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IIn just 10 years, African-Americans have slipped from almost half the 150,000 population of Paterson, N.J., to less than a third, while Latinos have vaulted into the majority.
The rapid demographic shift — which mirrors nationwide demographic changes — has created tension in the city, especially after José “Joey” Torres beat Paterson's first black mayor in his bid for re-election last May. The election of the city's first Latino mayor left many African-Americans bitter.
“There's a feeling among some African-Americans that they were cheated out of the office, even though Joey won it fair and square,” says the Rev. Stafford Miller, pastor at Paterson's St. Philips United Methodist Church and a leader in the black community. “Some black people are also put off by Spanish; you know, when they go down to city hall or whatever, they feel uncomfortable with all these people speaking another language.”
According to Miller, both groups have to work harder to clear up misunderstandings. “There are problems like this in both communities, but I don't see it as the result of malice or anything like that,” he says. “It's more like a case of innocent ignorance.”
Throughout the nation's history, tensions have been created when large, new immigrant groups began competing with more established ethnic communities for political power, resources and social influence. Now it is happening again in some of the nation's largest cities as African-Americans see Hispanics moving into the majority and threatening the political clout that blacks fought for decades to amass.
In Los Angeles, for instance, the November 2001 mayoral race highlighted a tussle between a white candidate, James Hahn, and Hispanic Antonio Villaraigosa. Although Latinos make up almost half of L.A.'s population, Hahn still won. “African-American leaders unified behind Hahn and helped him win a decisive 80 percent of the black vote — partly because of his longtime family ties to that community and partly because they feared a Latino mayor might tip the local balance of power away from them, according to columnist Ronald Brownstein.”
Roland Robuck, a Washington, D.C., political activist who works with both blacks and Hispanics, foresees even greater conflicts between the two groups, as both sides air legitimate grievances. “Latinos are going to make a lot of demands, showing these demographic documents to members of the Afro-American community,” he said. “And the Afro-American community is going to say, 'Yeah, but you have not paid your dues.' So, only through serious and strategic dialogue would you be able to take care of this.”
Toni-Michelle Tavis, a professor of government and politics at George Mason University, in Fairfax, Va., concurs. “There's going to be a lot of rivalry and jealousy because African-Americans were there first,” she says. “People don't want to share power.”
But others say both groups should be able to cooperate because they usually have similar agendas. “With the exception of the immigration issue, we are fighting for the same things,” says Roderick Harrison, a demographer at the Joint Center for Political and Economic Studies, which focuses on African-American issues. “We both favor more spending on education, housing and health care.”
Those convergent agendas eventually will lead to the formation of “real” coalitions, Harrison predicts. “As people in both communities continue lobbying for similar things, they will see that they do better by pooling their resources, energy and strategies,” he says.
In fact, noted Lawrence Aaron, a columnist for New Jersey's Bergen County Record, the Congressional Black and Hispanic Caucuses routinely work together on issues such as education and health care.
But Gregory Rodriguez, a senior fellow at the New America Foundation, a Washington think tank, says U.S. demographics do not back up all the talk of either heightened inter-racial tension or greater cooperation. “First of all, the majority of Latinos and blacks don't live in the same regions,” he says. Rodriguez notes that while Latinos are moving into non-traditional areas of the United States, two-thirds of Hispanics still live in the Southwest, and more than half of the African-Americans are in the Southeast.
Furthermore, he says, Latinos are not going to form a “minority group” with political and social values in the way that African-Americans have, largely because they don't see themselves as a single racial entity, as blacks do.
“On the last census,” he points out, “50 percent of Latinos said they were 'white' and 48 percent said they were 'other,' so it's much too simplistic to call them a group. The idea that you're going to have two big groups either slugging it out or forming grand coalitions is not realistic.”
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