Segregation of a New Sort Takes Shape

From the moment segregation in America had a name, it has referred to the separateness of blacks and whites.

But during the last decade, while blacks were making some progress in residential integration, Latinos and Asians became more isolated from other racial groups in the vast majority of the nation’s large metropolitan areas, from Chicago’s red-bricked grid to Phoenix’s beige sprawl, a Times analysis of 2000 census data shows.

Though Latinos and Asians spread into new regions of Southern California and the nation, the borders around their own core neighborhoods stiffened, as newcomers displaced the remnants of other racial groups.

A Times analysis found that while African Americans remain the most segregated group in the nation’s top 25 metropolitan areas, Latinos and Asians are beginning to close the gap.

In 21 of 25 population centers, Asians were more likely to live apart from other races in 2000 than in 1990, according to the dissimilarity index, which calculates how evenly ethnic groups are spread within communities. Latinos became more segregated in 19 of 25 areas.

Demographers and community leaders are struggling to classify these tightening knots of ethnic population, which share characteristics of both African American ghettos and earlier immigrant enclaves, yet do not match the pattern of either.

Some find the trend troubling, proof that “we’re still a society that arranges itself around race,” said Karen Narasaki, president of the National Asian Pacific American Legal Consortium.

Others, however, say the new concentrations of Latinos and Asians are transitory and should not be viewed through the poisonous prism of segregation.

“These places, they don’t have the rigidity or underpinnings of a true ghetto,” said David Hayes-Bautista, director of the Center for Study of Latino Health and Culture at UCLA. “ ‘Segregation’ and ‘isolation’ have negative connotations. These are just points on the curve.”

The words--and the substance beneath them--carry a heavy penalty. Segregated neighborhoods are often poorer and more dangerous, trapped in a cycle of bad schools, dilapidated housing and negligible job prospects.

Opposite Trend Seen Among Blacks

Segregation no longer has the formal framework it had decades ago, when real estate agents and lenders discriminated legally and restrictive covenants carved out urban reservations for minorities.

Still, measured by segregation’s standard yardstick--dissimilarity--Latinos and Asians live increasingly among themselves in the big cities that are home to more than half their overall number.

Demographers define places as at least moderately segregated if more than 50% of a group’s population would have to move to become evenly distributed in that place.

Some 21 of the nation’s 25 largest metropolitan areas registered as moderately segregated or worse for blacks in 2000, down from 22 in 1990. Eleven now meet this criteria for Latinos, up from six a decade earlier. Seven do so for Asians, an increase from five in 1990.

In the 1990s, Latinos exceeded blacks’ concentration levels in Phoenix, matched them in San Diego and almost did so in Dallas. Their level of segregation jumped more than 10% in Atlanta, Seattle and Minneapolis.

Asian clusters became rapidly more Asian throughout Southern California, particularly in Orange County.

The 2000 figures illustrate the obstinacy of ethnic divisions in older cities such as Boston and New York, where the Asian and Latino communities were among the most isolated in 1990 and became more so by 2000.

Some of the more dramatic shifts, however, occurred in modern boomtowns with less entrenched geography, many of them surrounded by suburbs flush with new-economy wealth.

A string of barrios took shape on Seattle’s south side as Latinos more than tripled in one narrow strip, jumping from less than one-sixth of the 1990 population to more than one-third in 2000.

In Houston, which ranked as the seventh-most-segregated metropolitan area for Asians, Vietnamese poured into apartment complexes near William P. Hobby Airport, making one patch 82% Asian.

In Oakland’s Fruitvale neighborhood, tucked in a census tract where the Latino population grew more than 23%, 8,000 parishioners cram into St. Elizabeth Church each Sunday, then flow out to shop and eat at ethnic businesses.

“It’s so crowded people can’t get in the door,” said Jose Arredondo, executive director of the Spanish Speaking Citizens Foundation. “You can close your eyes and feel you’re in Latin America.”

To some extent, the increased intensity of Asian and Latino enclaves is not surprising.

These populations grew far more swiftly than other groups in the last decade, fueled by immigration, family reunification and higher birthrates. Massive undercounting in 1990 also may be a factor.

“Theirs is an isolation driven by higher density and sheer accumulation,” said Philip Ethington, a USC historian who analyzes segregation in Los Angeles County. “You have to think in terms of the established groups--blacks and whites--as being in retreat, leaving city cores to the newcomers.”

Immigrants typically have lower incomes and less education, which means fewer choices of where to live. Like the waves of Europeans who arrived 100 years before them, today’s newcomers usually settle near friends and relatives, in areas where neighbors speak their language and where there are social service agencies and job networks.

Southeast Asian refugees, for example, initially lived in small groups near their sponsors in the 1980s, then coalesced into larger, centralized communities in the ‘90s, Narasaki said.

In Seattle’s Beacon Hill neighborhood, a handful of Latino families burgeoned into several hundred in the space of a generation around the social service agency El Centro de la Raza.

The area serves as both womb and springboard, its hyper-concentration providing instant ethnic, commercial and political identity, said Roberto Maestas, El Centro’s executive director.

It took 50 years for similar white ethnic communities to disperse in Eastern cities, and vestiges of them still remain, said John Logan, who studies segregation at the State University of New York at Albany’s Lewis Mumford Center for Comparative Urban and Regional Research.

Some demographers fear, however, that Latino and Asian enclaves may prove more stubborn and less nurturing, both because of the ethnic component and because of their sheer size.

“That scale changes things,” said Richard Sander, a law professor and director of UCLA’s empirical research group. “With European immigrants, you had a number of smaller groups that over time became indistinguishable from other whites. With Latinos, there’s less of a drive to assimilate and more desire to maintain a link to Latin culture.”

That same scale can result in fear and friction.

Affluent Seattle suburbs such as Bellevue developed miniature Latino belts in the last decade, fringe communities of low-wage service workers. But the interplay between Latinos and whites remains scarce and strained: youths divided on ethnic lines clash over soccer field turf as their parents maintain a frosty distance, Maestas said.

“There’s a phrase that captures the essence of Seattle on the racial front,” he said. “The illusion of inclusion.”

Ethnic Dynamics Are More Complex

While blacks’ experience of segregation has been more monolithic, some analysts argue that diversity within the Latino and Asian communities is producing a two-tiered reality.

Latino and Asian professionals and longtime U.S. residents mingle easily with whites of their class, said John Kain, who studies segregation at the University of Texas at Dallas.

Those with rural backgrounds and little education, however, are becoming more isolated. In 1990, Cambodians were more segregated than blacks, Sander noted.

But Narasaki disagrees that the split runs entirely on class lines, pointing to a spurt of ‘90s “ethno-burbs” dominated by Asian professionals and small-business owners.

“It’s not like you have lots of wealthy Asians living with wealthy whites,” she said. “Clearly, there is still the phenomenon of whites not wanting to live with them. People want to explain the Latino and Asian experience as being about voluntary separation, but that sort of lets them off the hook.”

Ultimately, some demographers suggest, more personal links may soften the boundaries of Latino and Asian enclaves. Both groups are far more likely to intermarry than are blacks.

“By the third generation, 57% of Latinos are marrying someone of a different ethnicity,” said Harry Pachon, president of the Tomas Rivera Institute in Claremont. “Us is them and them is us.”