SSIIM Paper Series Vol. 4
Contribuciones para una teoría de la segregación residencial y los mercados étnicos de los inmigrantes en ciudades de América Latina
by Tito Alegría
In the last decades many cities in Latin America have received a growing number of international migrants, mostly from neighboring countries. Inside several of those cities some neighborhoods or zones present high concentration of foreign residents and/or economic activities guided mostly to the immigrants’ final consumption and managed by them too. This research conceptualizes the immigrants’ residential concentration as segregation by national origin, and their economic clustering as ethnic markets. This immigrant’s intraurban spatial pattern seems to be similar to that present in countries of the North, however in countries of the South the reasons of the immigrants’ spatial concentration look different in type or intensity. Even more, an interpretation does not exist on that spatial concentration emergence neither of its localization, for Latin American cities. The few cases that appear in the scant literature are the “China towns” in almost each great city, the concentration of Bolivians in Sao Paulo and of the Peruvians in Santiago. This research proposes for Latin American cities explanatory models for, first, the particular social marginalization that immigrants experiment generated by the local social structuring conditions; second, the mechanisms that produce the immigrants’ residential segregation and its localization inside the city; and third, the determining mechanisms of the formation of ethnic markets and its localization inside the urban area.
