The consumption of out-of-home highbrow leisure by ethnicity and national origin: attendance at museums and live theatres in Houston

ABSTRACT

Dynamics of compensation for the deprivations of segregation and discrimination, and the support of multiculturalism derived from ethnic cohesion explain the consumption of out-of-home highbrow leisure events by minority/ethnic individuals, immigrants, and their descendants as efforts toward their integration and assimilation in metropolitan areas. Using data from the Houston Area Survey, I examine whether there are any significant ethnic disparities in the attendance at museums and live theatres, which represent a relevant dimension of out-of-home highbrow leisure in Houston. I found that the odds of frequently attending museums and live theatres are lower for Anglos compared with non-Anglos, and higher for US-born individuals with at least one foreign parent compared with US-born individuals with US-born parents. These findings reveal that the audiences of museums and live theatres in Houston are already characterized by a noteworthy ethnic diversity.

KEYWORDS:

• Culture consumption
• ethnic disparities
• leisure
• immigration
• Houston
• urban studies

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the 2015 American Sociological Association Annual Meeting. I thank Néstor Rodríguez and two anonymous reviewers for helpful comments and suggestions. I also thank the Kinder Institute for Urban Research at Rice University, Stephen Klineberg, and Jie Wu for making the Houston Area Survey data and the Houston Arts Survey data available. The author benefited from grant 5 R24 HD042849, Population Research Center, awarded to the Population Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin by the Eunice Kennedy Shriver National Institute of Child Health and Human Development.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1. In this study, I interchangeably use Latino and Hispanic.

2. Latinos have had a significant presence in Houston for decades. In the 1970s, the Hispanic presence was already significant (about 11%) before the immigrant influx began in the 1980s. By the 1990s, about 28% of Houstonians were Hispanics (US Census Bureau 2005).

3. Visit the webpage of the Houston Museum District: http://houstonmuseumdistrict.org/

4. See, for instance, the objectives of (and the events promoted by) the following organizations: Houston Arts Alliance (http://www.houstonartsalliance.com/); Institute of Hispanic Culture of Houston (http://www.ihch.org/home/); Gente de Teatro (http://www.gentedeteatro.org/); Talento Bilingüe de Houston (http://www.talentobilingue.org/).

5. Visit the webpages of these organizations: http://milleroutdoortheatre.com/; http://www.discoverygreen.com/

6. Film and theatre are different manifestations, but neither is intrinsically more artistic than the other. There are commercial or not-so-commercial films that are canonized as legitimate artistic manifestations as well as more commercial or less artistic plays. However, films are mostly produced in an entertainment industry whereas plays may be subsidized or be promoted by grassroots initiatives as artistic endeavours (see DiMaggio 1992).

7. The evidence of no significant differences reported by Klineberg and Wu (2012) was obtained with a bivariate chi-square test with the variable ‘attendance at art events’ and ethnicity (using categories for Anglos, blacks, Latinos, and Asians) available in the Houston Arts Survey.

8. I use ethnic disparities (instead of ethno-racial) because non-Anglos, the reference category of the analysis for non-whites, include not only blacks, a racial category, but also Hispanics and Asians. However, it also could be interpreted as ethno-racial because of the inclusion of blacks and the racialization of ethnic minorities.

9. Past rounds of the HAS only included respondents from Harris County.

10. Although response and cooperation rates were overall low, these rates are relatively high for current telephone survey data. The sample distributions support the confidence in the reliability of the data (Klineberg 2013).

11. The central question reads: ‘Are you Anglo, black, Hispanic, Asian or of some other ethnic background?’.

12. I alternatively ran regression models including more ethnic self-identification categories: black, Hispanic, and Asian/other, but I did not find any significant differences among black, Hispanic, and Asian/other. Moreover, variance inflation factors of independent variables in the regression analyses presented in this study suggest that multicollinearity is not a problem.

13. Nonetheless, Katz-Gerro (1999) used more categorical variables for occupation. Not all white-collar workers (e.g. managers) had a greater participation in highbrow activities compared with semi/unskilled workers.

14. I analysed these data using multivariate logistic regression techniques. However, the Houston Arts Survey did not gather all the variables that were used in this study such as white-collar occupation and lives in the suburbs.