Barrio

In the modern Spanish language, it is generally defined as each area of a city delimited by functional (e.g. residential, commercial, industrial, etc.

The expression barrio cerrado (translated "closed neighborhood") is used to describe small upper-class residential settlements planned with an exclusive criterion and often physically enclosed in walls, that is, a kind of gated community.

A 1974 decree replaced the word barrio with barangay, the basic administrative unit of government, possessing an average population of 2,500 people.

[8] It may or may not be further subdivided into sectors, communities, urbanizaciones, or a combination of these, but such further subdivisions, though popular and common, are unofficial[9] In the mainland United States, the term barrio is used to refer to inner-city areas overwhelmingly inhabited by first-generation Spanish-speaking immigrant families who have not been assimilated into the mainstream American culture.

Some examples of this include Spanish Harlem in New York City, East L.A. in Los Angeles; and Segundo Barrio in Houston.

[citation needed] Over the centuries, selectness in the Spanish Empire evolved as a mosaic of the various barrios, surrounding the central administrative areas.

The general urban pattern was one where the old central plaza was surrounded by an intermediate ring of barrios and emerging suburban areas linking the city to the hinterland.

This practice of peripheral land expansion laid the groundwork for later suburbanization by immigrants from outside the region and by real estate agents.

[11] At the edge of Hispanic American colonial cities there were places where work, trade, social interaction and symbolic spiritual life occurred.

In Mexico and in other Latin American countries with strong heritages of colonial centers, the concept of barrio no longer contains the social, cultural and functional attributes of the past.