{"id":127619,"date":"2022-06-02T12:52:45","date_gmt":"2022-06-02T12:52:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/?p=127619"},"modified":"2022-06-02T12:52:45","modified_gmt":"2022-06-02T12:52:45","slug":"colorado-census-data-shows-black-latinos-made-economic-gains-but-inequity-remains","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/fin2me.com\/economy\/colorado-census-data-shows-black-latinos-made-economic-gains-but-inequity-remains\/","title":{"rendered":"Colorado census data shows Black, Latinos made economic gains but inequity remains"},"content":{"rendered":"

Maria Bocanegra Tejeda awakens as the rising sun lights her room. Her room. In the house her family owns. That fact is still capable of surprising her, so far removed it is from her cousins\u2019 crowded trailer in the crowded mobile home park where she spent nearly half of her 22 years.<\/p>\n

The night before, she draped her navy graduation robe over the chair near the bed. Her cap lay nearby, its mortarboard top emblazoned with the words:\u00a0 \u201cCultura es orgullo. Orgullo es exito.\u201d Culture is pride. Pride is success. The rallying call of her University of Northern Colorado sorority.<\/p>\n

She can hear her parents in the kitchen. Her dad would be running on a few hours of sleep after his shift at the beef processing plant and the hour-long midnight bus ride home from Fort Morgan to Greeley. What he feels about his daughter\u2019s graduation, he later will say, is beyond his capacity to put into words. He walks around the house two hours before the ceremony wearing a black cowboy hat and white jeans that puddle over his boots. He tries to keep his tears at bay. Maria\u2019s mother does not even try.<\/p>\n

Years ago, when her dad was driving past UNC, Maria pointed to the campus and told him, \u201cOne day, I\u2019m gonna come here.\u201d He, with three years of formal education, a laborer his whole life, told her the university was for rich people. She reminded him of this recently. Not to shame him, she says, but to acknowledge how far they had come since settling in Greeley in 2010.<\/p>\n

In the decade that followed in this, one of the fastest-growing communities in one of the nation\u2019s fastest-growing states, the Bocanegra Tejedas worked their way from renters to homeowners, from a one-earner household on the poverty line to two earners with a monthly cushion big enough to ensure their mortgage did not devour them. Maria, the eldest of four, became the family\u2019s first high school graduate, its first to enroll in college.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s going to take a while to settle in,\u201d Maria says as she curls her hair on graduation morning. \u201cSo much changed. In 2010, I didn\u2019t know if college was a possibility and the optimism wasn\u2019t there. But now, it\u2019s not just dreams. Now, we have a foundation we can build on.\u201d<\/p>\n

Inching forward on shaky ground<\/strong><\/h3>\n

The Bocanegra Tejeda family symbolizes the most hopeful version of the story of Colorado\u2019s Black and Latino residents from 2010 to 2020. In several key measures of socioeconomic progress, each group moved a little closer to white Coloradans, who also saw many gains.<\/p>\n

A Colorado News Collaborative (COLab) analysis of U.S. Census and other data found that over the course of the last decade, poverty rates among the state\u2019s Black and Latino residents fell to historic or near-historic lows, high school graduation rates, particularly for Latinos, shot up, Black and Latino median household income climbed at rates that outpaced inflation, and Latino homeownership cracked the 50% mark for the first time since the Great Recession.<\/p>\n

Nowhere else in the nation saw a greater narrowing of the gaps in poverty levels between Latinos and whites than Colorado. The state was also among the top 10 that experienced narrowing gaps in median household income between Latino and white, and Black and white households.<\/p>\n

That thriving is the engine of Colorado\u2019s future. Population projections show growth will be led by younger Latinos and African Americans, and more Coloradans of color will enter the workforce as aging white workers retire.<\/p>\n

But if the upward trends tell one story, the underlying gaps tell another.<\/p>\n

Progress was tempered by the reality that in the last decade a Black or Latino Coloradan was still twice as likely to live in poverty as their white neighbors, and Black median household income was two-thirds that of white. Even with the slight upward tick, the rate of homeownership\u00a0 \u2014 the main path to generational wealth \u2014 among Latinos here remained lower than it was in 1970, while the rate among Blacks hasn\u2019t cracked the 50% mark since at least 1960.<\/p>\n

