Latinos make up almost 20% of the U.S. population, generating  $4.1 trillion in economic output. Yet, Latinos continue to own far fewer wealth-building assets – such as homes, savings, and investments – than their white peers. We had a Q&A with Gabriella Carmona, a senior research analyst at LPPI and co-author of Sueño Incompleto: A History of the Latino Wealth Gap in the United States, a new report examining centuries of policy patterns that created today’s systemic and cyclical wealth gap. 

In this conversation, Gabriella discusses the importance of examining past policies, how Latinos experience the wealth gap, and why non-Latinos should care.

Q: What does examining a complete history of the Latino wealth gap reveal that analyzing just one era does not?

Looking across the full arc of history makes it clear that this isn’t about one moment or one policy, it’s about a pattern. What we see in the report is that the same dynamics show up again and again across immigration, housing, labor, education, and public benefits. If you only look at one era, you might miss that continuity. But when you take a step back, it becomes really clear that cumulative policy choices consistently shaped who could build wealth and who couldn’t.

Q: How do historical barriers to wealth-building manifest as present-day consequences?

A lot of what we see today (lower homeownership rates, less access to savings, higher debt) is directly tied to how opportunities were structured in the past. For example, when Latino workers were concentrated in low-wage jobs without benefits, that didn’t just affect income in the moment, it limited their retirement savings, the ability to save to purchase a home, and their ability to pass down assets to their children, which compounds these inequities over generations.

Q: How do wealth disparities and barriers vary across Latino subgroups? 

As we say at LPPI, Latino communities are not a monolith. In the report, we show how different groups entered the U.S. under very different policy conditions that shaped their ability to build wealth. For example, Cuban migrants who arrived during the Cold War were granted faster access to permanent residency through policies like the Cuban Adjustment Act of 1966, along with housing assistance and small business support. In contrast, many Central American migrants fleeing civil wars in the 1980s faced extremely low asylum approval rates and long periods of legal uncertainty. Those policy differences created very different economic starting points, and we still see that today in income levels, business ownership, and overall wealth. 

Q: How does the wealth gap materialize in Latinos’ everyday lives?

It shows up in really tangible ways: whether a family can handle an emergency, whether they can help their kids pay for college, whether they can retire with stability. When you don’t have the means to save and build wealth, even small shocks can set you back in ways that are hard to recover from. 

Q: Why should these findings be important to non-Latinos?

Because this is really about how our systems work overall. When a fifth of the population is contributing so much to the economy but can’t fully translate that into wealth, that’s a structural inefficiency that affects growth, stability, and opportunity for the country. And more importantly, it challenges the idea of the American Dream – that hard work alone leads to mobility.

Q: Why is it important to highlight the Latino wealth gap’s history at this moment?

It’s important to highlight this history right now because many of the same dynamics we trace in the report are showing up again in real time. At a moment of economic uncertainty, rising costs, and geopolitical instability, we are seeing how policy decisions shape who is protected and who is left exposed. Latino communities are central to the country’s economic growth, but they are still navigating systems that make it harder to translate that work into long-term security. Looking at the history helps us recognize that these patterns are not new, and it gives us a clearer path to avoid repeating them as new policy decisions are being made in real-time. 

Read the full report: https://latino.ucla.edu/research/history-of-the-latino-wealth-gap/ 

Carmona presented the report’s key findings and implications during a webinar on April 14. Watch the webinar here: https://youtu.be/shG-zPO9EQw?si=XvqsC_s8jayrq-zy