CHAPTER 4
Often the need for shelter can be so pressing that vindicating even the clearest cases of housing bias is less of a priority for discrimination victims who need to find a place to live. Such was the case for Quinta, an Afro-Dominican who in 2004 sought a room to rent in New York City.1 She was a twenty-four-year–old, bilingual college graduate moving to New York for a position in government politics and needed a temporary place to stay until her husband could relocate to New York as well. Quinta considered herself fortunate that her Dominican brother-in-law alerted her to an informal Latino Craigslist-like housing network in which Latinos subleased bedrooms within their apartments in the Latino-dominated Inwood section of upper Manhattan. Arrangements were made over the phone for a week-to-week rental payment and date on which Quinta could move in.
Yet when Quinta arrived on the appointed date with her suitcase in hand, the Latina apartment dweller took one look at Quinta’s brown skin and claimed that the room was not actually available to rent and that a mistake had somehow been made. Quinta’s brother-in-law had never anticipated that the Latino Inwood room rental “agency” he recommended would fail Quinta in this way. Why? As a fair-skinned Latino, Quinta’s brother-in-law had no experience with his racial appearance being an object of derision by fellow Latinos.
The in-person denial of a housing rental after it is offered as available on the telephone is a classic example of race-based housing discrimination. However, Quinta had a new job to start and little time for anything else, let alone filing a legal claim. So, like so many other victims of housing discrimination, Quinta simply “moved on” and located an alternative housing arrangement. Yet, over fifteen years later, as she related the details of how she was racially excluded, Quinta was still disturbed by what had happened. Quinta explained to me that having spent her childhood in predominantly White non-Hispanic spaces in Boston, she “never expected to feel at home” with White non-Hispanics but had thought she’d be more welcome among fellow Latinos. The pain of being racially excluded by her Latino and Latina compatriots then felt much more acute and perhaps too painful to process with a protracted legal proceeding. So while the Latino-dominated network of informal housing rentals does not figure into national calculations of the extent of housing segregation, such networks exert significant influence and inflict actual racial harms. Consequently, the pragmatic choice not to file discrimination claims by the Quintas of the world should not be interpreted as the absence of a Latino anti-Black discrimination problem in New York or anywhere else.
Even more disturbing perhaps is that our national law and many state laws prohibiting racial discrimination in the rental and purchase of housing purposely exempt landlords who are owner-occupiers of small-scale multiple dwelling units (such as a building of four units or fewer).2 Legislators enacting the national Fair Housing Act wanted to protect the hypothetical “Mrs. Murphys” of the world from being forced to share their intimate settings with races they did not like. The exception was also justified with the presumption that small-scale multiple-dwelling units were not a significant share of the overall housing market. It was reasoned that this small degree of discrimination would not adversely disrupt the pursuit of racial equality. The compromise was enacted with the caveat that a real estate broker could not administer a discriminatory selection process, and public advertising for such small multiple-dwelling units could not be discriminatory in stating a preference for or an exclusion of applicants of a particular race, lest the advertising itself contribute to a societal climate of racial inequality.
While the earlier Civil Rights Act of 1866 prohibition against racial discrimination in housing does not contain a “Mrs. Murphy” exception, its reach into the informal housing market is hindered by the statute’s failure to include a government enforcement mechanism.3 The US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) is legislatively tasked with enforcing the Fair Housing Act and not the Civil Rights Act of 1866 (except as it relates to housing and community development programs funded by HUD). In other words, government funding to investigate and process discrimination claims is not directed toward the “Mrs. Murphy” context. Only if an aggrieved victim has the requisite resources and wherewithal to mount their own individual Civil Rights Act of 1866 lawsuit can they seek to have a “Mrs. Murphy” sanctioned. While local state laws vary in the extent of their “Mrs. Murphy” exceptions, only a handful of states completely omit the exception.
