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 ne ighborhoods influence how minorities look for and find 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 matchin g among blacks and Latinos in different residential contexts. Results show that while Latinos are generally more likely than blacks to acquire jobs th rough personal contacts, this racial difference shrinks considerably in ver y poor, coethnic neighborhoods (i.e., ghettos and barrios). However, result s also indicate that within these respective neighborhood contexts, Latinos are significantly more likely than blacks to use neighbors and eventual co workers to acquire jobs; whereas blacks are more likely to use residential and organizational "outsiders." We speculate that this qualitative differen ce in the type of contacts used in barrios, as opposed to ghettos, affects the extent to which individual success with informal job matching contribut es to the development of a collective resource that can be used by other jo b seekers in the neighborhood.