Quick, name the U.S. metropolitan area with the highest unemployment rate among Hispanics. Need a hint? It’s in the Northeast.

This may surprise many of you because when people think of high Hispanic unemployment, they think of metro areas like Las Vegas and Los Angeles. As Algernon Austin, director of EPI’s Race, Ethnicity, and the Economy program, pointed out earlier this week, this assumption is understandable because those areas have both large Hispanic populations and high levels of Hispanic unemployment.

At 25.2 percent, the Providence, R.I., metropolitan area has the highest Hispanic unemployment rate. Another New England metro area, Hartford, Conn., is second with a Hispanic unemployment rate of 23.5 percent. Both areas also had the highest percentage-point increases in Hispanic unemployment from 2009 to 2010; Hartford went up 7.5 percentage points and Providence 4.6. According to 2010 Census data, Providence is 37th and Hartford 39th in Hispanic population in metropolitan areas.

SEE FULL SNAPSHOT: Metropolitan areas with highest rates of Hispanic unemployment

In order, here’s where the five metro areas with the largest Hispanic populations ranked in unemployment:

• Los Angeles: 9th, 13.4 percent
• New York: 23rd, 11.0 percent
• Miami: 12th, 12.8 percent
• Houston: 36th, 8.9 percent
• Riverside, Calif.: 5th, 18.4 percent

For more on this issue, read Austin’s piece Hispanic unemployment highest in Northeast metropolitan areas. And for a companion paper on black metropolitan unemployment, read High black unemployment widespread among nation’s metropolitan areas.