http://www.chron.com/cs/CDA/ssistory.mp ... an/3163311

SHIFTING NEIGHBORHOODS
Latinos bringing change to black neighborhoods
Newcomers are finding acceptance comes graduallyBy LORI RODRIGUEZ
Copyright 2005 Houston Chronicle



A small Pentecostal church tucked away on a gritty corner of Martin Luther King Boulevard holds Spanish services for its Latino congregation several times a week.

On the Mykawa Highway side of the same South Park community, strategically placed across from a Fiesta supermarket, a Kroger billboard gamely competes in Spanish.

At a Metro stop nearby, Latinos and blacks share the seats and shade as they wait.

A growing Latino presence marks a quiet but escalating demographic shift that promises to transform Houston's historically black neighborhoods in the coming decades.

Blacks remain a strong majority in the neighborhoods they once dominated, according to a study by former University of Houston demographer Karl Eschbach.

Incoming Latinos still are less a tide than a trickle. But as more blacks continue to move to the suburbs, increasing numbers of Latino immigrants are spilling over from adjoining barrios and moving into the affordable inner-city housing left behind.

The upside is that the new settlers pump economic life into neighborhoods that have been losing population and vitality for decades, Eschbach said. The downside could be a gradual erosion of the original black character and increasing tensions between the two groups.

Sylvia Guzman, 35, exemplifies the Latino influx. She is a native of Jalisco, Mexico. Her husband, Sergio, and numerous immigrant friends hail from Ibarra, a village in Michoacan, Mexico. He holds a blue-collar job for a heavy machine plant, and she is a stay-at-home mom of three. After living in a South Park apartment complex for 10 years, the Guzmans bought a nearby home in 1990.

Along with their close friends and neighbors, they speak Spanish almost exclusively. The retail and social outlets they frequent all accommodate the language.

"We were already used to the barrio," said Guzman, of the couple's decision to purchase a $57,000 home in the neighborhood. "My sister lives nearby, and I have lots of friends who live in the area."

"Except for visits, we're never going to go back to Mexico. We're nuevo Americanos."


Bilingual services needed
Longtime community activist Omowale Luthuli-Allen says the language and the separate lives led by the Latino newcomers pose a potential barrier to their acceptance by longtime residents. The growing need for bilingual services and increased demand for Spanish-speaking employees across the city are sore points with many blacks, he says.

"Since we're going to have to share these neighborhoods, we're going to have to be proactive in trying to diffuse the tension that inevitably arises over jobs, education and housing," Luthuli-Allen says.

"That's what is explosive: There's a scarce number of jobs and other resources, and low-income people are competing for them."

Luthuli-Allen has spent his life working at the grass roots of the city's black neighborhoods, including Kashmere Gardens, the Third and Fifth Wards, South Park and Sunnyside. All of those communities could see their population become as much as a quarter Latino by the end of the decade.

"The black attitude right now is a type of benign toleration," said Luthuli-Allen, now an aide to Harris County Commissioner El Franco Lee.

"It's going to depend a lot on the leadership of the community to come up with collaborative programs to overcome some of the differences between the two groups."

Luthuli-Allen thinks those efforts must begin now, and demographic forecasts support that belief. Between 1990 and 2000, the Latino presence in such resolutely black neighborhoods as Kashmere Gardens, Third Ward, South Park and Sunnyside all jumped from between 5 percent to 10 percent; in Kashmere Gardens and the Fifth Ward, the Latino population went from 19 percent to 31 percent.

Longtime South Park residents so far seem ambivalent about the change.


Shift is 'inevitable'
These are the streets that spawned Scarface of the Geto Boys. Today, boarded up and abandoned buildings dot Martin Luther King Boulevard. Drug dealers are obvious but so are some businesses trying to survive.

One is L&R Financial Group, a family business that set up shop in 1979, about the time the former South Park Boulevard was renamed Martin Luther King, to honor the late civil rights leader. L&R specializes in tax returns but also operates a realty and pest-control service.

Owner Lula Tippit, whose husband died a few years ago, has noticed the increasing Latino presence in the neighborhood. Tippit not only isn't bothered but has even tried to hire Latino employees.

"It's good to diversify," said Tippit, who views the newcomers as potential customers.

Others are not so welcoming. A discussion with black customers at the Pay-Less market down the street erupted into blunt accusations about Latinos "mooching off" the system.

"They should get their green cards or citizenship papers or whatever they need and get jobs like the rest of us," said one woman.

"Right on that, sister," said an older man. "Or maybe they should just go back to where they came from."

After the customers left, owner Rick Anderson, shrugged. "That happens," Anderson said. "But I've never seen any of the Latinos asking for anything. They work."

Even if Latinization is unpalatable to some, projections indicate it will only continue. As newcomers feel comfortable, they will encourage friends and neighbors to move in as well, Eschbach said.

"End-of-the-decade projections may prove to be conservative estimates of the pace of Latinization," Eschbach said.

Kashmere Gardens and the Fifth Ward may be 44 percent Latino by the end of the decade as the growing, black middle class pursues housing opportunities that opened up with the demise of segregation and have continued to expand.

Many blacks have chosen homes in Alief, Missouri City, southwest Houston and the northwestern suburbs. Most recently, they have pushed outward toward FM 1960 in unincorporated Harris County.

Left behind in their former inner-city neighborhoods are what Eschbach calls "vulnerable segments" of the black population: elders, single-parent female-headed families and single people.

University of Houston sociologist Nestor Rodriguez recently moved into a growing black and Latino settlement in a once-white northwest suburb off Antoine and West Little York. In the shifting suburbs and inner-city neighborhoods, Rodriguez said the same forces are creating the change.

"The features of the housing market create housing opportunities that both groups are taking advantage of, and that's what brings them together in the same residential space," Rodriguez said. "It's inevitable."


Different opportunities
Suburban minorities, though, have more in common than do the Latinos and longtime black residents now living in the same inner-city neighborhoods. According to Eschbach's study of the most recent census figures, both groups are on the lower end of the income scale. Latinos are more likely to be younger, employed, live as intact families and have more children than their black counterparts.

Newcomers also are mostly new immigrants with low levels of formal education, limited knowledge of English and little access to government assistance programs. Of necessity, Eschbach said, the immigrants tend to hold jobs and be more entrepreneurial.

"The immigrants look at the same neighborhoods and see different opportunities," Eschbach said.

"Black and white businessmen may look at shrinking Inner-Loop neighborhoods and see declining markets that offer few investment opportunities. Immigrant entrepreneurs see growing markets of members of their own group not yet served by ethnically targeted merchants."

Think taquerias. Or, as did former Salvadorans Gloria Hernandez and her daughter, think a small specialty grocery story off Mykawa that also provides nutrition products for Latino mothers served by the federally subsidized Women, Infants and Children program.

"We've only been here a few months and business is still slow," said Hernandez in her native Spanish. "But it's bound to pick up, verdad?"

lori.rodriguez@chron.com