Map: Los Angeles Is The Most Segregated City For Hispanics

Los Angeles is the most segregated city in the United States between whites and Hispanics, and this map illustrates just how divided we are.From the University of Virginia's Weldon Cooper Center for Public Service comes this very cool Racial Dot Map of the United States made up of 308,745,538 individual colored dots. Whites are blue, Blacks are green, Asians are red, Hispanics are orange, and everyone else is brown. Each dot represents every person counted in the 2010 Census, further color-coded by the race and ethnicity they reported as. If you zoom in close enough on this map, you might actually see yourself!

As explained in their methodology, it's all data publicly available via the National Historical Geographic Information System—so don't be that creeped out. After all, you reported the info yourself. Personal addresses aren't part of the data; each dot is placed within its own census block, which corresponds roughly to an area the size of a city block.

An assessment of the same data from the 2010 Census by the US2010 Project (.pdf) finds that Los Angeles is one of the most segregated cities in the country. We're number 1 in Hispanic-white segregation, further entrenching Chris Rock's assertion that L.A. is a town where "Mexicans are going to take care of white people."

For black and white segregation Los Angeles is fourteenth, though it used to be much, much worse. As Grim Sleeper director Nick Broomfield said, Los Angeles is truly a racially divided city.

In looking at the data visually and from afar, neighborhoods and communities are split exactly as you thought they'd be: whites tend to be in the nicer real estate of the coasts and hills, Hispanic communities are further inland and within the urban core, blacks are in South Central and South Los Angeles, and Asians are clustered in places such as the South Bay, Orange County, San Gabriel Valley and around major universities.