By the 1960s, however, ethnicity had given way to race as the key factor in determining life chances in the city. While the African-American community has a long-standing presence in Boston, by the beginning of this century, conditions were so desperate - deaths outnumbered births among blacks in Boston - that observers wondered whether the community would survive at all. Of course it did, and in fact served as a magnet for the great migration from the South that redefined Boston's social and physical landscape.

That redefinition was palpable. By the 1960's Boston was one of the most racially segregated cities in the country in terms of physical space and among the most racially polarized cities in its social climate. The 1970's crisis of school desegregation and busing revealed the uneasiness of the relationship between blacks and whites in Boston. Despite the many efforts to repair those relations, the city is now accustomed to thinking of itself in terms of black and white - particularly in periods of political conflict.

But that racial self-conception may be changing as a result of a more recent, rapid growth in Boston's Latino population. The Latino influx coincided with deepening racial division in the city. A small presence since the beginning of the century, Latinos have arrived in earnest only over the past 20 years. In 1970 Latinos made up less than three percent of the city's population; by 1980 the percentage had more than doubled, and by 4990 I.Atinos were nearly 11 percent of the population of Boston. Such rapid growth would present challenges to any city. But Boston is not any city: for nearly thirty years it has been defined by sharp racial divisions. And the latino community is not just any new group: it does not see itself as black or white, or indeed principally in racial terms at all. Put these pieces together and you have the makings of an important - and potentially constructive - challenge to the basic terms of Boston's political organization and discourse.

Recent Census Bureau reports provide an unhappy starting point for a discussion of the position of Latincs in Boston: Massachusetts Latinos have the highest poverty rate of any Latino group in the United States; the highest poverty rate of any group in Boston or in Massachusetts; and the lowest levels of education -and the highest school drop-out rate of any group in Massachusetts.

Something is wrong here, and a small group of local economists and sociologists - including Edwin Melendez, Luis Falcon, Paul Osterman, and myself have just begun to figure out what it is. Part of the story appears to be straightforwardly economic. Recruited to the city to work in a dying manufacturing sector, Latino workers have suffered from the sharp decline of regional manufacturing. While Latinos are now penetrating the lowest echelons of the service sector in great numbers, they continue to be more dependent than any other group on the manufacturing sector as a source of employment. As a result of that dependence, the labor market situation-of Latinos in Boston during the 1980's was as bad as (and in some areas worse than) that of blacks. The Massachusetts miracle provided little benefit for Latinos; as the miracle dissolved Latinos were trapped in the lowest strata of the Boston economy.

These economic factors have caused trouble throughout the Latino, community. But Puerto Ricans and Dominicans are especially dependent for employment on the dying manufacturing sector and the low-paying service sector. So those groups have been hit especially hard by the weaknesses in those sectors.

Other elements in the picture of Latino poverty are less purely economic. According to MIT economist Paul Osterman, language and family structure-play a central role in accounting for differences in success within the community. Osterman has found that Latinos with fluency in English are more likely to be Working than Latinos who speak only Spanish, and that among those who are working, English speaking Latinos tend to have higher wages. Latinos in Boston also have high rates of single parent households, and fully 79 percent of all Latino, single parent families are poor.

Additional troubles have come from the impact on the Latino community of Urban renewal, physical displacement, and the social climate of the city. Urban renewal an& a volatile housing market have dispersed Latinos throughout the city, thus preventing the development of a cohesive physical community and of the power base required for political strength.

These economic and social circumstances faced by the Latino community help us to understand what the members of that community perceive as the crucial barriers to their inclusion in the life of Boston. Problems of labor market status and the barriers posed by racial and cultural differences top the list. An important recent study of Latino children in Boston Public Schools by Antonia Darder and Carol Upshur explores the educational impact of these racial and cultural issues. They point out that Latino children are failing in the school system because the schools provide little support for the cultural strengths that those children bring with diem. Instead of recognizing the cultural diversity of Latino children as an important contribution to public education, schools treat it as a disruption to be managed and resolved. The result of all of this is that both children-and parents feel pushed away from schools and education.

The story about both public and nonprofit social services is similar. Latinos believe that they are excluded from consideration in the formulation of social policy and in the implementation of social programs that affect the lives -of Latino families and children. Voting with their feet, Latinos often do not take advantage of government programs they desperately need, and have only a very loose relationship with the city's social support institutions. The result of the alienation of Latinos from these fundamental social institutions is the social isolation of the community.

