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For years, America’s growing and mobile Latino population helped transform cities such as Atlanta and Las Vegas as well as many smaller communities. But the deep recession slowed this great dispersion, a new analysis shows, raising economic and political implications.

Between 2000 and 2010, the nation’s Latino population jumped 43 percent to 50.5 million, growing especially fast throughout the South and in smaller metropolitan areas in the Midwest and Northeast. The Latino populations more than tripled in such places as Palm Coast, Fla.; Knoxville, Tenn.; and Wausau, Wis. Job opportunities and an influx of new immigrants from Mexico and Latin America helped drive the boom.

But with the economic downturn that began in 2007, the meltdown of the housing market and a slowdown of new foreign arrivals, many of these same communities have seen the Latino growth rates flatten out. READ MORE