Locating Hispanic Americans, 1900-2020

This study examines Hispanic Americans’ residential settlement patterns nationwide in the last 120 years. Drawing on newly available neighborhood data for the whole country as early as 1900, it documents the direction and timing of changes in two aspects of their location. First, it charts Hispanics’ transition from a predominantly rural population to majority metropolitan by 1930 and also their growing presence in all regions of the U.S. while still maintaining a predominance in the West and Texas. Second, it provides the first evidence of the long-term trajectory of their segregation from whites in the metropolitan areas where they were settling. As shown by studies of more recent decades, Hispanics were never as segregated as African Americans. Nonetheless, similar to African Americans, their segregation from whites increased to high levels through the middle of the century, followed by slow decline. For both groups metropolitan segregation was driven mainly by segregation among central city neighborhoods prior to the 1940s. But new forms of segregation – a growing city/suburb divide and increasing segregation among suburban places – have become the largest contributors to segregation today.