Ecuadorians in america:

NuevaDorians

Most Ecuadorians consider New York Andean nation's third-largest city

Ask any Ecuadorian to name his country's third-largest city and you may get a response that sounds a bit off, geographically speaking. After the bustling port of Guayaquil and the capital of Quito comes "Nueva York," at least according to popular opinion .

The population figures that give New York the No. 3 standing are a point of contention. Although Ecuadorians commonly claim to be 1 million strong in the tri-state area, four years ago the U.S. Census found only 176,567 in New York, New Jersey and Connecticut.

Perhaps that means Ecuadorians are seeing quintuple or the census counted with its eyes closed, but in truth the answer lies somewhere between both extremes.

In that respect the census fell dismally short, a fault widely attributed to the format of the questionnaire, which required people to write in their national origin by hand but did not provide any examples.

"They created confusion in the way that they asked the question about people's Hispanic background," Logan said. "A very, very large number of people gave an ambiguous answer that got coded as 'other Hispanic.'"

The center's revised statistics put the number of Ecuadorians in metropolitan New York City (the five boroughs plus Westchester, Rockland and Putnam counties) at 159,309 compared to the 111,722 counted by the census. For the entire tri-state area, Mumford counted about 250,000 Ecuadorians, 40 percent higher than the census tally.

"This is a natural phenomenon and we see it with every group. It's not anything special to Ecuadorians," Logan said. To say 1 million "is a kind of a shorthand, not that there's actually a million, but there's a lot. They use a term that suggests that there's a lot and it needs to be paid attention to."

they apparently have an home state origin inferiorirty complex...Ecuador’s inferiority complex, a perversely pleasing contrast to the Divine Righteousness here in the US. Besides, population-wise, New York is Ecuador’s fourth largest city .