Are Male Hispanic First Names Dying Out?

While the percentage of children born to Hispanics is rising, the popularity of traditional Hispanic first names for male babies is declining. As opposed to everyone's grandmother who claims that "They are just taking over the place", Hispanics seem to be conforming to U.S. culture and using traditional Anglo and modern American first names.

Using data from a Houston Chronicle applet that mines Social Security Data, I charted the rise and fall of new male Hispanic baby names over the last 45 years. If a name was the 100th most common name I gave it a value of 0. If it was the most popular baby name, I gave it a value of 100. If it did not make the top 100, it was given a value of 0.

Here is my chart.



Notes: I wasn't sure if Angel and Diego were specifically or overwhelmingly Hispanic names, so I left them off. They actually showed rapid increases in popularity during the last decade, but both declined in popularity in the last year (2007).