Jessica Vasquez-Tokos
In 1959 Judge Leon Bazile defended Virginia’s prohibition against interracial marriage by opining, “Almighty God created the races white, black, yellow, malay and red, and he placed them on separate continents. And but for the interference with his arrangement there would be no cause for such marriages. The fact that he separated the races shows he did not intend for the races to mix.”1 Using an essentialist view of race, Judge Bazile convicted the trial court defendants, Mildred Loving, a Black woman, and Richard Loving, a White man, of violating Virginia’s Racial Integrity Act of 1924 designed to prevent interracial relationships.2 This court opinion not only suggests that racial mixing is anathema but in so doing upholds the racial hierarchy—in particular White supremacy—through essentializing race and demanding racial separation. By ruling to uphold the racial order, the orating judge implies a fear over such pairings. In interviewing non-White cross-racial married couples, my study puts the margin at the center.3 By using this vantage point—of centering the periphery4—I argue that the ramifications of non-White romantic partnerships that are founded upon an experience of mutual marginalization are not the production of “a mongrel population and a degraded civilization” but instead generate a critique of racial and gender inequality in the United States.
Patricia Hill Collins argues that being an “outsider within”—someone who is marginal to and oppressed by the larger social structure—allows for a poignant critique of the system.5 In this chapter, the notion of outsiders within comes alive as a lived experience for non-White racially heterogeneous couples.6 The orienting questions for this chapter are threefold: How might being an outsider within motivate cross-racial minority marriage? How do interracial minority couples—who are similar in their marginality but dissimilar in their racial status—experience race? How does race operate within cross-racial families?
This chapter draws from twelve individuals (six heterosexual couples) who represent a portion of a larger project on racial endogamy and exogamy. These married pairs include one US-born Latino (or, if foreign-born, a person who arrived in the United States by age twelve) and a non-Latino racial minority (Asian, Black, or Native American). Of the six Latinos, five are US-born and one is Mexican-born; five are Latina women and one is a Latino man. The non-Latino racial minority side of the pair includes Chinese American (2), Native American, multiracial Black/White (2), and Japanese American. Interviews were conducted in California and Kansas, the intent in the larger project to compare a border state with high racial diversity to an interior state that is predominately non-Hispanic White. Of the six couples, three reside in California, three in Kansas. I recruited participants through Latino-serving organizations, high schools, professional contacts, and snowball sampling where I asked interviewees for referrals. The interviews lasted one to two hours and were conducted at a location chosen by the interviewee. The interviews took a life history approach, beginning with early life, moving through schooling and dating experiences, and culminating in questions about marriage choices, marital life, cultural practices, and child rearing. I used Dedoose, an online qualitative data analysis software program, to assist in the coding process. I engaged in inductive analysis of interview material, reading verbatim interview transcripts and field notes for pertinent themes around issues of race, gender, marriage, and family dynamics.7
Prior scholarship has not shed much light on dual-minority couples, most work to date focusing on Black/White,8 Asian/White,9 and Latino/White couples.10 Intermarriage scholarship tends to ask questions concerning social distance or changing rates of intermarriage over time. This chapter uses cross-racial minority pairings, an overlooked demographic reality, to delve into the reasons behind marriage trends as well as the ramifications of them. The chief reasons my respondents gave for intermarriage with a member of another minority group are a non-White minority-minority connection and women’s desire to escape patriarchy through out-marriage. As far as consequences of cross-minority marriages, sharing a non-White status but belonging to different racial groups opens the possibility of overt race-oriented discussions. Race and culture are discussed in these homes, with both historical and contemporary issues transported into everyday conversations. Most couples were race-conscious and cultivated both an American identity and racial minority pride; those who stressed American identity did so out of recognition of race as a salient social feature. Couples who were parents hoped they were harbingers of a multicultural and multiracial American future, this stance an effort to preserve their culture(s) as well as a critique of rigid racial categories and hegemonic Whiteness.
