Latino Homicide

Immigration, Violence, and Community

Ramiro Martinez, Jr.

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• Print ISBN: 9780415536516
• eBook ISBN: 9781317689348
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Criminology
• Index: Social Sciences

Latino Homicide is the first empirically based, but readable book for courses to counter the conventional wisdom that immigrant populations only contribute crime to their communities. For this second edition, Martinez further emphasizes his argument with updated data and the addition of a new city, San Antonio. With fascinating case studies from police reports and actual cases from six varied cities, Latino homicide rates are revealed to be markedly lower than one would expect, given the economic deprivation of these urban areas. Far from dangerous or criminal, these communities often have exceptionally strong social networks precisely because of their shared immigrant experiences. Martinez skillfully refutes negative stereotypes in a coherent and critically rigorous analysis of the issues.

Chapter 1
Introduction

Latinos and Violent Crime

Over a decade ago Latino Homicide was first published. Much has changed and little has not since the first book on homicide among the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the United States appeared. The prolonged national debate over the costs and consequences of letting newcomers into American society continues and immigration remains a divisive topic.¹ One consequence of immigration is now even more evident—the Latino population grew by 43 percent from 35.3 million in 2000 to an estimated 50.5 million in 2010 and now comprises 16 percent of the U.S. resident population.² The bulk of that growth resulted from the rise in the number of immigrants and their offspring born in the United States, now representing over a third of the total Latino population.³ Largely because of border proximity, regional concentration and overall size, the immigration debate focuses heavily on Latinos. Even though most Latinos are born in the United States, many problems associated with immigrants in the public imagination— loss of well-paying jobs, perceptions of community disorder, fear of political participation and crime—are linked to Latinos.⁴

In spite of this linkage, a consequence of Latino growth is now even more evident than a decade ago. Homicide rates have declined across the nation and that drop included Latinos and Latino communities. Most of the cities in this book had relatively minor and short-lived homicide rate rises after 1980 followed by a sustained decline. But a number of them, particularly in America’s oldest, extremely disadvantaged barrios, were more serious, lasting for a slightly longer time period, resulting in more homicides, involving gang members and gang retaliations. These spurts were usually short lived, often in places that immigrants bypassed or in communities untouched by immigrant revitalization.

Despite the statistics, many reacted with concern when the immigration influx overlapped with the surge in youth/gang and drug-related homicide in the 1980s and much of the 1990s, and these events deeply troubled many Americans. And because much of the then-rise in homicide took place within urban areas where racial/ethnic minorities resided and in communities attracting newcomers, some considered both issues pressing national problems. For better or worse, concern over the roots of this urban transformation is partially directed at Latinos. Spurred to a large extent by alarm over violent crime, immigration opponents linked crime to foreign-born Latinos, and this presumed connection⁵ was exacer bated by at least two dramatic events: the 1980 boatlift from Mariel, Cuba, which resulted in more than 125,000 unauthorized Cubans landing in southern Florida; and the widely publicized movement of undocumented Mexicans crossing the border into the southwestern United States joining co-ethnics, many of whom resided in the region for generations. Emphasizing their fear over Latino growth, political pundits and immigration opponents used these developments to highlight the failure of immigration policy and to heighten public concern that the U.S.-Mexican border was “out of control.”⁶ Many contended that criminally inclined refugees were allowed to freely enter our country undeterred and did so with little fear of sanction. Some questioned whether Latino violence was rising especially when immigrants appeared to revitalize areas. At that time few stressed the benefits of immigration even when crime declined along the border was obvious.

To a certain degree that was understandable. Nativity status aside, the “Mexican problem” has long been linked with the gang problem, which coupled with the latest immigration crisis is perhaps the “most recognized theme in American social science regarding Mexican Americans.”⁷ This topic resonates among many U.S. residents. The singling out of Latinos generated momentum to the point where claims are made that they pose a threat to the American way of life⁸ and are even dangerous enough to undermine the integrity of the United States, potentially splitting the nation into a Spanish-speaking and English-speaking countries.⁹ It’s not surprising that these claims yield little empirical support or evidence supporting the validity of these ideas. But these remarks have helped cement the notion in the public sphere that the nation is under siege even without data to support these assertions. In the absence of data, fear of Latinos resembled that of other newcomers at start of the last century.¹⁰

These concerns are borne by documented and undocumented Latino residents, both old and new alike, as more Latinos arrived in the United States, resembling those who have been here for generations. Partly as a response to the recent Latino prominence and partly as an attempt to address stereotypes and combat the public unease with Latinos, scholarly interest in Latinos rose in many areas, such as history, political science, demography, public policy, immigration and ethnic studies.¹¹ Perhaps the most important legacy of the rise of Latino research has been that the national fixation with race, now concentrated on an ethnic group comprised of both established and more recent Americans.¹² Sur prisingly, research on Latino crime in 2002 had remained virtually untouched, even though media stereotypes on the Latino criminal date back to the turn of the last century, morphing from bandit to gang member over the years, and this image entered the public imagination and contemporary debate on the consequences of immigration.¹³ Although Mariel Cubans are associated with drug-related violence and Mexicans and Puerto Ricans with gang warfare in the popular media, relatively little is known about how much Latinos and Latino communities are influenced by violent crime such as homicide.