Thus, apart from advertising, the legal system effectively authorizes discrimination in the informal housing context. What the law fails to consider is that the “Mrs. Moraleses” of the informal Latino housing market controlling access to apartment shares and basement apartment rentals are not an insignificant source of housing. Housing experts note that the private rental industry is very decentralized and includes many “disconnected, small-scale landlords who often evaluate applicants on a case-by-case basis, in-person, and without formalized eligibility criteria.”4 Independent landlords still own most rental properties and thus are of vital importance in implementing fair housing laws. Indeed, by 2018, the Latino homeownership rate rose to 47.5 percent (as compared to the national rate of 65.1 percent).5 Against a backdrop of hyper-segregation precluding Latino access to most White non-Hispanic residential areas, the informal Latino-controlled housing networks that many Latinos are limited to take on greater importance.
Furthermore, Afro-Latinos feel the brunt of Latino anti-Blackness beyond the discrimination they experience from Latino landlords and homeowners. This is because Latino property managers and neighbors can also be agents of anti-Blackness. The Martinez family slammed right into such bias as tenants of Meridian Apartments in Cypress, California (an Orange County suburb within twenty miles of Los Angeles).
During the time that the Afro-Latino Martinez children and their African American mother, Suzy Martinez, lived there, their Latino neighbors joined with the White non-Hispanic neighbors in racially harassing the family with “persistent racial slurs, vandalism of the apartment and car, throwing of rocks, beer cans, and other matter [along with] threats of violence.”6 Moreover, the Martinez family was denied access to the complex’s facilities, including the pool, courtyard, and Jacuzzi. The racial harassment was only compounded when, after reporting the discrimination to the Latina apartment complex manager, Eve Diaz, Diaz failed to take any action to address the discrimination.
By failing to take any action to halt the racial harassment, property manager Diaz and the Latino neighbors were actively complicit in fortifying the longstanding racial hostility of Orange County, California.7 Ironically, the television show The O.C. visually illustrated White segregation in Orange County when it aired from 2003 to 2007, the same years Suzy was litigating her family’s discrimination claim against the Meridian Apartments. At that time, the census listed the resident population of Cypress as 54.4 percent White, 3 percent African American, 0.6 percent American Indian, 31.3 percent Asian, 0.38 percent Pacific Islander, 5.2 percent other, and 4.9 percent identifying as two or more races.8 Hispanics/Latinos made up 18.4 percent of the population (Mexican, 14.1 percent; Puerto Rican, 0.5 percent; Cuban, 0.3 percent; other Hispanic/Latino 3 percent), which was lower than the state percentage of 37.6 percent. Racially, the Hispanic/Latino population identified as 58.49 percent White, 0.77 percent Black, 1.67 percent American Indian or Native Alaskan, 1.45 percent Asian, 0.34 percent Native Hawaiian or Pacific Islander, 27.45 percent other race, and 9.8 percent two or more races. Suzy was able to receive financial compensation for the harm of the harassment when the parties reached a confidential settlement agreement on the eve of trial. However, Suzy’s incident is one of the few recorded cases of Latino anti-Black housing discrimination involving Afro-Latinos in the United States.
Even Miami, with its density of Latino residents and its reputation as the capital of Cuban Whiteness, has few recorded Latino anti-Black housing discrimination cases filed by Afro-Latinos.9 Yet, equating the absence of legal claims with the absence of instances of discrimination would be misplaced given the prevalence of discrimination accounts when Latinos are directly questioned about their life experiences. The current oral history project Black Migration into a White City: Power, Privilege and Exclusion in Miami is tracing the longstanding exclusionary tactics of White Cubans against Black Cubans in Miami.10 Furthermore, published ethnographies of Miami parallel the narratives of exclusion illuminated in the legal cases.
