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(excluding the Commonwealth of Puerto Rico), representing 12.5 percent of the
total. Hispanics grew in numbers by 57.9 percent in the last intercensal period,
as compared with 13.2 percent for the national population.
population would have fallen into the single digits and a number of cities and
states would have actually lost population. These facts are well known, as is the
source of this rapid growth: sustained immigration.
ture and the politics of the cities and regions where it concentrates. However,
neither the culture nor the political orientations that these immigrants bring
is incompatible with integration into American society.
A Companion to Latina/o Studies, edited by Juan Flores, and Renato Rosaldo, John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated, 2007. ProQuest Ebook
Central, http://ebookcentral.proquest.com/lib/rutgers-ebooks/detail.action?docID=320058.
Created from rutgers-ebooks on 2021-09-10 04:25:06.
Copyright © 2007. John Wiley & Sons, Incorporated. All rights reserved.
trated in the South and West, where three fourths of them still live, they have
started to move out of their traditional areas of settlement to increase their
presence in other areas.
Although just two states, Texas and California, continue to concentrate half of
the Hispanic population, it is clear that new clusters are being created continu-
ously by two forces: the gradual expansion of Mexican labor migration eastward
and the settlement of immigrants from Central and South America in new areas
Driven, in part, by the rigors of tighter border enforcement that
has made more difficult the traditional cyclical migrant flow, Mexican laborers
have become more settled and have trekked east attracted by new and better
employment. New York, Florida, and the Carolinas have been principal targets
of this eastward flow, which has turned Mexican labor migration into a national
cent of the Hispanic population, but are its fastest growing components, have
spread around the country, targeting both traditional and new areas of settle-
ment. There are, for example, large concentrations of Dominicans in Providence,
Rhode Island and in Boston; of Colombians in New Jersey and Los Angeles;
of Salvadorans in Washington, DC and in Los Angeles; and of Brazilians in
Massachusetts (Guarnizo et al. 1999; Itzigsohn et al. 1999; Landolt 2000; Levitt
1997). Such movements have also contributed to turn Hispanics into a truly
national presence.
aside from the consolidation of social networks across national borders, has been
the labor needs of the American economy. This huge economy, surpassing 10
trillion dollars of GDP in 2000, generates a vast demand for foreign labor at both
the high-end of professional and technical occupations and the low-end of low-
paid manual jobs.
acteristics and its continuation over time, reinforced now by large Central American
contingents, have given the Hispanic population its dominant economic and
occupational profile.
to climb their way up over several generations. Even those groups with higher
levels of human capital and entrepreneurial prowess cannot escape the dominant
characterization of Hispanics, defined by continuing low-wage immigration.