Solidification of Ethnic Boundaries and Retreat from Hispanic intermarriage in the United States

Description

Abstract:

Prior work on the retreat from intermarriage usually treats Hispanic as a monolithic group, ignoring racial diversity within the Hispanic population. As a result, two questions of fundamental importance to the marital assimilation of Hispanics have remained unanswered: (1) did all Hispanic subgroups, irrespective of their race, experience a retreat from intermarriage? and (2) to what extent did the racial diversification of the Hispanic population contribute to their retreat from intermarriage? To address these questions, I document how the permeability of racial, ethnic, and national boundaries changed during the 1990s. My results underscore the heterogeneity in the marital assimilation of Hispanics. Not all Hispanic subgroups experienced a retreat from intermarriage. Rates of intermarriage with non-Hispanic Whites decreased among Hispanic Whites and Hispanic SORs, but they increased among Hispanic Blacks. Changes in Hispanic men and women’s willingness to marry Hispanic partners of a different race also varied by race. The odds of intermarriage between Hispanic Whites and non-White Hispanics increased during the 1990s, while the odds of intermarriage between Hispanic Blacks and Hispanic SORs decreased during this time. Overall, these findings highlight the importance of considering race when studying the intermarriage behavior of Hispanics.

Speaker’s bio:

Kate H. Choi is a social demographer interested in the causes and　consequences of family formation, namely how crossing social and national boundaries influence family formation and wellbeing. She contributes to this literature by pursuing two lines of scientific inquiry: (1) investigating how institutional opportunities and constraints arising due to international migration shape family formation and (2) examining how crossing ethnoracial, educational, and age boundaries in spousal selection influence the health and wellbeing of individuals and their offspring. Her work has been published in several renowned journals, including Demography, Journal of Marriage and Family, and Social Science and Medicine. She is currently Associate Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Western Ontario.