Racial isolation: the latinos’ community in chicago

When I arrived to Chicago I took some English lessons in my neighborhood. One day in class, the teacher asked students whether they agreed or disagreed with marriages between people of different races or ethnicity. I was surprised by the question that I considered to be obsolete, since I did not think that this was still a matter under discussion in this day and age. But I was even more surprisedwith the students’ responses: some of them did not believe that marrying someone of another race or ethnicity was a good idea. After living in Chicago for a while, I understood that the question was not obsolete. Racial segregation is still a reality in this city and is represented in the spatial distribution of the city itself.
Some people think that segregation is an expression of each grouppreferences: Latinos want to be with other Latinos, or African Americans with other African Americans. But it is much more complicated than that. It responds to dynamics of social exclusion and inequality of conditions. For a person born in a low-income Latino or black neighborhood it is very difficult to get out of there and move socially.
The spatial and social settings of the city promotes thegeneration of poverty and inequality, which in turn leads to violence and crime. In this essay I will focus on the population of Latinos and the emergence of gangs like the Latin Kings, the largest Hispanic street gang in Chicago.
Background
During the mid 1960s, Chicago experienced race riots like the confrontation in 1966 between police and Puerto Rican communities of West Town andHumboldt Park, and the massive West Side riots after the assassination of Martin Luther King in 1968. Even though, no clashes of this magnitude have occurred since then, the reality of the ghettos continue to express the same unequal conditions under which these demonstrators protested one day. Unemployment, excessive population with no skills, lack of educational institutions, drugs, crime and violencecontinue to determine the daily life of the minorities. Therefore, racial discrimination is not part of Chicago’s history; it is not a concluded chapter. (Essig)
Racial and ethnic segregation has been a matter of policy concern for a long time, but the discriminatory configuration of the city has not changed much since 1960. Now, the income differences between racial groups fortify thesegregation of the city, clustering lower-income minorities into ghettos and reinforcing the isolation. (Ahmed and Little 1)
In the picture below, we can see two green demographic clusters that represent the African American communities; the other neighborhoods have changed as a result of the Hispanic immigrants and the rise in the number of Asians. (Bogira) Still, the new immigrants do not mingle witheach others, and the city keeps being divided into delimited ethnic groups.

Nowadays, blacks constitute approximately the 35 % of Chicago's population and are mainly concentrated on the South and West Sides. Whites make up around 28% and are located in the north and small sections of the South Side, while Hispanics, are about 30 % of the population and are distributed into the Northwest andSouthwest Sides of the city center (Ahmed and Little 1).
Chicago is a dual city: one mainly white city located in areas with a modern and prosperous economy, with residents who have high levels of formal education and with moderate to high levels of income. The other city is placed toward the south and west. It is mainly Black and Latino. It is poor. This explains why the ghetto has notdisappeared in Chicago, but has persisted. (how should I cite uic.edu?)
One of the main consequences of this separation and lack of inequality is the emergence of violent groups known as Gangs. By the mid-1960s, several gangs had developed throughout the city: black gangs like the Blackstone Rangers and Vice Lords started to develop in the South and West Sides, respectively; Puerto Rican gangs such as...