Latino families in Massachusetts have the lowest median net wealth of any major ethnic group in the state, just $1,200, according to Boston Federal Reserve data released in August. Two-thirds of Latino families in the state cannot cover a $400 emergency expense.
Latinos now number more than one million residents of Massachusetts, according to a Boston Globe analysis that counts Brazilians, and more than half are from Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic. Their median age is 30, far younger than other groups, and they account for the vast majority of the state’s population growth in recent decades. They are expected to soon make up the majority of new workers, which means their finances will shape the state’s economy.
Their situation has improved in recent decades, with fewer low-income households, higher rates of home ownership and more college degrees. But Latino families remain disproportionately working class, they lag behind white, Asian and Black residents on almost every measure of economic well-being, and the Trump administration’s crackdown on immigration, DEI programs, social safety nets and financial aid has made life harder, the Globe reported.
Part of the problem is Massachusetts itself. It is one of the most expensive states in the country and one of the most segregated by income, according to the MassINC Policy Center, and the poorest cities and lowest-performing schools tend to be heavily Latino. More than anywhere else in the United States, middle-class pay here requires a college degree: 92 percent of jobs paying at least $90,000 a year on average demand one, and fewer than a quarter of the state’s Latinos have bachelor’s degrees.
“There are so few pathways to middle-class earnings that don’t involve a bachelor’s,” said Elise Rapoza, a senior research associate at MassINC. Latinos are more likely to work in home health care and food service, where pay rises more slowly than the cost of living.
A degree is no guarantee of catching up. Latinos with college degrees earn less than $63,000 a year on average in the state, according to the Gaston Institute at the University of Massachusetts Boston, less than Black, white or Asian workers with similar educations. Many Latino students there are the first in their families to attend college, take longer to graduate because they work, and carry more debt. Most Latinos never go at all, in part because their public schools do not prepare them, said Lorna Rivera, the institute’s director. “Sometimes the schools don’t have high expectations of students,” she said.
Javier Juarez, executive director of the Latino Equity Fund at the Boston Foundation, who came to the United States from Peru at 10, traces the gap to an absence of inheritances, mentors and access to business loans. “It’s an accumulation of systemic wrongdoings,” he said. Professionals’ foreign credentials often do not transfer. “You’ve probably heard the stories. ‘My Uber driver, back home he was a heart surgeon.’”
For Katheryn Gravenhorst, a young Latina trying to start her career in what the Globe called the worst labor market for recent college graduates since Covid, a spreadsheet of job applications keeps growing. “I was trying to build my resume, but at the same time I was trying to survive,” she said. “I feel like I would have better job prospects if I had more time to network.”
Her aunt, Sandra Gravenhorst, arrived from Colombia in 1998 at 24, cleaned at Logan Airport and worked at a cousin’s wire-transfer business before learning tax preparation and taking over a store. She owns a home, something only a third of the state’s Latinos do, and runs a tax business in Lynn. But at 53 she has no retirement account and supports her niece, her mother, two sons and a baby. “I’m comfortable, thanks God,” she said. She worries about the future.
Claudia Osirio, 54, who came from Uruguay in 2000, once cleaned alongside a man who had been a doctor in the Dominican Republic. She worked her way up to assistant director at a South Boston social services nonprofit but makes $20 an hour, recently took a second job, and could not afford her neighborhood without public housing. “The white people I’m connected with, their sons have a good job, because they know someone there,” she said. Her sons, now 25 and 26, are why she stays. “I choose to stay here for my sons.”