How Houston Has Become The Most Diverse Place In America

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How Houston Has Become The Most Diverse Place In America


MAY 9, 2017

By BRITTNY MEJIA

Read More: http://www.latimes.com/nation/la-na-...htmlstory.html

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The story of how his city turned from a town of oil industry roughnecks and white blue-collar workers into a major political centrifuge for immigration reform, demographic analysts say, is nothing less than the story of the American city of the future.

- Houston boomed through the mid-20th century, thanks to the oil bonanza, and most of those who came to get rich were white. Large numbers of Vietnamese refugees began arriving in the 1970s, and after an oil collapse in 1982, they were followed by an influx of Latinos driven by cheap housing and employment opportunities. Whites, meanwhile, started drifting out. The multi-ethnic boom has occurred deep in the heart of a state that has often seemed to regard conservatism, and Texas identity, as an element of religion.

- Demographic experts say the Houston metro area, home to the third-largest population of undocumented immigrants in the country — behind New York and Los Angeles — is a roadmap to what U.S. cities will look like in the coming decades as whites learn to live as minorities in the American heartland. Census projections have opened a window into the America of 2050, “and it’s Houston today,” said Stephen Klineberg, a sociology professor at Rice University. ---“This biracial Southern city dominated by white men throughout all of its history has become, by many measures, the single most ethnically diverse major metropolitan area in the country,” Klineberg said.

- The expansion has not all happened smoothly. Gridlock has worsened and schools have been pressed to accommodate the influx of students. Close to 70,000 students have limited proficiency in English, a situation that has angered some longtime residents. --- “The whole idea of having bilingual teachers and specific programs just to address those folks I think is overwhelmingly tilted in the wrong direction,” said Sam Herrera, outreach director of Stop the Magnet, a local political action committee that supports deportation of those in the country illegally. “Folks need to come here, they need to assimilate and they need to learn the language.”

- Today, most of the city’s Latino growth springs from children born to immigrants who arrived two or three decades ago. And it’s only going to become more pronounced. In Harris County, of which Houston is the county seat, 51% of all those under the age of 20 are Latinos, and 19% are African American. What that means is a whole new dynamic, in which minorities are no longer seen as outsiders. “Suddenly these are 100% American kids, and they’re falling in love with each other, making multiracial babies,” Klineberg said. A “psychology of inevitability” begins to set in around immigration, he said — it’s happening, and it might not be a bad thing.

- Segregation is a fact of life across Texas, and in Harris County, white, black and Latino neighborhoods are still in some cases divided by major highways and rail lines, the Houston Chronicle concluded in 2015. Yet the number of affluent white neighborhoods set off by themselves is far fewer than the number found in Los Angeles, according to research from the Center for Urban and Regional Affairs at the University of Minnesota. Diversity has swept across the city — into the rodeo, where mixed-race couples bring their children decked out in boots and cowboy hats, and even into the classic cowboy bars.

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