Responding to these conditions of exclusion, alienation, and isolation, Latinos have sought to build a strong, but separate community. This was not their initial goal. In fact the struggle for inclusion has been the most powerful force in the social organization of Latinos in the city. But faced with continued inattention to their urgent needs, Latinos have followed the pattern of the black community in developing a set of organizations that run parallel to mainstream Boston institutions. And while the development of these organizations has been hampered by Latino geographic dispersion, they have had some success in unifying a diverse community, developing that corn munity internally, and leading the struggle for inclusion in the social life of Boston.

But in this struggle for inclusion Latinos have come-up against the entrenched racial order of Oie city. Neither black nor white, but multi-mciali Latinos fit uneasily in the racial structure that both,defines and confines Boston's social and political life. And that uneasy fit presents a distinctive challenge to conventional politics.

The population called "Latino" in the United States is an aggregation of people from the Spanish-speaking Caribbean, and from Central and South America. They were Mexicans, Puerto Ricans, Guatemalans, Cubans, Panamanians, etc. before they came across the border. And from inside the Latino community, they continue to be so perceived, because most Latinos in the U.S.identify themselves by nationality. In the U.S., it was bureaucratic and political considerations - rather than self-understanding - that produced the designations "Spanishspeaking," then Hispanic, then Latino (this last is the term of choice).

The formation of an identity as a Latino is, however, not simply a matter of external labelling. It depends on a sense of commonalities among the very distinct groups of Latin Americans in thei U.S.. just as important, it requires recognition of the political fact that Latinos as a group fare better in the political process in the U.S. than they do as separate national groups. The development of this common identity is an achievement of unity that is too easily overlooked.

In Boston the majority of the Latino population is Puerto Rican. In 1990, 42 percent of all Latinos were of Puerto Ricarn background and most were first generation immigrants. The 1990 share represented a drop from a 1970 high of 70 percent and reflects the growing diversity of the Latino population of the city. Mexicans and Cubans, the two other nationalities represented, in large numbers in the U.S., accounted for a minuscule percentage of the Boston Latino population in 1990 - three and four percent respectively. The majority share of the population (51 percent) are classified by the U.S. Census as "other Hispanics": people from the Dominican Republic, and from Central and South America. The Dominicans are the largest group of "others," followed by the large contingent of Salvadoreans, Guatemalans, and Hondurans that made their way to Boston in the 1980s. Unlike other areas of the U.S., where one Latino group predominates with strength Cubans in Miami, Puerto Ricans in the northeastern seaboard up to Connecticut, Mexicans in the West and Southwest - Boston's Latinos are a highly diverse group in terms of nationality. The fact that they see themselves as, and act as, one community despite this diversity and geographic dispersion, is an extraordinary accomplishment.

In addition to differences of nationality, race represents another complexity within the Latino population. Latinos can be of all races and of an extraordinarily diverse mixture of all races. The Caribbean groups - Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans - represent a facial and cultural mixture of. European (Spanish), African, and to a lesser extent, Native American backgrounds. The blending of European and African cultures in particular is an important characteristic of the Caribbean groups, and is reflected in their cultural and artistic expression, their religious practices, their food and even their language. The African influence is much less pronounced among South Americans, for whom the primary blend is between European and Native American cultures. This, too, is reflected in all aspects of their cultural expression. While Central Americans are primarily a mixture of Native and European peoples, they also have a significant African influence, particularly those from the Caribbean basin.

This racial mixture distinguishes Latinos from North Americans and reflects the more flexible and permeable racial order of their countries of origin. While the racial diversity in Latin America and the Caribbean was produced by the same factors that created the diversity of race in the United States - the existence of native peoples, European conquest, the importation of African slaves - conceptions of color and race are very different. As Rodriguez and Cordero Guzman point out, in the U.S. individuals were looked at and defined legally only in terms of the polarities: one was either black or white. By contrast, race in the Caribbean islands came to be seen as a continuum of color categories, with the norm being the mixtures and gradations. Among Cubans, Dominicans and Puerto Ricans, racial definitions carry many labels from negro, through milled, mestizo, and trigueno to blanco. Moreover, among Latin Americans, race is perceived in a social context: a dark-skinned person of high status or income is, in fact, whitened by his or her social status. As this fact indicates, color continues to be a significant factor in the organization of Caribbean societies; racial stratification exists, and racism as well. But there is much more permeability among racial groups, much intermarriage and social interaction, and ultimately qualitatively different relations than those found among racial groups in the United States.