Dual-minority partnerships are often founded on a non-White connection that facilitates a race-conscious critique of US racial history and race relations. While this minority-minority bond can occur among people who are mixed with Whiteness, this finding was prominent among racial minorities and mixed race individuals without White heritage, non-Whiteness lending itself to a marginalized perspective that craves consensus. Three couples were passionate about the comfort they feel with a marital partner who shares their racial subordination. To understand each other fully, these couples feel they need to share an outsider-within status. Moreover, the way that these pairs draw links between their racially disparate but similarly oppressed backgrounds demonstrates how “racial categorizations constantly evolve, and groups may develop a panethnic consciousness that transgresses ‘official’ designations.”11
Penelope Rio, who is Mexican American and Native American (Ojibwa, otherwise known as Chippewa), and Travis Strong, who is Native American (Lakota), felt cultural commonality because they are both non-White. Speaking from his racially peripheral status, Native American Travis expressed a deep and dear connection with Mexican people, saying, “We are all Brown people,” as he rubbed his index finger along his arm to indicate his tan skin color. He is highly sensitive to the historical oppression, including forced removal, of Native Americans, and this subjugation is the primary reason why he feels a bond with Mexican Americans who were similarly dispossessed of land,12 and nowadays face the threat of deportation.13 Travis grew up off-reservation in Colorado and South Dakota, where Native/Mexican mixed families were part of the racial landscape: “A lot of Lakota families married into Mexican families. A lot of Lakotas have Mexican last names. . . . But they were . . . a big part of the Native community, too. . . . They mingle in like that, marriage-wise.” Travis took cues about the compatibility between Native Americans and Mexican Americans not only from his own observations of marriage patterns, but also from community leaders such as medicine men: “Talking with a lot of the medicine men—the spiritual leaders—we are all the same. We don’t . . . call Mexicans ‘them.’ In our eyes, the Lakota eyes, they are our brothers and sisters, they are no different—they’re Indians too. That’s why a lot of our medicine men treat spiritually the Mexicans now, for healing. . . . So we look at them as the same, there’s no difference.”
One reason for Natives’ acceptance of Mexicans as “brothers and sisters” is historical. “They’re Indians too” harkens back to the historic origins of indigenous oppression at the hands of the Spanish conquering forces of Hernán Cortés in Montezuma’s Aztec empire in the 1530s. First, Aztecs and other tribes in present-day Mexico are indigenous to the Americas, just as Native Americans are to the United States. Second, both Mexicans and Native Americans suffered deterritorialization and diaspora as a result of conquest. Significant parts of Mexico were ceded to the United States due to provisions of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848) that ended the Mexican-American War. This move echoes the forced removal of Native Americans instituted by US government legislation such as the Indian Removal Act of 1830 that was the genesis of the Trail of Tears.14 Conquest and deterritorialization are common themes between Native Americans and people of Mexican descent, making Mexicans “Indians too,” in Travis’s eyes. The shared experience of colonization is central to this cross-racial minority couple’s bond.
Being historically marginalized from the mainstream offers a basis of critique, Travis juxtaposing White culture with non-White ethnic culture: “You don’t get stuck in this everyday rut of ‘dog eat dog world’ if you’ve got culture. You can always activate the culture button and everything will be okay after that.” By culture, Travis means song, dance, and ethnic celebrations. Travis draws a comparison with his White brothers-in-law who do not “share about who they are” and whose “culture seems like to be just basketball.” Judging this lack of culture as “sad,” Travis’s narrative reflects a pattern whereby Mexican Americans and Native Americans discursively valorize minority culture and critique White society in order to reinvest their derogated groups with esteem.15
Penelope Rio agrees with Travis that their mutual marginalization is a bond. She was raised in Horton, Kansas, knowing only the simple fact that she was half Native on her mother’s side. Oppression of Native Americans kept Penelope’s mother ashamed of her Native heritage until she reclaimed it (through Penelope and Travis) at the end of her life. Due to poverty, Penelope’s maternal grandparents sent her mother to a boarding school in South Dakota, retrieving her in the eighth grade when she threatened to commit suicide. Indian boarding schools were established in the United States during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to educate Native American youth according to Euro-American standards. The schools were originally established by Christian missionaries, but the Bureau of Indian Affairs created the assimilation-model schools that over a hundred thousand Native Americans were forced to attend.16 Native American children were immersed in Euro-American culture: they were forbidden to speak their native languages, their traditional dress and haircuts were changed, and their given names were replaced by Anglophone names. Boarding schools were a heavy-handed approach to Anglo-conformity, forcing abandonment of Native American identity.17 Penelope’s Mexican American father also suffered racism: despite being a high school “big basketball stud,” he was forced to “stay in the boiler room” at state championships because “the hotel . . . wouldn’t allow him a room.”
For those minorities sensitive to their history of oppression, finding another minority partner with whom they share a racialized affinity was a clear preference. Trinity and Rodrigo Valencia gravitated toward one another because racial subordination (and class disadvantage) played a large role in their lives and they needed to share this foundation in order to feel intimately understood. Trinity Valencia, a biracial Black/White woman, says relative to her dating history, “I was always attracted to men of color—even though I was surrounded by White men. . . . My choices had always been . . . men of color.” I asked, “What draws you to them?” Trinity links her experience of being a racial outsider to her preference for men of color: “Just feeling like [men of color] would understand what it’s like to be an ‘other.’ Not always feeling comfortable in the White culture. . . . Yeah, shared experience and someone who understands being an ‘other.’” The experience of being a racial “other” is so fundamental that it was essential to share this experience with a loved one.