In this respect, Alan Aja’s interview of Afro-Cuban David Rosemond helps flesh out how the deeply entrenched racialized geography of Latino Miami normalizes discrimination and thereby discourages lawsuits. In recalling his parents’ struggles when moving from New York City to Miami in the 1970s, David said, “They [Miami Latinos in Little Havana] wouldn’t rent to us. It went from ‘yeah the apartment is available’ (over the phone) to ‘we made a mistake’” once they showed up in person.11 After feeling beleaguered from all the in-person rejection, David’s mother prevailed upon a White Cuban family friend to accompany her during her search for housing, hoping her adjacency to White acquaintanceship would validate her good character and financial responsibility. Unfortunately, her strategy did not work, and the family was never able to locate housing in Little Havana despite being Cuban themselves. Instead, the Rosemond family lived in Allapattah, a once African American enclave now home to Miami’s “Little Santo Domingo,” populated by many darker-skinned immigrants from the Dominican Republic.
Nor is the experience of the Afro-Cuban Rosemond family singular. An early study of discrimination in rental housing in Miami found that as compared to White Cubans, Afro-Cubans were repeatedly asked to pay a higher average security deposit across Miami, including in White Cuban areas, and were more often misinformed regarding the nonavailability of vacant rental units.12 Other studies of Miami and Susan Greenbaum’s examination of Tampa, Florida, trace similar housing challenges for Afro-Cuban residents.13 Historically, Afro-Cuban settlement across Florida from 1869 forward was subject to an anti-Black racialized geography. As Afro-Cuban Evelio Grillo recounts of his youth in Ybor City, Tampa, in the 1920s, “I don’t remember playing with a single White Cuban child. . . . Black Cubans and White Cubans lived apart from one another in Ybor City.”14 Moreover, the patterns of residential segregation between White and Black Latino Florida residents continues today.15 The echoes of the Jim Crow segregation of Afro-Cubans from White Cubans that is part of the history of Florida resound loudly in the present.16 Miami in particular remains one of the nation’s most segregated cities, and the actions of Latino landlords do nothing to mitigate this.17 Or as one Afro-Cuban interviewee told anthropologist Michelle Hay, “The examples of [Latino anti-Black] racism in Miami is in house hunting.”18 Today, Latino anti-Black bias has an enormous ability to interfere with access to housing in Miami, given the density of Latino homeowners (and potential landlords) that exists in Miami. Unlike many other regions in the United States, in Miami, Latinos make up 67 percent of all owner-occupied homes and 70 percent of all renter-occupied homes, and thus present a vast informal, Latino-controlled housing network influenced by Latino racial attitudes.19
Lamentably, Afro-Latino segregation from other Latinos is not exclusive to Florida. Historian Nancy Raquel Mirabal has noted that New York City was a major destination for Puerto Ricans and Cubans from 1823 to 1957, and that the early period was marked by racial tensions and separations among the Cubans she studied.20 Similarly, Jesse Hoffnung-Garskof’s study of Puerto Rican migration to New York City before the 1920s indicates that there was little residential contact between White and Black Puerto Ricans.21 Afro–Puerto Rican Pura Delgado’s description of her arrival to New York in 1947 underscores the historical antecedents of today’s intra-Latino residential discrimination.
I remember vividly a cousin who made arrangements for me to rent a room when I arrived in New York City from a Puerto Rican woman who was her friend. But when I arrived, she refused to allow me to stay in her home because I was dark. She had assumed I was the same [light] complexion as my cousin.22
In essence, Pura is Quinta’s ancestor across the generations of continued Latino anti-Black bias in New York City. Should it be so surprising then that Latino anti-Blackness in housing also extends to African Americans?
To begin to understand contemporary Latino housing discrimination against African Americans, consider a city like Chicago, consistently ranked by the census as one of the top five most segregated cities in the United States and the most segregated in the state of Illinois, more than fifty years after the Fair Housing Act outlawed housing segregation.23 While Chicago certainly comports with the historical non-Hispanic Black-White vision of segregation, it has also become the fourth in segregation between Latinos and African Americans. The ranking is especially noteworthy when one considers that the three metro areas ahead of it (Milwaukee, Detroit, and Cleveland) all have fewer Latinos and significantly smaller total populations. However, the degree of Latino-Black residential segregation cannot be understood simply from the census data. Contemporary personal accounts of racial exclusion help illuminate how a group, like Latinos, that is discriminated against by White non-Hispanics in the housing market can then turn around and discriminate against another group, African Americans.