Four-year college graduation rates among Latino residents 25 years and older inched upward during the decade, but still remained in the teens, 10 percentage points lower than Black Coloradans, and 31 points lower than white. The state\u2019s long and acknowledged history of importing college-educated whites while failing to homegrow the potential of its youth of color created the nation\u2019s largest Latino-white higher education gap and the second-largest Black-white gap. Expand the definition of higher education to include two-year degrees and career-technical certifications, and Black and Latino Coloradans attainment rates still remained a fraction of their white peers.<\/p>\n

When three of every four students who made up the growth in the state\u2019s high school population over the last decade were Latino, the consequences of the failure to ensure more can achieve a higher education are obvious.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\u201cIf we don’t (close the gaps), we will continue, decades on, the way we have decades past where we have this blaring equity gap, and we have unfulfilled, unactivated potential,\u201d says Colorado Department of Higher Education Executive Director Angie Paccione, who in 2020 launched the agency\u2019s Office of Educational Equity. \u201cAnd how sad is that? How bad \u2014 not just sad \u2014 how bad for this state?\u201d<\/p>\n

Progress was also tempered by the nature of the decade itself. The economy rose from the trough of the Great Recession and its lopsided decimation of Black and Latino income and wealth to settle into a historically long, slow expansion that brought low unemployment, gradual wage increases and huge gains in home equity. Then the pandemic struck.<\/p>\n

COVID-19 tore a disproportionately deadly path through Black and Latino communities and hit hard the lower-paying industries in which they are overrepresented. In a matter of months, the pandemic revealed truths about the hard-wired nature of inequity that the years before may have blurred, says state Rep. Jennifer Bacon, D-Denver, who calls the Census data a representation of a \u201cdream unrealized.\u201d<\/p>\n

\u201dWe have not been intentional in undoing the intentional harm of the past,\u201d she says. \u201cFor centuries, we denied people access not just to homes and jobs, but to knowledge because of their skin color and place of birth. And unless we are intentional, a sustained intentionality, we are going to see these gaps persist.\u201d<\/p>\n

The most skeptical view, shared by Pastor Del Phillips, chairman of the Colorado Black Leadership Coalition, sees any uncritical celebration of the data as \u201ca trademark of the oppressor to always make you think you are better off than you are.\u201d Accepting a narrowing gap at face value, he says, creates an escape hatch that allows the wielders of power to dodge responsibility for past harm and future repair.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf the gap represents me on one side of the Grand Canyon and whites on the other side of the Grand Canyon, and they’re saying, \u2018Just jump. The gap is not as large as it was before,’ well, I’m still going to fall to the bottom,\u201c Phillips says. \u201cAnd that’s the way I look at this. It doesn’t matter that (the gap) is less. The challenge is that it\u2019s there.\u201d<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

Connecting the dots<\/strong><\/h3>\n

COLab and its partners are examining the last decade\u2019s trends, and over the next few weeks will report on a range of issues, including home ownership, high school graduation rates, infant mortality and poverty.<\/p>\n

Because Colorado’s Indigenous and Asian American and Pacific Islander populations are so small, the Census data is unreliable for similar analysis of those communities. But state data, particularly about educational attainment and health inequities, show the state\u2019s Native population faces among the greatest barriers to well-being.<\/p>\n

Numbers never tell the whole story. The Census Bureau\u2019s data are no different. COLab started with the Census\u2019 five-year American Community Survey (ACS), a daily rolling poll conducted over 60 months. The every-five-year statistical snapshots can be good for measuring changes over time, but not for pinpointing the events of a single year. <\/p>\n

But we can see from state data that the single last year of the decade upended previous years\u2019 positive trends in, among other things, high school graduation, college enrollment and unemployment rates. Life expectancy reversed across all groups, with Black life expectancy plummeting from 78 years old to 74, what it was in 2000.\u00a0 White life expectancy, in comparison, fell by a little more than a year to just over 80 years old.<\/p>\n

Data also shows a greater percentage of people have moved above what the federal government defines as poverty. That is not the same thing as being self-sufficient, stable, flourishing.<\/p>\n

\u201cSure, families might be financially doing better on paper,\u201d says Nita Gonzales, a longtime community leader in Denver. \u201cBut that may mean that you’ve got both parents working or one parent working two jobs, and they’re transporting all over the place because they have to look for housing out of the city farther away from the metro area, and that reduces time with their kids.<\/p>\n

\u201c …I’m seeing that we made gains, I am not discounting that. But it’s not enough. And I don’t know how permanent it is. That’s my concern. It’s no time to sit back.\u201d<\/p>\n