Rodrigo Valencia, Trinity’s Mexican American husband, preferred the company of Mexican Americans or Blacks because of their “life experience” similarities. Rodrigo and Trinity met working for a college preparatory program that serves high school students from low-income families and families in which neither parent holds a bachelor’s degree. Even their place of meeting, a summer job helping disadvantaged students gain admission to and succeed in college, reveals the extent to which they care about racial and class inequality. Rodrigo explains his desire for a racial minority life partner: “The people I was interested in . . . [were] either Mexican American/Hispanic or . . . Black. . . . [When I met Trinity] I thought, ‘She’s biracial . . . [we] have similarities in . . . life experiences.’” “Life experiences” captures both race- and class-related subordination. For my respondents, it was not critical to mirror one another’s racial background in order to be on the racial periphery together and share that marginal perspective.
In cross-minority pairs, racial subordination was a unifying transcendent theme. In “half and half” pairs that are biracial and share Whiteness, the experience of non-Whiteness overriding Whiteness facilitated bonding. Caroline and Bryce Wu are both half Caucasian, yet despite having claims to Whiteness, they feel marginal to mainstream US society. Even calling themselves “half and half” suggests that they do not feel accepted by the US public, otherwise their mixed race status would go unmentioned.18 This illustrates a similarity among mixed race individuals who do and do not include Whiteness: everyday racialization that telegraphs a subordinated status can render inconsequential a technical entitlement to Whiteness.
Caroline Wu is a thirty-one-year-old woman who was born to an Ecuadorian mother and a White father. Like Penelope Rio and Travis Strong, Caroline feels a comfort in discomfort, taking solace that she and her husband Bryce are mixed race. She describes her first reaction to her half White, half Chinese husband: “[What] I did like about him right away . . . right off the bat . . . was that he was half just like me. . . . I really latched onto that [as] something that we had in common. . . . We have this one major thing in common, which is growing up . . . with one foot in each culture in Kansas.” The experience of being “half” was so central to Caroline’s life experience that she instantly felt a visceral connection to Bryce. They share an experience of not fitting into neatly bounded racial categories or cultures.
Dual-minority couples make creative connections with one another, as Travis Strong did by referring to himself and his wife as phenotypically Brown people. Caroline made similar inventive links: “My cousins say he looks more Latin than I do. . . . [Laughter.] It’s the Black hair. . . . Besides the obvious, like physical characteristics, there’s the food . . . eating things that aren’t . . . part of the regular day to day American diet . . . things that are steamed or . . . wrapped. . . . Often we joke . . . that Chinese and Ecuadorian people really are the same race. [Laughter.]” Understandings of racial identity evolve, as we see among cross-racial minority respondents who perceive and assert similarity where others would not. Anthony Ocampo observes this with Filipinos who see greater cultural affinity with Latinos than Asians based on a history of Spanish conquest: “despite linguistic, socio-economic and cultural differences, ethnic groups develop panethnic consciousness . . . emphasizing cultural commonalities or highlighting shared racial experiences.”19 This process of identifying and underscoring commonality that underlies apparent differences reveals mechanisms behind panethnicity and cross-racial coalitions.
Bryce, too, feels comfort with a spouse who shares his half White and half minority experience. He feels a bond with Caroline because she struggled with issues of race and acceptance as he did: “[Caroline’s] mom . . . spoke Spanish, she was from Ecuador . . . and her dad was [from] Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas. [That] kind of mix . . . I think really . . . was intriguing for me. It’s like, ‘oh, here is someone who . . . went through some of the same self-realization that I went through, but not the same culture.’ . . . There were common experiences with a different twist. . . . She understood going to family reunions and having all the older generation speaking . . . Spanish. I would go and they’d all be speaking Chinese.” Being mixed race with immigrant ancestors is qualitatively different from being monoracial with native-born forbearers, and sharing this experience with a spouse is a source of connection. Many interracial minority couples echoed Bryce’s comment that “support and understanding [comes from] having gone through some of the same things.” While outsider-within experiences can be discomforting, sharing that experience is grounds for bonding.
The dual-minority marriages also had a gendered aspect to them. The Latinas I interviewed who had domineering fathers generalized that quality to all Latino men and excluded Latino men from their prospective long-term romantic partners. This moratorium on Latino men freezes masculinity in the image of one’s father and forecloses the opportunity to become familiar with men who enact different forms of masculinity.20 Latinas who out-married with non-Latino, non-White men did so for two chief purposes: to find a heterosexual partner whose gender ideology was more egalitarian and to avoid racial othering they associated with Whites.
