Just Neighbors?: Research on African American and Latino Relations in the United States
Just Neighbors? is a needed and welcome assessment of African American and Latino relations. As more of the nation s major cities become majority minority a key question becomes how people and communities of color interact with, understand, and affect one another. Edward Telles and colleagues have pulled together an excellent set of articles that in a rich and mutually informing manner, span the fields of anthropology, political science, and sociology. The work highlights the dynamics of group identity and stereotyping processes, of local context and characteristics particularly within the labor market, and especially of community leadership in molding the tenor of group relations. Just Neighbors? provides an important and broad-gauge baseline for serious scholarship on black-Latino relations. --LAWRENCE D. BOBO, W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Social Sciences, Harvard UniversityStudies of intergroup relations traditionally have been framed in terms of minority-majority interactions. In the United States, this meant black-white relations or, more recently, Hispanic-white relations. As the United States becomes a minority-majority society with no single dominant group, however, this framing increasingly does not apply. Equally important now and in the future are minority-minority relations, and perhaps no relationship is as critical as to the future of America as that between blacks and Hispanics. Interactions between these groups will determine much about the future demography, politics, and socioeconomic structure of the nation. Just Neighbors? is a timely and very welcome contribution to the scholarly literature, bringing together the nation s top researchers on blacks and Hispanics and the relations between them to synthesize what is known and not known about this critical issue. --DOUGLAS S. MASSEY, Henry G. Bryant Professor of Sociology and Public Affairs, Princeton University