The housing experience of African American Chicago tenant Mitchell Keys provides a useful example. Mitchell discovered that his rental agreement was more onerous than that of the other tenants in his Chicago apartment building. When he confronted his Latino landlord, Francisco García, about the matter, García stated that he had a preference against renting to African Americans like Mitchell. Given the clarity of the anti-Black bias in the landlord’s conduct, the secretary of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) brought an administrative case on behalf of Mitchell.24 García failed to provide a nondiscriminatory reason for his actions and agreed to settle the case without a hearing before an administrative law judge. The settlement agreement required García to financially compensate Mitchell. Importantly, García was also permanently prohibited from “discriminating on the basis of race, sex, color, religion, national origin, handicap, or familial status against any person and/or renter in any aspect of the rental of a dwelling unit.” HUD monitored García’s compliance by examining his HUD-mandated monthly reports regarding his reasoning for accepting or rejecting tenants. Thus, by all metrics, Mitchell won.
Mitchell ironically was benefitted in his claim by how brazen García was in verbalizing his anti-Black bias and by Mitchell’s own ability to contest the racial discrimination after having obtained housing, albeit at a discriminatorily inflated rental rate. Other victims of Latino anti-Black bias who have been excluded by landlords more savvy about obscuring their true racialized motives are not as well positioned to challenge racism that has not been made obvious but has completely blocked their access to housing. Similarly, those Black people who have been physically chased out of Chicago neighborhoods by Latino residents never have the opportunity to seek housing there, let alone file housing discrimination claims regarding their racial exclusion.25
At the time Mitchell filed his discrimination claim, Chicago, Illinois, had a population of 2,783,726, which was 45.4 percent White non-Hispanic, 39.1 percent Black, .3 percent American Indian, 3.7 percent Asian or Pacific Islander, and 11.5 percent other.26 Ethnically, Latinos made up 19.6 percent of the population. While not a majority, the Latino homeownership rate in Chicago was 37.8 percent (as compared to the citywide average homeownership rate of 46.1 percent).27 By 2018, the Latino homeownership rate in Illinois as a whole rose to 54 percent (as compared to the national average rate of 64.8 percent).28 The density of the Latino population in Chicago then and now means that the existence of Latino anti-Black bias can have a significant effect in a housing rental market that is already virulently segregated.
Even more concerning, then, are those contexts in which Latinos are an even greater proportion of a local population with the potential for outsize influence on the home rental market (either by renting or selling properties they own or by renting rooms in apartments or homes they occupy as renters themselves). Elias and Patricia Tulsen’s experience searching for a home in Latino-dominated Brentwood, New York, is thus very illuminating. Elias and Patricia are an African American couple who wished to pursue their dream of homeownership in Brentwood. The white frame house on Hewes Street greatly interested them, given its location on a quiet residential street in the suburban community of Long Island. Near the time of their search, the Census Bureau reported that there were 53,917 people living in Brentwood.29 The population broke down racially as follows: White, 47.7 percent; Black, 18.1 percent; American Indian, 0.6 percent; Asian, 2.0 percent; Pacific Islander, 0.1 percent; other, 25.4 percent; and two or more races, 6.1 percent. Significantly, the city was 54 percent Hispanic/Latino (Mexican, 0.9 percent; Puerto Rican, 15.3 percent; Cuban, 0.4 percent; other, 37.7 percent) and 45.7 percent non-Hispanic/Latino, with 42 percent of the total Hispanic/Latino population identifying racially as White. This marked a significant increase in the Hispanic/Latino population of the area from 34.7 percent just one decade earlier.30 Perhaps it was this large demographic of Latinos that emboldened Latino homeowners (father and son) Thomas and Andrew Clemente to flagrantly assert their anti-Black bias.
