Latino neighborhoods and Latino neighborhood poverty

In this article, I use 1980 and 1990 US census tracts that were 50% or more Latino to present a socioeconomic portrait of Latino neighborhoods and to investigate the determinants of poverty and the factors behind the poverty increase of Latinos in these neighborhoods. Results show that Latinos in Latino tracts rank worse than US Latinos on virtually all socioeconomic measures. Recent immigrants raise Latino neighborhood poverty, while long-term immigrants reduce it. The 1979 to 1989 increase in poverty in Latino neighborhoods can be explained better by changes in the payoffs of the characteristics that affect poverty than by changes in the value of these characteristics. Changes in the industrial composition of employment had a relatively large poverty-increasing effect.