Hispanic rioting during the civil rights era

The 1960s' U.S. black riots have received detailed systematic study at virtually all levels of analysis (individual, event, temporal, group, neighborhood, city, SMSA, state, and national). Although there are many impressionistic accounts of particular nonblack riots during this era, no systematic study of nonblack violence has heretofore been conducted. This article aims to reduce this gap in our knowledge. It is the first to present comprehensive data on nonblack rioting for the tumultuous 1960s and early 1970s. The analyses of these data focus upon the fruitfulness of applying models developed to explain the black riots, at the city and event levels of analysis, to their nonblack counterparts. The community-level model proves useful. Of particular importance are the effects of family income inequality and of local police force size.