While Elias and Patricia Tulsen toured the basement of the home, Latino seller Thomas Clemente asked his real estate agent, Lisa McNell, to stay upstairs with him. Thomas Clemente then informed the agent that he did not want to sell the property to any Black person, and the only way he might consider doing so is if they paid 3 percent above the stated sale price (despite an absence of counteroffers from any other would-be purchasers). After Thomas Clemente spoke on the phone with his son Andrew Clemente (a co-owner of the property), Thomas reaffirmed to the real estate agent their joint disinterest in selling to Black people absent a payment premium that he increased to 5 percent above the publicly listed price.31
In effect, the Clementes wanted to impose a “Black Tax” on Elias and Patricia, presumably for the hardship of selling to Black people and having them present in the neighborhood.32 In addition to being discriminatory, the Clementes’ bias against having Blacks seemingly taint the neighborhood is ironic, given that it was a time in which Brentwood was experiencing a surge in crime caused by Latino gang activity.33
Fortunately for Elias and Patricia, real estate agent Lisa McNell sacrificed her potential to earn a commission in favor of following the law, which prohibits real estate agents from facilitating the racial discrimination of sellers. McNell instead informed the real estate agency’s owner about the Clementes’ anti-Black comments, and in turn the agency severed its relationship with the Clemente family. In the face of such irrefutable evidence, the Clementes agreed to settle the case without a hearing or adjudication.
As a result, the Clementes paid Elias and Patricia financial compensation and agreed not to (1) retaliate, coerce, intimidate, or interfere with any individual because of their exercise or enjoyment of any right granted or protected by the Fair Housing Act; (2) make statements that indicate preferences, limitations, or discrimination against any individual(s) in the rental of property based upon any of the protected classes under the act, including, but not limited to, race and national origin; and (3) discriminate against persons because of race or national origin or any other protected class pursuant to the provisions of the act. Less than three months later, Elias and Patricia were able to purchase another home within the same price range and located within the same zip code and school district, but on an even larger lot size than the one owned by the Clementes. Meanwhile, it took the Clementes seven months to sell the property they wanted to maintain as exclusively White.
While the large numbers of Latinos living in Brentwood, New York, may have emboldened the Clementes to overtly express and act upon their anti-Black bias, similar forms of blatant Latino anti-Black exclusion have also occurred in locations where Latinos are numerically a small percentage of the population in comparison to White non-Hispanics and African Americans. When Andre Echols and Jacqueline Ash were seeking apartments in Davenport, Iowa, it had a population of approximately ninety-eight thousand.34 It was 83.7 percent White, 9.2 percent Black or African American, 0.4 percent American Indian, 2.0 percent Asian, 2.3 percent other, and 2.4 percent two or more races. Hispanics/Latinos were only 5.4 percent of the population (Mexican, 4.5 percent; Puerto Rican, 0.2 percent; other, 0.7 percent). Racially, 44.40 percent of the Hispanic/Latino population identified as White. Despite the smaller demographic presence of Latinos in Davenport, Iowa, when Jacqueline and later Andre sought to rent an apartment from Latino landlord Frank Quijas, he felt completely free to loudly vocalize his prohibition against renting to Black people.
When Jacqueline saw Quijas’s newspaper advertisement for a vacant apartment, she called to inquire about the available unit, and Quijas immediately asked: “Are you Black or White? I don’t rent to Blacks.”35 Nor was Quijas’s racial brazenness confined to this telephone conversation. Andre had the offensive experience of having Quijas contemptuously tell him to his face that he didn’t rent to Black people. Andre was so shocked that he asked Quijas to repeat what he had just said so that his mother, who had accompanied him, could hear it as well. Quijas then nonchalantly repeated, “I don’t rent to Blacks.”
Given how egregious Quijas’s expression of anti-Black bias was for both Jacqueline and later Andre, they were each awarded financial compensation, and Quijas was obligated to submit a written apology to each of them. Moreover, Quijas agreed to sell all three of the duplexes he owned as rental properties in the area and never participate in the real estate business. For Quijas, it was preferable to discontinue earning money as a landlord when the judge prohibited him from any further anti-Black discrimination.
