Study Finds New Latino Middle Class on the Rise

An emerging Latino middle class is gradually achieving a certain prosperity and in many cases is moving toward parity with the overall Southern California population, a study released Wednesday has found.

The study, sponsored by Pepperdine University’s Institute for Public Policy, is billed as the first to examine the region’s dynamic Latino middle class, a group long ignored in mainstream research.

“It is generally assumed, in the academia and in the media, that Latinos are not going anywhere,” said Gregory Rodriguez, a research fellow at Pepperdine who wrote the report. “In fact, there is considerable economic movement and progress over time.”

Latinos, who make up 26% of Orange County’s population, are following a hopeful track in Southern California not too dissimilar from that of Italian Americans and other ethnic groups that have historically moved up the socioeconomic ladder and into the national mainstream, the researchers concluded.

By 1990, the study found, there were nearly four times as many U.S.-born Latino households in the middle class in Southern California as there were in poverty.

“Give these people 20 years, and they’re going to be doing better,” said Rodriguez, who used U.S. census data to prepare his analysis.

The study does not deny the fact that Latinos, especially new immigrants, continue to struggle with high poverty and low educational attainment. But the report points to what it calls upwardly mobile trends--such as rates of home ownership and household incomes comparable to other groups.

Still, progress tends to be unequal: U.S. natives generally fare better than the foreign-born. It is a pattern generally seen in all immigrant populations, as succeeding generations build upon the success of their parents. But such generational improvement, the author argues, is frequently overlooked in the case of Latinos, whom outsiders often view as a homogenous population.

“The longer immigrant families reside in the U.S., the more likely they are to become middle class,” the study says. “U.S.-born children and grandchildren of Latino immigrants fare considerably better than the immigrant generation.”

The overall portrait that emerges is one of a hard-working, family-oriented people who are gradually increasing their incomes, purchasing homes and attaining their piece of the American dream.

That is good news for Southern California, say participants in the study, who note that population changes driven by immigration and high Latino birthrates have radically transformed the region’s demographic makeup.

“The future of L.A. has a lot to do with how Latinos do,” said Joel Kotkin, a writer who is also a senior fellow at Pepperdine and edited the study’s results. “It’s important to look at the data and see how that population is doing.”

Dowell Myers, a leading researcher who was not involved in the Pepperdine project, said its conclusions appear to be on target.

“Latinos are moving into the middle class,” said Myers, a USC demographer and urban planner. “Home ownership is the American dream, and immigrants come for the American dream,”

The Pepperdine research is at odds with some portrayals of Latino status. A pair of Rand Corp. reports released last summer found that Latino immigrants generally were lagging in education and economic progress.

But Rodriguez noted that despite lower educational levels for Latino immigrants, a large number of them and their families are able to break into the middle class. “This is not an educationally driven mobility,” said Rodriguez, who writes on Latino issues for various publications.

The Latino path to the middle class, the study states, is marked less by rapid individual educational progress and more by the pooling of resources among family members who work in blue-collar and service industry jobs. More than among other populations, Rodriguez said, Latino households typically include several wage earners, often from different generations, contributing to family upkeep.

Unlike many other studies, which focus on individual incomes, the Pepperdine report looked at household income. The household figure, Rodriguez said, is especially germane for Latino families, which tend to have multiple wage earners donating to the family well-being.

Still, Latinos, who in 1990 constituted about one-third of the population of the five-county Southern California area studied--Los Angeles, Orange, Ventura, Riverside and San Bernardino counties--only account for about one-quarter of all residents identified as middle class. The study defined middle class--which, Rodriguez concedes, is a somewhat amorphous concept--as those whose household incomes were above $35,000 or who own their own homes.

But the study calls the rate of upward mobility remarkable considering that two-thirds of Latino households in the region are headed by immigrants, many of whom arrived virtually penniless, not speaking English and with only primary school educations. The massive immigration that began in the 1970s dramatically increased the region’s Latino makeup and broadened its diversity, adding significant numbers of Central Americans and others to a Latino population that was largely of Mexican ancestry.

Today, the study notes, the total Latino middle class is numerically larger than the combined African American and Asian middle classes in the region.

The differing progress among immigrants and U.S. natives is clear when looking at the study’s two key indicators, median income and home ownership.

Almost 50% of Latino households headed by U.S. natives had attained the median income of $35,000. That is below the 58% figure for non-Latino white households, and the 57% for Asian households. Among foreign-born Latino households, 34% were above the median income--slightly below the 38% figure for African American households.

On the question of home ownership, the study found that 51% of households headed by U.S.-born Latinos owned their dwellings, compared to 61% for non-Latino whites, almost 55% for Asians and 37% for African Americans. About 31% of foreign-born Latino households owned their residences.