Boston Latinos are, then, both ethnically and racially diverse. Outsiders sometimes overlook these differences among Latmos, and in doing so miss the mtemal complexity of the community. Others, observing Latinos fiom the perspective of their own experience of diversity in the United States, get lost in the complexity of differences among Latinos and miss the unique ways in which Latinos work to bridge them. Although by no means perfect, the way that this group manages its internal racial and cultural diversity is irriportant to understand and may provide a model for other groups.

At the same time, however, this distinctive experience makes it difficult both conceptually and practically - for Latinos to come to terms with the racial polarity in this country. The tendency is for Latinos to identify themselves first culturally - in terms of nationality or as Latinos - and only second in racial terms. In the 1990 U.S. Census, for example, nearly half of Massachusetts Latinos identified themselves as "other" (meaning Latino), bypassing any of the U.S. racial categories.

Latinos' understanding of race relations and of their own position in the racial structure is a source of consternation for blacks and whites. Whites react to Latinos' "hispanicity" and label them as a group "of color" irrespective of their actual skin color. And blacks, too, react to the darker skin of most Latinos and also declare them "of color". Whites are surprised at the claim of some Hispanics to be white; in fact fully 43 percent of Massachusetts Latinos identified themselves as white in the 1990 U.S. Census. At the same time, blacks distrust the resistance of Latinos to identifying themselves racially first, and in some cases, to identifying themselves racially at all.

To be sure, Latino racial consciousness undergoes important changes as the group comes to understand the powerful role of race in American society. Newcomers first see language and culture as the main source of their differences from mainstream society and the principal reason for their exclusion. Believers in the ideology of assimilation, many feel that the problems they face stem from their recent arrival and expect that the differences will disappear with the passage of time. As the new arrivals come in contact with other Latinos who have lived in the U.S. for a much longer time, and as the length of their own tenure in the U.S. grows, their explanations begin to take into account the persistence of their exclusion. As Latinos organize to control their own their own resources, they begin to understand the problems of discrimination and racism and to identify them as the root of their exclusion. But even the identification of racism as a problem does not necessarily lead them to abandon their primary ethnic/national identification for a racial one. More commonly, the result is a stronger assertion of their ethnicity.

In Boston, Latinos live with blacks, go to school with blacks, work alongside blacks; interaction between Latinos and whites is substantial but far less frequent. In organizing themselves and developing their community, Latinos have made alliances with both blacks and whites and both groups have felt the pressure of Latinos' demands for inclusion.

Relations between Latinos and whites are framed principally by the economic and political dominance of whites in the city. But there has been considerable collaboration 'at the community level. Striking examples of both types of relationships were found during the development of Villa Victoria in Boston's South End. In the late 1960's, one Puerto Rican neighborhood - located on what was called "Parcel 19" - was identified by the white-controlled Boston Redevelopment Authority as the location for a South End Community Center. Building the center would have required the relocation of nearly the whole Puerto Rican neighborhood. Puerto Rican tenants joined with mostly white activists in St. Stephen's Church, and a burgeoning black opposition to urban renewal in the South End, to form an Emergency Tenants' Council (ETC) in opposition to the destruction of the neighborhood. The fight lasted more than five years. But in the end ETC was successful in forcing the Boston Redevelopment Authority to designate their organization as the developers of Parcel 19. Over the years, Parcel 19 would become Villa Victoria and the developers - Inquilinos Boricuas en Accion (IBA) - would become one of the largest Latino community development corporations in the United States.

Alongside such important cases of cooperation, there have been many more cases of confrontation between Latinos and the white power structure: with the School Committee, the State Department of Education, the Boston City Council, the Massachusetts Legislature, hospitals, the Boston Public Schools, institutions of higher education, and the established social service systems. Focused on such survival issues as education, jobs, and services, those conflicts have provided a strong catalyst for Latinos to organize. The struggle against exclusion and the struggle for control of resources by the community have been the main characteristics of the relationships between whites and Latinos in Boston.