Even Latino landlords who live nowhere near the properties they rent out still insist on maintaining their rental units as racially exclusive White spaces. A Latino couple, Jaime and Graciela Barberis, were living in Ecuador yet vigilantly policed the racial occupancy of their rental property in Rockville, Maryland, despite their use of a property management company to lease the premises for them in their absence.36 Gilmore Thompson Sr. sought to rent the four-bedroom house for himself and his family as part of their move from the US Virgin Islands. When Gilmore signed the rental agreement with the property manager acting for Jaime and Graciela, he also paid the first month’s rent and security deposit and was informed that Jaime and Graciela had orally agreed to rent him the house. But after Jaime and Graciela discovered Gilmore was Black, they rejected his lease.
Jaime and Graciela refused to admit they acted in a discriminatory fashion. Nevertheless, the US Department of Housing and Urban Development (HUD) concluded, based upon the witness interviews they conducted and documents they reviewed, that Jaime and Graciela had violated the Fair Housing Act in using race to deny Gilmore and his family the rental home. After HUD presented its final report and issued a charge of discrimination, Jaime and Graciela then decided to settle the case and pay Gilmore monetary compensation.
Despite the absolute clarity about the racial motivation of such Black exclusion, public commentators tend to characterize Latino anti-Black bias as simply an unfortunate outgrowth of the racism against African Americans learned in the United States. However, the presumption that Latinos are racial innocents is undercut by the very same anti-Black bias that is evident in Latino distaste for renting and selling to other Latino compatriots who happen to be Afro-Latino. Yet, the lack of public attention to Latino anti-Black bias translates into a jury pool that is not well informed to recognize its manifestations when presented in a court case. In fact, there are times when the Latino involvement in anti-Black bias makes the discrimination more vexing and difficult to address in court.
Eddie Frazier, an African American man, was thus thwarted in his efforts to combat the housing discrimination he and Diane Treloar, his White non-Hispanic girlfriend, encountered when seeking an apartment in the Long Island, New York, suburb called Smithtown (forty-three miles from New York City).37 Like the racial segregation that Suzy Martinez had to navigate in the Orange County suburb of California, Smithtown is a town of hyperracial segregation. At the time Eddie was seeking an apartment, the Census Bureau reported that Smithtown was predominantly White (96.8 percent), the rest of the population was Black (0.8 percent), American Indian (0.1 percent), Asian or Pacific Islander (1.9 percent), and other races (0.4 percent).38 The town was 2.6 percent Hispanic/Latino (Mexican, 0.2 percent; Puerto Rican, 1.1 percent; Cuban, 0.1 percent; other 1.2 percent) and the racial makeup among Hispanic/Latino people was White (83.13 percent), Black (0.98 percent), American Indian (0.70 percent), Asian or Pacific Islander (0.64 percent), and other (14.53 percent). Significantly, the Ku Klux Klan played a significant part in the founding of the town and was just publicly reviving its presence in New York near the time of Eddie’s apartment search.39
Nevertheless, when Eddie’s offer to rent a Smithtown apartment was rejected and his telephone calls were unreturned, while the unit remained vacant another three months until it was rented to a White tenant, the jury that heard his claim refused to conclude it was because of racial discrimination. Notably, the owners of the unit that rejected Eddie included Anna Maria Rominger, a woman the judge described as a “Brazilian with dark skin,” who stated in court that the accusation of discrimination was unfounded because she was “of mixed-race heritage and that numerous of her [Latino] relatives were black, Indian, and Italian.”40 In essence, the Latina landlord advanced a Latina shield of immunity against being biased—and the jury seemingly accepted it in a way that would otherwise be viewed as implausible had a White non-Hispanic landlord said it.
Small wonder, then, that of the sizeable number of persons who indicate in surveys that they have experienced Latino anti-Black bias, few actually file legal claims. Further aggravating the disinclination to file legal claims are the limited resources that fair housing centers have for enforcing antidiscrimination law. Fair housing centers are nonprofit organizations across the country that help provide evidence of housing discrimination by investigating claims and by sending out individuals of different races and ethnicities to pose as renters or buyers for the purpose of testing for unlawful housing discrimination.