The original publication of Latino Homicide arose in an attempt to answer unsubstantiated claims, contradictions and assertions on this topic.¹⁴ Given that widespread disadvantage or poverty is prevalent among persons of color, writers and researchers assumed levels of Latino violence are similar to those of other ethnic minority groups¹⁵ despite the existence of studies finding that Latino rates are comparable to non-Latino Whites.¹⁶ Still others predict rates between those of Whites and Blacks.¹⁷ Widely shared assumptions about Latinos raise a series of fundamental yet unanswered questions: Are Latinos generally a crime prone group? Is violence high near the Mexican border? Is violence high in old barrios? Did the Mariel Cubans make Miami a violent city? Given high poverty and immigration, shouldn’t the Latino homicide rate be as high as that of Blacks?¹⁸ Is violent crime the same for all Latino groups (Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Central Americans, Cubans, etc.)? This volume is still the first book-length attempt to answer these questions with hard evidence and empirical research that help us better understand the impact of the latest wave of Latino immigration and the consequences of entrenched poverty.

Instead of concentrating on a single Latino group, region of the country or specific year, my focus is now on Latinos and Latino homicide in six cities.¹⁹ The addition of San Antonio, Texas, is a notable improvement over the first edition. Incorporating the “Alamo” city with Chicago, El Paso, Houston, Miami and San Diego offers a wider range of places that have faced sustained and unique waves of immigration, and in the case of the border state cities, some of the longest history of Latino settlement in the United States.²⁰ The immigration process, in turn, should impact Latinos more than any other ethnic group and have a corresponding influence on homicide. But, as we shall see, the alleged immigration/crime link has had relatively little positively influence on Latinos. Latino homicide rates have dropped in a uniform manner and remained lower than expected given high rates of disadvantage and immigration. Instead, types of Latino homicide have usually been characterized by some variation across urban areas since 1980: a few rose, and all eventually fell or remained stable. But across the board urban Latinos rates eventually dropped.

The Latino population has experienced major social and demographic changes in the past thirty years—changes that are still best captured at the city and neighborhood levels explored in this book.²¹ Rapid population turnover and large numbers of immigrants have become distinguishing features of many Latino communities—even some facing the Mexican border area where Mexican-origin Latinos have resided for centuries. As foreign-born newcomers settled in areas with older more established co-ethnics, fear of crime often increased shaping perceptions of violence even in the midst of a sharp decline in homicide.²² How ever, homicides did not swamp across all or even most Latino communities; many were concentrated in a small number of specific locations or barrios. Still youth/gang-related killings in these areas did not always rise to unprecedented levels (as with other similarly situated racial/ethnic minorities). As always there are some exceptions. The San Antonio addition provides one concerning barrio youth/gang homicide, but by examining how Latino rates changed over time between a range of six cities, by connecting the past to the present with an emphasis on distinct types of homicide, as well as the correlates of these changes, I provide insight into the relationships among Latinos, community conditions and the serious violent crime of homicide.

More precisely, my primary objectives are to describe and explain the extent of urban Latino homicide and to relate the patterns that emerge to other ethnic group patterns, to explore similarities and differences within the Latino population, and to determine the influences and circumstances that shape the nature of Latino homicides in urban communities. With the growth in the numbers of Latinos—now the largest racial/ethnic minority group in the United States— many writers and some researchers have engaged in a discussion on urban violence that rests on beliefs, guesses and opinions about the latest threat to the national social fabric.²³ This book challenges the perceived nature of Latino criminality and the assumption that Latinos, especially young Latino males, are a criminally inclined ethnic group, by filling in the gaps in contemporary analyses of Latino violence.²⁴

Current Contributions

Although it may be argued that there have been some efforts in contemporary criminological research to study Latino homicide, it still is not difficult to find evidence that Latinos have been overlooked in the violence literature.²⁵ As I will discuss extensively in chapter 3, most previous research reaches at least one conclusion similar to my findings: the presence of Latino homicide is not as high as expected relative to that of other impoverished ethnic groups. That conclusion surprises some readers, in particular when one considers the moral panics cultivated by the media and police.²⁶ There are exceptions to this general rule, but nevertheless these are rare instances driven by specific and somewhat idiosyncratic circumstances. In spite of this consistent finding, important gaps remain to be studied that would undoubtedly contribute to a better understanding of Latino violence, illuminate broader issues common to other ethnic groups, and highlight some specific to Latinos. Therefore it is essential to more clearly highlight how the new insights about Latino homicides that have been generated in this revision move beyond earlier research.

First, my approach builds on earlier studies in several ways. The analysis takes advantage of both individual-level and neighborhood-level homicide data.²⁷ Many people use one or the other, or in some instances examine national-level data.²⁸ These avenues are useful for some studies, but in my case access to original and combined data sources has revealed important differences across research settings, thereby suggesting a “kinds of place” rather than a “kinds of people” explanation of homicide. Not only do findings vary across and within communities and cities, but also distinct variations in the effects of recent immigration have unfolded over time, especially over the past thirty years, transforming the Latino population as well as patterns in homicide.²⁹

Equally important are the changing contemporary homicide contexts since 1980, in particular, the then-pronounced levels of youth homicides and gang- and drug-related killings across urban America. Much of this has been attributed largely to the crack cocaine epidemic and concentrated in urban areas.³⁰ If immigration changed the composition of the Latino population, heightened poverty and increased crime, some writers³¹ contend it should have done so during this time frame.³² In fact, given consistently high levels of economic disadvantage Latinos should have higher rates of h...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Tables and Figures
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• chapter 1 Introduction: Latinos and Violent Crime
• chapter 2 The Legacy and Images of Latino Crime
• chapter 3 The Emergence of Latinos and Latino Communities: Local Context and Contemporary Crime
• chapter 4 The Origins of Latino Communities
• chapter 5 The Roots of Homicide in the Barrio and Enclave
• chapter 6 The Ethnic and Immigrant Homicide Contrast
• chapter 7 Rhetoric and Reality: Latino Homicide Motives
• chapter 8 The San Antonio Barrio Beckons, 1950–2010
• chapter 9 Conclusion: Still Moving Beyond Race and Homicide Research
• References
• Index