Latino immigrants often hold negative views of African-Americans, which they most likely brought with them from their more-segregated Latin American countries, a new Duke University study shows.

The study also found that sharing neighborhoods with Blacks reinforced Latino’s negatives views, and reinforces their feelings that they have “more in common with Whites” — although Whites did not feel the same connection towards the Latinos.

“We were actually quite depressed by what we found. The presence of these attitudes doesn’t augur well for relations between these two groups,” says Dr. Paula D. McClain, a professor of political science at Duke University, who led the study along with nine graduate students.

The study, “Racial Distancing in a Southern City: Latino Immigrants’ Views of Black Americans,” is based on a 2003 survey of 500 Hispanic, Black and White residents in Durham, N.C., a city with one of the fastest-growing Hispanic population.

This study reiterated a similar conclusion reached a decade earlier out of Houston, which found that U.S.-born and foreign-born Latinos expressed a more negative view of African-Americans than Blacks expressed of Latinos. In both studies, it’s interesting to note, Blacks did not reciprocate the negative feelings.

However, Duke’s study found that the more educated the Hispanic respondent, and the more social contact they had with Blacks, the less likely they were to harbor negative stereotypes.

“It was interesting that the greater social contact with Blacks, the less they had negative stereotypes,” says Rob Brown, assistant dean of students for Emory College. “I think that’s a pivotal variable, especially for Latino immigrants who are learning English and who have not had much contact with Blacks, who are unfortunately influenced by the American lens and vocabulary of race and what White America has constructed in terms of stereotypes of Backs.”

McClain focused her study on the South because Latinos have only appeared in significant numbers there in the past 10-15 years. Recent and limited research suggests that migration has been encouraged by the 1994 North Atlantic Free Trade Agreement, global economy and an expanding market for unskilled, low-wage workers.