Kate Scott, the executive director of the Equal Rights Center in Washington, DC, supervises fair housing testing, and she laments that “there’s no way that we have the resources to capture all of the discrimination that’s happening.”41 Moreover, the discrimination that does get investigated is primarily “as a result of us being very affirmative in our outreach efforts . . . [within] the priorities of leadership at these various organizations.” Given the intransigence of White non-Hispanic housing discrimination against African Americans, Amber Hendley, a fair housing testing coordinator in Chicago, notes that fair testing centers have prioritized non-Hispanic White-Black testing, without the more complicating nuance of White Latino-Black test designs.42 Relatedly, when landlords and homeowners who might be Latino, based on their surnames, are investigated, Boston fair housing tester Catherine LaRaia has observed that the testers who are sent out rarely specify the ethnicity and race of the landlord.43
Still, Latino anti-Black bias in the United States informs and, in turn, is structurally shaped by residential segregation. Afro-Latina scholar Zaire Zenit Dinzey-Flores powerfully reminds us from her work detailing how anti-Black racism informs the trend to create gated communities in Puerto Rico’s public spaces: “In Puerto Rico, in the United States, in Latin America, and in much of the world, homes and residential neighborhoods have been a vehicle for race, ethnic, and class exclusion. Housing and neighborhoods frame race. Space, the built environment, exposes the activated racist contours of its imaginations.”44 Today’s matrix of racially exclusive housing also implicates Latino agents of anti-Black bias. As the legal case stories in this chapter have shown, Latino landlords and home sellers have been direct instruments of anti-Black residential exclusion against Afro-Latinos and African Americans alike.
Residential segregation is crucial to concerns with racial equality, because the racialized ordering of neighborhoods, unfortunately, determines how community and educational resources are allocated or not allocated. In fact, the Fair Housing Act of 196845 is commonly referred to as the “last plank of the Civil Rights Movement.”46 Thus, the existence of both stark White non-Hispanic segregation from non-Whites and segregated proximity of non-Whites with one another is key to understanding the current racial dynamics that exist.
Large-scale studies on US segregation patterns have detected an additional racial barrier imposed on Latinos with apparent African ancestry compared to other Latinos.47 For example, Puerto Ricans perceived as “Blacker” are more segregated from White non-Hispanics than are White Puerto Ricans and other Latino groups.48 Dark-skinned Mexicans and Cubans experience a lesser degree of residential segregation from White non-Hispanics because dark-skinned Puerto Ricans are more likely to be perceived as Afro-descendants.49 White Latinos experience less segregation from White non-Hispanics than do Black Latinos.50 Hence, it is not just skin color that penalizes Latinos in the housing and rental market but specifically Blackness. Anti-Blackness is what underpins the fact that Latinos who are White–presenting, or whose dark skin is not attributed to African ancestry, consistently are shown to experience less intense levels of residential segregation from White non-Hispanics. In short, Latino anti-Black bias exists within a universe of White non-Hispanic segregation that rewards the appearance of Whiteness and confines non-White-identifying Latinos and African Americans to neighboring non-resourced, non-White spaces. This helps explain why light-skinned Latinas prefer White non-Hispanic neighbors when choosing places for their families to live.51
Thus, while Latinos and African Americans often reside near one another, that racial diversity is geographically segmented in ways that preserve traditional segregation of Whites and non-Whites. In fact, neighborhoods demographically categorized as “integrated” can resemble “worlds of strangers.”52 This is because when Latino residents choose to limit their interaction with Black neighbors to fleeting contacts, racial stereotypes are left undisturbed.53
By the same token, being segregated from White non-Hispanics heightens the impulse of socially derided Latinos to seek social status through “turf defense” exclusion of the denigrated group, African Americans. Further heightening the adverse consequences to equality from housing discrimination is how residential segregation also facilitates interethnic violence. The next chapter examines the notable instances of Latino anti-Black violence in the United States and how the criminal justice system has responded.