Relations between Latinos and blacks are much more complicated. Most Latinos live alongside blacks in what are traditionally black neighborhoods. This physical proximity has led to strong alliances in both neighborhoods. Collaboration with African Americans in the South End was important to the success of the efforts that led to Villa Victoria. In Roxbury, the early collaboration between Roxbury Multiservice Center and emerging Alianza Hispana stand as an example of emerging trust and wise leadership on the part of both groups. Most recently, cooperation between Latino and black political leaders led to the election of State Representative Nelson Merced, the first Latino from Boston to hold public office in the state.

But relations have not always been so easy. Because of the political realities of Boston, blacks sometimes occupy positions of authority in the city schools, govemment, and social service institutions. This often leads to the perception among Latinos that these resources are controlled by blacks. The presence of black persons in positions of authority in institutions that either exclude Latinos or are not attentive to tatino needs has been a source of public conflict between blacks and Latinos. That was the case in ABCD and Model Cities in the 1970's, and has more recently been true in the Boston Public Schools. In general, Latinos enter into confrontation with blacks when blacks in authority deny them access or consideration as a distinct group. Recognition of the differences between blacks and Latinos and respect for the desire for autonomy of the group, by contrast, leads to collaboration and mutual respect.

In a racially polarized city like Boston, the most dangerous times for Latinos are the periods of rising tension between blacks and whites. Although there is a great differential in power between these two groups, when they confront each other Latinos get squeezed. The conflicts over school desegregation and busing in the 1970s sharply underscore these effects of racial polarity. Organized Latino parents did not support busing although they did not support the antibusing forces either - principally because of the implications of racial polarization within their own families. Jovita Fontanez put it this way: "We had to show them that we are Puerto Rican and that in our families we can have whites and we can have blacks. How can you classify one child in the family as black and another as white and bus them in different directions?" Racial polarity threatened the integrity of Latino, families, just as it threatens the integrity of Latinos as a group. Writing about racial relations among Puerto Ricans, blacks, and whites in New York City, Clara Rodriguez explains this self-defined position between blacks and whites as "an attempt to remain a unified whole and evolve from our own roots." In defiing an independent position for themselves in Boston, Latinos seek to maintain their multiracial and cultural integrity, and with that, to guarantee their distinctiveness and survival as a group.

In racially polarized cities, blacks and whites characteristically frame political struggles in racial terms. The contest for power in Boston still involves just such a macabre dance of two unequal partners. Others - like the Latino community - are left on the sidelines, astonished by the strength and the bitterness of that dominant rivalry. As the desegregation crisis and many other political struggles in Boston demonstrate, the Latino response to racially polarized politics is a strong resistance to intervene. So they continue to be outsiders to the major battles for power in the city.

But as the community and the political stakes grow, and as concerns about Latino economic and educational disadvantage intensify, this will surely change, as it has in other large urban areas in the United States. The problem is that none of these other cases offers a good model of constructive political change. The experience of New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, Miami, and other cities where whites, blacks, and Latinos share turf is bitter, as the three groups battle it out for resources and power in these cities. Boston is at the portal ofthat experience, still untouched by the ugliness and destruction of those struggles. There is still a chance to do it differently, still the hope of doing it better.

The first step along a more constructive path will come when those now in power understand that the city has changed. Boston is no longer exclusively a white city: one of every three Bostonians is now black, Latino, or Asian. And the "coloring" of Boston will likely increase as the city joins other large urban areas in what is one of the most significant demographic changes in the United States in this century.

Moreover, in this city of immigrants, the descendants of older European immigrants must understand the differences between the experience of their parents and the lives of Puerto Ricans and Salvadoreans in Boston today. The older manufacturing economy that nurtured their kin and offered them upward mobility no longer exists in Boston and it will not return. In the new economy, education is the key to advancement; that is why the struggle over Boston's schools is so bitter. So public education must ensure a place for all the children of this increasingly diverse city. And resources also have to be provided - as they were at the beginning of the century - to educate the large number of adult immigrants and to prepare them for life in Boston.

Similarly, the social and cultural institutions of Boston - long dominated by one group - have to arrive ti-ansformed at the twenty-first century. The continued promise of a "commitment to diversity" that never materializes and so never truly supports, nurtures, and validates the presence of others in the city is one of the great impediments to the advancement of Boston as a whole.

Finally, as Bostonians we must demand an end to the deadly, unequal dance of two and transform it into a chorus of many voices, singing in different languages, in the only hannony that will save the city we have all grown to love.