Latinos in Massachusetts Selected Areas: Lowell

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in Lowell. It reflects a commitment by UMass Boston’s Mauricio Gastón Institute for Latino Community Development and Public Policy to provide periodic updates on the growing Latino population in Massachusetts. The report on Lowell is part of a larger series that covers fourteen other cities, or clusters of cities, in the Commonwealth of Massachusetts. Each report analyzes data from the 2010 American Community Survey (ACS) conducted by the U.S. Census Bureau. Data are analyzed by Public Use Microdata Area (PUMA), which consists of a minimum population of 100,000 and is the smallest geographic area publically available for individual-level analysis. Lowell is a large enough city that it constitutes a PUMA by itself. The ACS thereby enables us to arrive at a demographic and economic portrait of Lowell’s Latino community. Since ACS data is collected from a sample of the population, there is some variation associated with each population estimate. In the bar graphs in this report, the ‘I’ that accompanies each bar represents the confidence interval for that estimate; we expect that another sample would generate an estimate within this interval 95% of the time. In this report, Latinos are compared to non-Latino whites, non-Latino blacks, and Asians for selected demographic, economic, and social characteristics. The number of ethno-racial groups included in a particular analysis may vary; each ethnoracial group is included in the analysis only when the observed sample size is large enough to produce reliable population estimates. Lowell is the fourth largest city in Massachusetts and is home to an estimated 23,001 Latinos, who make up 21.5% of the city’s population. Whites constitute the largest ethno-racial group (49.6%), while Asians account for 22.8% and blacks represent 4.3% of the city’s population