Ghetto

Ghettos refer to sections of cities populated by minority ethnic or religious groups, that is, neighborhoods in which the minority is a majority. Some argue that their roots can be traced to Roman persecutions of Jews. During the Middle Ages in Europe, ghettos consisted of Jewish quarters in overwhelmingly Christian cities (e.g., the famous Warsaw Ghetto). Venice had a Jewish ghetto by the 14th century. Jews were forbidden from owning land outside the ghetto, and Jewish[Page 189] ghettos often had walls around them and were the subjects of vicious pogroms.

The nature of ghettos has changed over time. As Jewish ghettos were gradually disbanded during the 19th century, the term ghetto came to refer to other ethnic minorities such as Indian, Bangladeshi, and Jamaican immigrants to British cities. Although most ghettos tended to have below-average income levels, they were defined primarily in terms of ethnicity, not class.

The reasons for the formation of ghettos involve a combination of external constraints and internal motivations. External constraints include economic and political discrimination against the minority population, including formal or informal prohibitions against employment and the purchase of housing. Internal motivations that help underpin ghetto formation include the desire to be near one's ethnic group and language, the availability of marriage partners, access to culturally specific foods, and the informal webs of mutual assistance common among some ethnic groups.

In the United States, ghettos have taken a variety of ethnic forms, a theme well studied by urban geographers and sociologists (e.g., Chicago School social ecologists). During the waves of immigration from Southern and Eastern Europe during the late 19th century, many American cities had high-density ghettos composed of various ethnic groups (e.g., Italian, Irish, Polish). During the 1920s, immigrant Jews from Germany and Eastern Europe established a large ghetto in southern Manhattan centered around the garment industry. Often the cultural assimilation of one group over several generations and its dispersal into predominant Anglo-American communities, which varied from group to group, led to the group's replacement by another, less assimilated ethnicity. Thus, although the ethnic division of labor that underscores ghettos may be temporary so far as any individual group is concerned, it tends to be a permanent part of the urban landscape. The arrival of Chinese immigrants generated the first Chinatowns in New York and many West Coast cities. The migration of African Americans to northern cities circa World War I led to the formation of black ghettos, many of which were middle-class communities. Some ghettos (e.g., Harlem) became the center of rich artistic and political movements. The growth of the Latino or Hispanic population has generated the formation of Spanish-speaking barrios in cities such as Los Angeles, where distinct Mexican, Dominican, Salvadoran, Colombian, Nicaraguan, and Cuban communities may be found. In many large cities that are the destination of migrant streams from around the world, it is not unusual to see ethnic communities of Armenians, Koreans, Thais, and Vietnamese, among others.

The transformation of American cities after World War II, particularly suburbanization and deindustrialization, changed the nature of American ghettos decisively. The intersections of class and race increasingly rendered minority-dominant neighborhoods poor with high levels of unemployment and crime. Increasingly, the term ghetto came to be associated with the black urban underclass and more generally with poverty, leading to the popular equation of ghettos with slums. However, some use the term to refer to gay or artistic enclaves in contemporary cities.

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