Ghettos and Barrios: The Impact of Neighborhood Poverty and Race on Job Matching among Blacks and Latinos

Recent research suggests that racial and poverty concentrations in urban neighborhoods influence how minorities look for and find jobs. In this study, we use data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality to examine this hypothesis, focusing on the use and return to various modes of job matchin...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:Social problems (Berkeley, Calif.) Calif.), 2001-08, Vol.48 (3), p.341-361
Main Authors: Elliott, James R., Sims, Mario
Format: Article
Language:English
Subjects:
(HN) Social History
Atlanta, Georgia
Barrios
Black people
Blacks
Boston, Massachusetts
Employment
Ethnic groups
Ethnic Neighborhoods
Ethnicity
Ghetto
Ghettos
Hispanic people
Hispanics
Job hunting
Job Search
Labor markets
Latin American Cultural Groups
Los Angeles, California
Neighborhoods
Neighbourhoods
P values
Poverty
Race
Racial aspects
Racial Differences
Research Article
Search strategies
Social aspects
Social inequality
Social problems
Sociology
U.S.A
United States
Urban areas
Urban Poverty
Urban sociology
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Summary:Recent research suggests that racial and poverty concentrations in urban neighborhoods influence how minorities look for and find jobs. In this study, we use data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality to examine this hypothesis, focusing on the use and return to various modes of job matching among blacks and Latinos in different residential contexts. Results show that while Latinos are generally more likely than blacks to acquire jobs through personal contacts, this racial difference shrinks considerably in very poor, coethnic neighborhoods (i.e., ghettos and barrios). However, results also indicate that within these respective neighborhood contexts, Latinos are significantly more likely than blacks to use neighbors and eventual coworkers to acquire jobs; whereas blacks are more likely to use residential and organizational "outsiders." We speculate that this qualitative difference in the type of contacts used in barrios, as opposed to ghettos, affects the extent to which individual success with informal job matching contributes to the development of a collective resource that can be used by other job seekers in the neighborhood.
ISSN:0037-7791
1533-8533
DOI:10.1525/sp.2001.48.3.341