County’s Emerging Latino Middle Class Charted

OXNARD — Ventura County has one of the region’s highest percentages of middle-class Latino households, far surpassing Los Angeles and Riverside/San Bernardino counties, according to a recent study.

Los Angeles-based researchers Gregory Rodriguez and Joel Kotkin met with Ventura County community leaders for two hours Monday afternoon at Oxnard’s Tower Club to discuss the results of the study, “The Emerging Latino Middle Class.”

The researchers described what they say is an emerging and increasingly powerful Latino middle class that contributes significantly to the Southern California economy.

Rodriguez defined a middle-class household as having an income of $35,000 or more, or individuals who own their own home.

Nearly 23% of U.S.-born Latinos in the region worked in secretarial and clerical jobs, another 12% worked in sales. While the number in service industry jobs decreased slightly to 9% in 1990, nearly 20% of the Latino work force was classified in professional or executive-administrative jobs.

Though the study, sponsored by Pepperdine University’s Institute for Public Policy, was unveiled in Los Angeles in October, forum participants said it was important to bring the message to Ventura County.

“You are starting to see more Latinos involved in the corporate community and the professions,” said Marty de los Cobos, president of Ventura County Economic Development Assn. “This study was important in terms of putting numbers on what we had perceived.”

The study, based on 1990 census data from Riverside/San Bernardino, Los Angeles, Orange and Ventura counties, has been billed as the first to analyze the region’s Latino middle class.

By 1990, the study found, there were nearly four times as many U.S.-born Latino households in Southern California in the middle class as there were in poverty.

According to a 1994 profile by Health and Human Services in Ventura County, more than 26% of the county’s population is Latino. Fillmore, Santa Paula and Oxnard have populations that are at least 50% Latino.

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Among U.S.-born Latino households in Ventura County, 55% are middle class, compared with 60% in Orange County and 49% in Los Angeles County. Orange and Ventura counties have the greatest proportion--44% each--of foreign-born Latino households in the middle class, according to the study.

Rodriguez maintains Ventura County has become a destination for many Latinos moving up the socioeconomic ladder who seek a new home away from Los Angeles.

“That is why the study held up,” said Rodriguez. “Homeownership has always been an integral part to becoming part of the American middle class.”

Although those numbers are encouraging, Latinos are still lagging behind other groups in obtaining an education, the study found. Middle-class, U.S.-born Latinos are far less likely to hold a bachelor’s degree than other ethnic groups, including African Americans, the study states.

Yolanda Benitez, superintendent for the Rio School District, said one of the biggest challenges facing the mostly Latino district is increasing the involvement of immigrant parents in their children’s education.

“They tend to be disenfranchised by the institution,” said Benitez. “We need to pull them in.”

Kotkin said more attention must be focused on improving both K-12 education and instruction at community colleges.

Ventura County Community Colleges District Trustee Pete Tafoya said that Latino enrollment in the district’s three colleges has increased by 30% to 50% in the past 10 years.

In Oxnard, one indicator of Latino upward mobility is reflected in housing trends, said Francisco Dominguez, who heads the nonprofit social service agency El Concilio del Condado de Ventura. These days, Latino families are buying homes in areas of the city that were predominantly white two decades ago.

But Karl Lawson of Oxnard’s Housing Authority said that may not be an accurate indicator of a burgeoning Latino middle class.

“That River Ridge is not an all-Anglo enclave is good, but that is not a barometer of the working-class immigrant moving up the social ladder.”

Though some aspects of the study may be disputed, at least it supplied a new angle on the immigration and upward mobility debate, said Kotkin.

“It changed the nature of the debate,” Kotkin said. “It is getting people to look at the upside rather than the downside.”