U.S. Immigration and Intergroup Relations in the Late 20th Century: African Americans and Latinos (1996)

Introduction Various macro-structural forces are transforming the social composition of large U.S. urban areas in the late 20th century. As in other advanced Western societies, global economic restructuring and international migration are dramatically altering socio-cultural and demographic landscapes in the urban United States. In the short historical span since the 1970s, these processes have produced substantial growth of ethnic/racial populations in large U.S. urban areas, e.g., New York, Los Angeles, and Houston, with strong ties to the global economy. Large-scale immigration from Asia, Latin America, and other world regions has intensified urban change in these settings by creating new culturally distinct communities (Lamphere, 1992). Socially and culturally, and in terms of new patterns of intergroup relations, the large U.S. urban centers of the 1990s are not the same settings of 10 or 20 years ago. This large-scale social and demographic change has produced new interrelational matrices in U.S. urban areas (Bach, 1993). With the expansion and diversification of Asian, Latino, and other ethnic/racial communities, the poles of urban race relations have been transformed from a mainly binary plane of black-white relations into multidimensional axes of ethnicity, immigrant status, nationality, race, and other social identifies. Especially after the social eruptions of African Americans and Latinos in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992, this social recomposition has created concerns among mainstream institutional leaders about the interethnic/racial future of their localities. African American and Latino communities are prominent players in this future, since in many of the largest urban areas they form a collective majority of the population. Among the five largest cities in the country, this is true in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1994). In the fifth largest city, Philadelphia, African Americans and Latinos compose 45.2% of the population. In the South, Houston is a critical case of emerging intergroup relations between African Americans and Latinos in the context of high immigration levels. The 1990 census found that Houston has more black residents than any other southern city, and has the second largest Latino population in the South (if not the largest by 1995). Over 40% of Houston's 450,000 Latino population consists of first-generation immigrants (U.S. Bureau of the Census, 1993). In this article, I focus on the arena of intergroup relations between African Americans and Latinos from the perspective of Latino immigration. In the first part of the discussion, I attempt to relate the arena of intergroup relations to larger structural processes with reference to global change and immigration. These processes are important for relations between African Americans and Latinos because they greatly affect the social geographies and related opportunity structures of intergroup interaction. In the second part of the discussion, using findings from recent intergroup surveys and ongoing ethnographic research in the Houston area, I argue that contrary to some expectations (see Johnson et al., 1995) tensions, conflict, and community instability are not the only resulting relations between African Americans and Latinos in contexts of high immigration. Indeed, I attempt to make the case for varied modes of intergroup reactions in such settings, sometimes varying by social identities other than ethnicity or race, and sometimes forming collaborative relations based precisely on identities of minority status. Using the prominent Houston case, my purpose in this discussion also is to suggest that the highly publicized intergroup patterns of Los Angeles do not necessarily represent the future of the U.S. urban system. Macro-Structural Contexts of Immigration And African American-Latino Relations In the late 20th century, urban intergroup relations have become substantially affected by underlying structural processes whose reach transcends not only specific urban settings, but also the very nation-state. …