Increasing Spanish fluency in the United States likely shapes ethnoracial group boundaries and inequality. We study a key site for group boundary negotiations—the housing market—where Spanish usage may represent a key source of information exchange between landlords and prospective renters. Specifically, we examine the use of Spanish in advertisements for online rental housing and its effect on White, Black, and Latinx Americans’ residential preferences. Using a corpus of millions of Craigslist rental listings, we show that Spanish listings are concentrated in majority-Latinx neighborhoods with greater proportions of immigrant and Spanish-speaking residents. Furthermore, units that are advertised in Spanish tend be lower priced relative to non-Spanish ads in the same neighborhood. We then use a survey experiment to demonstrate that Spanish usage decreases White, Black, and non-Spanish-speaking Latinx Americans’ interest in a housing unit and surrounding neighborhood, whereas Spanish-speaking Latinx respondents are less affected. We discuss these findings in light of past work on neighborhood demographic preferences, segregation, and recent theorizing on within-category inequality.

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在美国，西班牙语流利程度的提高可能会影响种族群体的界限和不平等。我们研究了群体边界谈判的一个关键场所——房地产市场——其中西班牙语的使用可能代表了房东和潜在租户之间信息交换的关键来源。具体来说，我们研究了在线租赁住房广告中西班牙语的使用及其对白人、黑人和拉丁裔美国人居住偏好的影响。通过使用包含数百万个 Craigslist 租赁房源的语料库，我们发现西班牙房源集中在以拉丁裔为主的社区，其中移民和西班牙语居民的比例较高。此外，与同一社区的非西班牙语广告相比，用西班牙语做广告的单位价格往往较低。然后，我们通过一项调查实验来证明，西班牙语的使用降低了白人、黑人和非西班牙语拉丁裔美国人对住房单元及其周边社区的兴趣，而讲西班牙语的拉丁裔受访者受到的影响较小。我们根据过去关于社区人口偏好、种族隔离的研究以及最近关于类别内不平等的理论来讨论这些发现。

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