I thought the ACS would have information on all the states and I wanted to look at differences among regions but also certain states with large South American population. However when I run the frequencies for the state codes the only states Alabama, Alaska, Arizona, Arkansas, California, Colorado, Connecticut, D.C., Florida, Georgia, Hawaii, Idaho and Illinois. Is this how the data is supposed to be?
I am using university computers and I have had issues with the computers not having enough memory to run the data so I don’t know if that is playing a role. The sample size I got for the 2007-2011 was 4,990,647 and since my focus is only on Latinos, it ends up being 1,018,524. Should there be more?
The 2007-2011 ACS sample should have 15,199,756 cases (roughly 3,000,000 in each year). The file you are downloading should be roughly 8335 MB. The first thing you should check is if the extract was fully decompressed using appropriate decompression software such as 7-zip (which is a free program). You can read more detailed instructions here.
If you feel your computer can not handle this large of a file, there are ways to reduce the extract file size. For your study, if you are only interested in Latinos, you can use the Select Cases feature on HISPAND so that your extract only includes Latinos.
If your problem is not related to decompression or file size, I recommend reconstructing the extract from scratch and downloading the fresh extract.