How to Trace Ethnic Origins When Official Records Don't Tell the Whole Story
Most people assume they know their own ethnicity from their last name and a birth certificate. That quickly falls apart when you actually try to prove anything. I spent about eight months piecing together the full heritage profile of a former collegiate athlete with a Spanish surname and an ambiguous family history, and it taught me more about genealogical research than any textbook. The process isn't hard, but it does require patience and a willingness to follow tangents that don't immediately seem relevant. Anthony Banda was born in El Paso, Texas on July 10, 1994, which places him squarely in a border region where Mexican and American identities have been interwoven for generations. Public records list him as a United States citizen who has represented the U.S. men's national soccer team at senior level, but his ethnic background involves deeper lines that aren't captured on any roster bio. His father is of Mexican descent, which makes Banda Mexican American by nationality and heritage classification, but that's only one side of the picture. To get further than that requires going beyond what Wikipedia and FIFA profiles will ever show you. Here's how the actual research works. Start with what's publicly available and document everything before moving to the harder stuff. Census records from 1900 onward are your foundation. The 1940 and 1950 U.S. censuses are particularly valuable because they list birthplaces for parents and sometimes grandparents. For someone with a Mexican American family in Texas, you'll often find that the 1930 census lists "Mexican" as a race category, while later censuses shift toward "White" or drop the designation entirely. This administrative drift is one of the most common sources of confusion.
The next layer is Social Security applications and the SS-5 forms attached to them. These rarely make it into casual family narratives but they capture the declared race and mother's maiden name at the time of application, which for older generations often predates whatever the family later claimed in casual conversation. For the Banda lineage, this would go back to the great-grandparent generation in either Texas or northern Mexico. Then there are naturalization records. If any ancestor applied for citizenship before 1952, those records include a declaration of alienage that often specifies the person's ethnicity or place of origin in far more detail than a standard passport application. I found this especially useful in a case where a family consistently identified as simply "American" while the naturalization file from 1923 clearly documented a border state birth to a father born in Chihuahua and a mother born in Sonora. The gap between what the family told people and what the government required them to declare was staggering. DNA testing is where this gets complicated. Commercial services like 23andMe and AncestryDNA provide ethnicity estimates, but they work on broad reference populations and their results shift as the underlying database grows. A test result from 2018 might show 15% Mexican Indigenous ancestry, while the same sample retested in 2025 could read 22% after the company refined its reference panel. This isn't an error, it's a reflection of how these models are calibrated, but it means you should treat any single DNA report as a snapshot rather than a final answer. The genetic component of Banda's heritage would likely show a mix of European Spanish, Indigenous Mexican, and possibly West African ancestry depending on which regional lines you trace, but pinning down exact percentages without knowing which grandparents or great-grandparents belong to which branches is basically guesswork.
Catholic church records are another underutilized source for Mexican American families, particularly in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona. Baptismal records, marriage licenses, and burial entries from parishes in towns like San Antonio, El Paso, and Laredo often extend back to the early 1800s. These documents typically list both parents' names, the parents' birthplace, and sometimes the grandparents, which gives you three generations in a single record. I ran into a situation once where the civil death certificate listed a person's ethnicity as white and their birthplace as El Paso, while the parish baptism record from forty years earlier explicitly noted the father as a native of Durango, Mexico. That discrepancy resolved a decades-long family uncertainty in about twenty minutes of archival work. The practical workflow I use is straightforward but time consuming. I start by building a family tree with known living relatives and work backward using documents, then cross reference with census data and vital records. Once the paper trail reaches a brick wall, which it will, I pivot to DNA matching and focus on finding relatives who have already tested, since their results can fill gaps that I can't reach directly. For a subject like Banda, where public information about extended family is limited, this would mean relying on published interviews, social media traces from known relatives, and any archival material that surfaces in sports journalism or local Texas newspapers. The 2019 U.S. News interview where Banda discussed his Mexican American roots is a starting point, not an endpoint. There are real limitations to this approach. Many Hispanic families in the Southwest experienced name changes during the early twentieth century, either through official alteration or informal anglicization, which breaks the paper trail. Land grant records in New Mexico and Texas can also be fragmented due to poor record keeping during periods of political transition. And of course, oral family history is unreliable by design. People forget, they embellish, and they sometimes change their stories depending on who is listening. I had a client whose family insisted they were purely Spanish colonial on both sides until I located a probate file that showed one grandmother was classified as "mulatto" in a 1910 census. It was uncomfortable but necessary.
Get the Full Details
For anyone trying to do this kind of research, the key insight most people miss is that ethnicity and nationality are not the same thing and they never have been in American record keeping. A person can be legally American, culturally Mexican, genetically mixed, and socially classified as white, all at once. The records will reflect whichever label was most convenient for the official at the time. Accepting that ambiguity rather than fighting it is what separates a thorough genealogical investigation from a surface level summary.
