ABSTRACT
In the 1990s, the stark divide between cities and suburbs began to melt away, and thus the main defining characteristic of the postwar urban crisis began to disappear. The suburban movement paused for a time in the years of the Great Depression and World War II, but turned into a gathering stampede as soon as postwar prosperity made it possible. All through the 1980s and 1990s, suburban communities continued to sprawl in ever-widening arcs around the historic urban centers. Millions of immigrants have been making their way to the United States from countries all over the world, but for the first time in the nation's history most of them are bypassing the cities entirely and moving directly into the suburbs or beyond. Hispanic immigrants from several other Latin American countries streamed into the states of the Southwest in even larger numbers in the 1980s and 1990s, pushed by political repression and poverty and pulled by the availability of jobs.
