Latino Communities, Social Organization, and Victimization: A Study of El Paso, TX Neighborhoods

• In Event: Communities and Place: Setting an Agenda for Neighborhoods, Race, and Crime Research in the 21st Century

Abstract

The communities and crime literature has not fully appreciated that the urban racial landscape is increasingly Latino. We see this as a missed opportunity to understand community social organization processes. In particular, a small body of work indicates that Latino areas exhibit strong community social organization due to their extensive familial and fictive kin ties, connections to the labor market, and vibrant use of public spaces. Some have speculated that this neighborhood vitality has led to less crime than expected given socioeconomic marginalization. To explore this claim, we study heterogeneity within communities of varying levels of Latino residents in El Paso, Texas, a predominantly Latino area with a sizeable immigrant population that sits along the Southern border with Mexico. We employ the El Paso Neighborhood Study which provides detailed indicators of community social organization, victimization, and other socioeconomic factors for individuals across 46 neighborhood clusters in 2014. This work hopes to broaden our understanding of how race shapes community outcomes by going beyond the Black/White divide and spotlighting Latinos, the largest ethnoracial minority group in the US.

Authors

• Maria Beatriz Velez, University of Maryland

• Christopher J. Lyons, University of New Mexico