The Ambiguous Roles of Suburbanization and Immigration in Ethnic Segregation: the Case of San Antonio¹

Abstract

The traditional spatial assimilation model, though still operative, has proven inadequate to explain new trends in urban residential location in which, for example, disadvantaged and newly arrived groups move directly to the suburbs where they may re-segregate rather than disperse. Understanding residential patterns after 1990 often benefits from a micro-level approach, looking at specific cities and disaggregating traditional measures (e.g., the dissimilarity index) to examine changes within areas and neighborhoods of the city. This study takes such an approach. It analyzes segregation by means of the residential micro-patterns that give rise to it, and examines their relationship to suburbanization and immigration in greater San Antonio (Bexar County) during the 1990s for four ethnic groups: Hispanics, Blacks, non-Hispanic Whites, and Latino immigrants. The results reveal that segregation patterns in San Antonio have deep historic roots—the result of ongoing processes of urban job and housing availability, minority political power, and economic mobility. They show that the dissimilarity index declined for all groups in the 1990s, a decline chiefly attributable to deconcentration (lessening overrepresentation) in the inner city. By contrast, in the outer suburban city, incursion (moving into new areas) was offset by hyper-concentration (concentrating with fellow ethnics) such that the dissimilarity index neither increased nor declined. A typology is developed to explain the different pathways by which the dissimilarity index may increase or decrease in a metropolis. Finally, the results show that Latino immigration increased the overall dissimilarity index for Hispanics as well as for other groups in San Antonio.

Keywords:

• segregation
• suburbanization
• immigration
• San Antonio