The segregation of ancestry groups in San Antonio

Abstract

Despite some evidence for the economic advancement and suburbanization of urban-bound immigrants in the United States, the preponderance of evidence points to increasing residential segregation of these groups in ethnic enclaves in U.S. cities. In this study, based on an extensive literature review, the segregation of an ancestry group is tied to the group’s SES, recency, physical and cultural distinctiveness, and social distance as judged by the majority population. The dissimilarity index (DI) is calculated for each of 28 ancestry groups in San Antonio, based on the 1990 U.S. Census, and related to explanatory indicators from various sources. The socio-economic status of a group is found to exert a non-linear influence on segregation—reducing it for below-average SES groups (the traditional immigrant assimilation model), while increasing it for above-average SES groups (a new pluralism model, reflecting the decisions of professional and entrepreneurial immigrants). The recency of an ancestry’s entry; whether it is non-European versus European; and (especially) the magnitude of its social distance rating, all play significant supplementary roles in its segregation.

Acknowledgements

The author gratefully acknowledges the help of Francisco Flores and Stephen Smeltzer in operationalizing the census tract maps for San Antonio in ARCVIEW, and of his colleague, Miguel de Oliver, who critiqued an earlier version of the manuscript.