarly, for African-Americans, I simply took the number of people who listed their race as "Black" and subtracted the people of African or West Indian immigrant backgrounds. Jews were a bit trickier. I had to estimate each district's Jewish population based on the Jewish population of the county it's located in--that's the most specific the data gets--and based on how many people in the district report ancestries that many Jews list on the census, such as Russian, Ukrainian, Hungarian, and "unclassified".

Problem: Some large groups are invisible because they're split between several smaller groups. For example, in northern New England, around an equal number of people listed their background as "French" and "French Canadian". If the two groups were put together, they'd easily make up the plurality, but when seperated this way, they're outnumbered by English-Americans and the large Quebecois presence in New England is invisible. Similarly, there's only one congressional district where a single Slavic ancestry group makes up the plurality--a heavily Polish area of Chicago. However, when put together, Americans of all Slavic backgrounds make up the plurality in eight districts. 

Solution: I combined similar ancestry groups in order to better reflect their presence. I grouped together Scots & Scots-Irish into "Scottish"; French and Quebecois into "French"; Portuguese and Cape Verdeans into "Portuguese"; Danes, Norweigans, Swedes, and Finns into "Scandinavian"; Iraqis, Lebanese, Egyptians, etc. into "Arab"; Ukrainians, Poles, Serbs, etc. into "Slavic"; and Haitians, Jamaicans, Trinidadians, etc. into "West Indian". This definitely masks the nuances within certain groups, especially huge and diverse ones like Slavs and Arabs, but it's prefereable to their presence being invisible.

Problem: America is currently going through another wave of immigration, and countless new groups are adding to the already broad array of European backgrounds. The number of people who list various Latino and Asian ancestries is certainly much more accurate than the counts for European groups, considering that most Latinos and Asians are either immigrants themselves or the children and grandchildren of immigrants, so they're much less likely to have forgotten their roots than people whose families have been here for centuries. However, the numbers shown on the US Census are still probably an undercount for two reasons:

1. America's Latino and Asian populations are growing at a rapid pace, and this data is a few years old, so the numbers are likely higher now than they were then.
2. The large populations of undocumented immigrants among both groups are severely undercounted because they're often afraid to respond to the census for fear of deportation.

Solution: I've simply increased every district's population of every Asian and Latino group by 20%. Why 20%? Well, I didn't do any fancy calculations to come to this number. I know this is not very scientific, but I picked it because it just feels like around the right number.

Why use congressional districts?

I’m aware that congressional districts are a completely arbitrary political unit that changes every few years and will change again very shortly. However, I prefer them to counties when making maps, because all congressional districts have a similar population at around 700,000. The population of couties, meanwhile, varies greatly, ranging from ten million (Los Angeles County, CA) to 228 (King County, TX). So county maps can be extremely misleading--looking at a 2020 election map by county, you'd think Donald Trump won by a landslide. Similarly, a county map of ancestry would greatly misrepresent the size of each group. For example, there are about 4.5 million Americans who report Norweigan ancestry and 5.2 million who report Puerto Rican ancestry (on the mainland, not in Puerto Rico itself). However, because Norweigan immigrants settled in rural areas of Minnesota and North Dakota and Puerto Ricans settled in large cities like New York and Orlando, the former group makes up a plurality in 33 counties, while the latter group predominates in just two. 

I also prefer congressional district maps because they show the distinct parts of each city instead of lumping them all together. For example, there are 16 different congressional districts in Los Angeles County. So with a district-level map, I can show the huge variety within LA, showing its Chinese, Vietnamese, Armenian, and Jewish communities. On a county-level map, it would be just another Chicano county in Southern California.