Editor's note: Raquel Cepeda is an award-winning journalist, documentary filmmaker and former editor of Russell Simmons' Oneworld magazine. Cepeda wrote and directed the feature documentary, "Bling: A Planet Rock," about hip-hop's obsession with diamonds and its effect on the decade-long conflict in Sierra Leone. Cepeda is based in New York, where she was born to Dominican parents. Find her at http://djalirancher.com/blog/.





Raquel Cepeda says people don't fit into the neat categories outlined by the U.S. Census.





NEW YORK (CNN) -- Let's all pretend to be the astrologer Walter Mercado for a moment. Say we predict that the Obama administration's master plan to engage people of Latino/Hispanic/Spanish origin proves to be effective.





Let's say that along with strategic partners Telemundo and the Census Bureau, they somehow manage to corral the millions of "Latinos" into filling out the 2010 census forms in April. Say the idea of plot-kneading the message into an already half-baked yet inexplicably popular telenovela, "Mas Sabe el Diablo," wins over the hearts and minds of "Latinos" everywhere.





But what's a Latino?





While we all may speak a version of our Spanish colonizer's language, contrary to popular belief, we're not all Mexican. Yes, the majority of Latinos in America are of Mexican descent, but we also hail from other countries around the world.





Take the ethnically ambiguous 15 percent of us who descend from the Dominican Republic, Puerto Rico and Cuba. An overwhelming majority of us aren't solely of Spanish, black or native origin: We're all of the above and then some (some of our ancestors migrated from Asian, Middle Eastern and an array of European countries).





With the 2010 census upon us, the time is now for the fastest-growing minority group in the country to define themselves for themselves and at the same time clear up the cultural confusion surrounding our identity. But how can we, given the perplexing racial categories on the census, coupled with our own complex identity issues, paint an accurate picture of who and how complex we are, not just what we are?





Take me, for example; I'm a first-generation American, the product of Dominican parents whose short-lived relationship could have rivaled that of Shakespeare's own telenovela, Romeo and Juliet. My family is made up of a rainbow coalition of racial chameleons.





Recently, I was told that my maternal grandmother's own abuela was Vietnamese; my maternal great-great-grandfather was Haitian; somewhere on my paternal side, we're supposedly Sephardic. As in many Dominican families in my New York neighborhood -- Washington Heights -- with ties to the motherland, blackness is rarely discussed.





When I traveled to Sierra Leone and Ghana, I was asked if I was Moroccan, Lebanese or Eritrean. In Paris, if I was Brazilian or Arabic. In fact, I've been singled out a couple of times when entering and leaving Brazil, and was once accused of having a fake American passport by an agent. Being mistaken for everything but a person of Dominican heritage has certainly piqued my desire to examine how I and other Latinos fit into our national and global communities.





When I learned that nearly eighty percent of Puerto Rico's 4 million colorful residents checked off the "white" racial box on the last census, I wasn't floored -- given the alternatives. Race in the Caribbean lies in the eye of the beholder. And the beholder, from centuries of colonization, has more often than not been socialized to reject their blackness despite our collective and direct relationship to slavery.





An association with a historically discriminated ethnic group like African-Americans somehow drives the idea that the American dream is out of reach. In the American media, people with darker complexions are often grossly stereotyped. And Spanish language television often depicts people with darker skin and so-called African features as shiftless, ignorant and at the bottom of the social barrel.





This sort exposure, along with other factors, will result in a Latino with dark skin to
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people don't fit into the neat categories outlined by the U.S. people don't fit into the neat categories outlined by the U.S. Census.
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