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24 U.S. Immigration and Changing Relations Between Mrican Americans and Latinos Nestor Rodriguez INTERNATIONAL MIGRATION is dramatically altering social-demographic landscapes in U.S. urban areas. Since the 1970s large influxes of new immigrants have substantially altered the ethnic and racial populations of large urban centers-for example , New York, Los Angeles, and Houston-with strong ties to the global economy. Large-scale immigration of peoples from Asia, Latin America, and other world regions has contributed to major social change in these settings by establishing new culturally distinct communities (Lamphere 1992). This development of new communities has produced new patterns of inter- and intragroup relation in large U.S. urban centers. With the expansion and diversification of Asian, Latino, and other ethnic and racial communities, the setting for U.S. urban race relations has been transformed from a mainly binary plane of blackwhite relations into multidimensional axes of ethnicity , immigrant status, nationality, race, and other social identities (Bach 1993). Especially after the social eruptions in Los Angeles in the spring of 1992, this social recomposition has created concerns among mainstream institutional leaders about the intergroup future of their localities. African Americans and Latinos are prominent players in this future, since collectively they form sizable populations, if not majorities, in many large U.S. cities. Among the five largest central cities in the country, this is true in New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Houston (see table 24.1). In the fifth-largest central city, Philadelphia, African Americans and Latinos compose 45.2 percent of the population. In the South, Houston is a critical case of emerging intergroup relations between African Americans and Latinos in the context ofhigh immigration levels. The 1990 census found that Houston has more black residents than any other southern city, and the second-largest Latino population in the South (if not the largest by the mid-1990s). Over 40 percent of Houston's 450,000 Latino residents are first-generation immigrants (U.S. Bureau of the Census 1993c, table 28). In this chapter, I respond, through two discussions , to James H. Johnson, Walter C. Farrell, and Chandra Guinn's chapter in this volume. In the first discussion, I address the authors' topology of "immigration-induced community conflicts," primarily from the Houston perspective. Using findings from recent intergroup surveys and ongoing ethnographic research in Houston, I argue that tensions, conflict, and community instability are not the only outcome of 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. In the second discussion, I attempt to relate the arena of intergroup relations to larger structural processes related 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 . VARIED MODES OF INTERGROUP RELATIONS BETWEEN AFRICAN AMERICANS AND LATINOS To help place specific levels of intergroup relations in Houston into historical perspective, it is necessary to describe the area's dynamic economic growth, its political development, and its attraction for large numbers of immigrants. With the influence of a business elite strongly connected to various levels of government, Houston's economy enjoyed almost nonstop growth in the oil and petrochemical industries between the 1910s and the beginning of the 1980s. So robust was the area's 424 The Handbook ofInternational Migration TABLE 24.1 Racial and Ethnic Population Distributions in the Five Largest U.S. Central Cities, 1990 Asian 1990 American or American Indian, Population Non-Hispanic African Pacific Eskimo, or Central City (millions) White American Latino Islander Aleutian New York 7.32 43.4% 28.8% 23.7% 7.0% 0.3% Los Angeles 3.49 37.5 13.9 39.3 9.8 0.4 Chicago 2.78 38.2 39.0 19.2 3.7 0.2 Houston 1.63 40.8 28.1 27.2 4.0 0.3 Philadelphia 1.59 52.2 39.9 5.3 2.7 0.2 Source: U.S. Bureau afthe Census (1993b), table 171. economic development, assisted by governmental support, that Houston continued to enjoy substantial business vitality even during the Depression of the 1930s. Until the price of oil collapsed in the early 1980s, Houston enjoyed unparalleled growth as a production and technological center of the world...

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