Latinos Extend Reach Beyond Enclaves

By Miriam Jordan, Wall Street Journal

South Americans, Puerto Ricans and Cubans are settling among the existing U.S. population more readily than Mexicans, the nation’s largest Hispanic group, a trend with implications for politics, the economy and other areas of daily life.

In another finding of a study of U.S. Hispanics to be released Wednesday, the number of Hondurans, Guatemalans and others has been growing more rapidly than Mexicans, who still make up six in 10 U.S. Hispanics, since 1990. In all, 50.5 million U.S. residents trace their origin to Spanish-speaking countries.

Every group except Mexicans has experienced a substantial decline in residential segregation from whites since 1990, according to the most common measure of segregation, the “dissimilarity index,” which measures the distribution of two groups in a neighborhood and how much one group is over- or under-represented in relation to the other.

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