Neighborhood Poverty and Segregation in the (Re-)Production of Disadvantage

Focusing on shopkeepers in Latino/a neighborhoods in Los Angeles, Dolores Trevizo and Mary Lopez reveal how neighborhood poverty relative to other stratification variables (including racial segregation and gender) affects the business performance of Mexican immigrant entrepreneurs. Their survey of Mexican shopkeepers in twenty immigrant neighborhoods demonstrates that less poor and more multiethnic communities offer better business opportunities than do the highly impoverished and racially segregated Mexican neighborhoods of Los Angeles. Their findings not only contribute to the scholarship of concentrated disadvantage that emphasizes the long-term consequences of neighborhood deprivation, but reveal previously overlooked aspects of microclass, as well as "legal capital," advantages. The authors argue that even poor Mexican immigrants whose class backgrounds in Mexico imparted an entrepreneurial disposition can achieve a modicum of business success in the right (U.S.) neighborhood context, and the more quickly they build legal capital, the better their outcomes. While they show that the local place characteristics of neighborhoods both reflect and reproduce class and racial inequalities, they also demonstrate that the diversity of experiences among Mexican immigrants living within the spatial boundaries of these communities also matters to their economic mobility. In sum, race, gender, legal status and poverty affect individuals, but do so according to the ways that they are nested in space and time.