Ghettos and Barrios: The Impact of Neighborhood Poverty and Race on Job Matching among Blacks and Latinos

Recent research suggests that racial and poverty concentrations in urban neighborhoods inuence how minorities look for and Žnd jobs. In this study, we use data from the Multi-City Survey of Urban Inequality to examine this hypothesis, focusing on the use and return to various modes of job matching among blacks and Latinos in different residential contexts. Results show that while Latinos are generally more likely than blacks to acquire jobs through personal contacts, this racial difference shrinks considerably in very poor, coethnic neighborhoods (i.e., ghettos and barrios). However, results also indicate that within these respective neighborhood contexts, Latinos are signiŽcantly more likely than blacks to use neighbors and eventual coworkers to acquire jobs; whereas blacks are more likely to use residential and organizational “outsiders.” We speculate that this qualitative difference in the type of contacts used in barrios, as opposed to ghettos, affects the extent to which individual success with informal job matching contributes to the development of a collective resource that can be used by other job seekers in the neighborhood.