Latinos in Massachusetts Selected Areas: Lawrence and Methuen

This report provides a descriptive snapshot of selected economic, social, educational, and demographic indicators pertaining to Latinos in the cities of Lawrence and Methuen. 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 Lawrence and Methuen 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. In the PUMA that includes Lawrence and Methuen, these two cities account for nearly four-fifths of the total population and the vast majority of the area’s Latinos. Since ACS data is collected from a sample of the population, there is potential error 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. The Lawrence-Methuen area is home to an estimated 68,575 Latinos, who account for 43.6% of the area’s population. This represents the highest concentration of Latinos in the state. Whites make up a larger percentage of the population (48.5%), while Asians represent 4.8% and blacks represent 1.7% of the area’s population