“No Podemos Perder La Esperanza”: Material Hardship, Public Benefit Access, and the Limits of Upward Mobility Among Hispanic/Latino Families In Urban America

Background: Latino families represent the largest and fastest-growing minority population in the United States yet face compounding structural barriers to economic stability including immigration-related stressors, restricted access to public benefits, and constrained pathways to upward mobility (Chaparro et al., 2023; Varela et al., 2023). Despite growing recognition of these intersecting inequities, longitudinal comparative evidence on how material hardship accumulates across domains and life stages (Chung & Maguire-Jack, 2026; Thomas, 2022), and how Latino/a/x families fare relative to other racial/ethnic groups remains limited.

Using a racially and ethnically diverse urban birth cohort, this study examines racial/ethnic disparities in material hardship burden across five domains over twenty years, with particular attention to the experiences of Hispanic/Latino families. Specifically, we ask: (1) Do Hispanic/Latino families experience disproportionate hardship compared to other racial families? (2) Are Hispanic/Latino families less likely to access public benefits relative to their hardship exposure? (3) Does upward mobility buffer against cumulative hardship differentially by race/ethnicity?

Methods: We draw data from the Future of Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a longitudinal urban birth cohort (n = 1,658) followed across seven waves from birth to young adulthood (1998–2017). Material hardship was operationalized across five domains (food insecurity, housing instability, difficulty paying bills, utility shutoffs, and unmet medical needs) using wave-specific composite indices from Waves 2 through 7. Race/ethnicity was measured at baseline and classified into four analytic groups, with Hispanic/Latino families as the primary focal group within the full comparative sample. Logistic and Poisson regression models estimated racial/ethnic disparities in hardship exposure and benefit non-receipt, controlling for mean poverty ratio, caregiver age, and child sex. Race/ethnicity by upward mobility interaction terms were tested via likelihood ratio tests to assess moderation effects across domains.

Results: Significant racial/ethnic disparities in hardship burden were observed across the full sample (p <0.001). Hispanic/Latino families exhibited a distinctive and domain-specific hardship profile. Bill hardship was the most elevated domain, with 68.3% of Hispanic/Latino families reporting lifetime exposure (the highest of any racial/ethnic group) while food insecurity (41.1%) and utility shutoff (61.7%) substantially exceeded White family rates (29.1% and 47.3%, respectively). Among hardship-exposed families, Hispanic/Latino families were substantially less likely to have ever received SNAP (73.2%) relative to Black families (84.6%). Critically, logistic regression models predicting public benefit non-receipt revealed that Hispanic/Latino families were significantly more likely to not access TANF than White families (AOR = 1.53, 95% CI [1.02, 2.29], p < 0.05). Upward education and income mobility were associated with reduced hardship exposure in main-effects models; however, likelihood ratio-based interaction tests indicated that mobility's protective function was not race-neutral across hardship domains, with Hispanic/Latino families showing attenuated benefits from mobility in several domains.

Conclusions: Findings reveal a complex pattern of racial/ethnic stratification in material hardship experiences that is not reducible to a simple hierarchy of disadvantage. While Hispanic/Latino families face elevated lifetime hardship risk relative to White families, structural economic conditions account for much of this disparity, underscoring the primacy of poverty as a driver of hardship across all groups.