Adventures in Indexing #4 – Texas A&M

My most recent page to index in the 1940 US Census is from College Station Texas, home of Texas A&M University.  This was a tedious page to index because there were no family groups to offer repeated information such as Surname. 

The page started with Manuel Salas, Partner, Male, White, Single, 27 years old, from San Antonio.

My first thought was that this was a page of students, maybe a men’s dorm.  I had to go back two pages to find the household number; when I did, I found the following notation:

Here begins the enumeration of the Texas A&M College dormitory for Mexican employees of the Dining Hall

That gave me some context, but still didn’t answer my curiosity about the term Partner in the Relationship field.  There were many people on the page listed as Partner.  I found my answer in the enumerator instructions:

If two or more persons who are not related by blood or marriage share a common dwelling unit as partners, write head for one and partner for the other or others.

One more interesting thing about this page.  Every one of the people in this section had a Hispanic surname, as you would guess from the description of “Mexican employees of the Dining Hall”.  However, every one of them was also listed as White rather than Hispanic, even the ones who were listed as born in Mexico.