Penelope was unhappy with her natal family’s patriarchal structure and the gendered division of labor: “I have three brothers: they didn’t have to do any of the work hardly. The girls all took care of all the other kids, did all the laundry, helped in the kitchen, and I just didn’t think that was very fair. . . . I really rebelled against that thinking.” Part of Penelope’s rebellion was to reject Latino men as potential marital partners. She dated men from various backgrounds, yet she “never dated a Mexican man” because she “just didn’t want it,” referring to the male authority she associated with her father. “It was by choice,” a racialized affinity, that she preferred to associate with Native Americans and learn more about her Native heritage. Penelope chose to “put [herself] in that . . . scene,” including attending powwows, which led to meeting her husband. Penelope escaped the brand of masculinity she resisted in her youth through both shifting away from Latino culture and toward Native culture: “I . . . turned off the Mexican side and the macho-ism. . . . I just feel a lot more comfortable in the Native culture. . . . I just feel better, identifying and raising my family as Native.” Her reaction to generalize her father’s dominance to his entire ethnic group has intergenerational consequences, as she raises her daughter not as Mexican American, a defamed category in her mind due to gender inequality, but as Native American.
Inez Korteweg, a Mexican immigrant, also preferred an out-group member, hoping to find a partner who was not patriarchal and abusive like her father. Inez explained why she married outside of the Latino category: “I married out of my culture . . . because I didn’t feel that I could work out with someone born [in Mexico] or have the mentality of a [Mexican] man. I don’t fit that traditional role. My dad always said I needed to learn to cook and clean . . . so that my husband would be happy with me. I hated it. . . . I didn’t want to be my mom. . . . I didn’t want to be submissive. I didn’t want to be taken advantage of. I wanted to have a voice.” Critical of both her parents, Inez resisted her father’s “mentality” and the “traditional role” he socialized her to fulfill and her mother’s position as “submissive.” Not wanting to turn into her mother—“taken advantage of” and without a “voice”—meant avoiding a man like her father who enforced a narrow definition of femininity. Inez’s father “was very abusive emotionally, physically, psychologically,” getting “really upset” and “smacking her mother if she neglected to put an appropriate utensil on the table.” Inez summarized, “I guess you call it machismo. . . . I didn’t want that disrespect.”
As a stay-at-home mother, Inez stressed that this was her “choice,” her husband Darnell’s egalitarian gender ideology allaying her concerns about being controlled by him. Darnell conveyed his gender egalitarian perspective: “I’m not a Machista [macho man]. . . . I wash dishes and . . . I’ll carry my wife’s purse. . . . I don’t see it as a male role or a female role. I’m not raising my boys to think that cutting the lawn is a male thing and washing the dishes is a female thing. . . . It’s not like I’m going to trump her because I’m the man.” Darnell and Inez cocreate an emotionally stable and gender egalitarian household that is in stark contrast to Inez’s natal family. Yet, as prominent as gender ideologies are in motivating Inez and Darnell’s partnership, race is not entirely absent. Rejecting racial descriptors, they both stress they are “human.” Leveraging rhetoric of humanity, this couple tries to dislocate the racial classification system. Significantly, this move comes from non-White (and immigrant, in Inez’s case) people who, despite their focus on humanity, recognize their disadvantage in the racial order. It is their very awareness of racial (and immigrant status) inequality that catalyzes their discourse of humanity, this race-minimizing rhetoric a strategy for inclusion in American identity.21
Being on the non-White side of the White/non-White divide, minority respondents did not experience their race as the taken-for-granted standard as Whites typically do.22 Not being situated at the top of the social hierarchy affords a type of situated knowledge derived from a particular vantage point.23 For intermarried minority men and women, connection on racial minority grounds is important. For Latina women previously subjugated or abused by Latino fathers, avoiding Latino men influenced their marriage decision. Yet, why not marry White men? For the Latinas in this chapter, Whites lacked a perspective they valued: that of a minority man who comprehends the power of race. In this formulation, the Latina women critiqued both Latino men for aggression and White men for lacking a perspective on race and power. Marriage with a non-Latino minority man is the answer, provided that he is also nonviolent and race-conscious. Intermarried minority men and women valued their non-White commonality and the awareness of race it entailed, while women also sought non-overbearing men.
Intermarried minority pairs view their relationships as racial havens. Within these relationships where both partners had experienced racial marginality from society at large, couples can grieve racial wounds, rail against racial inequities, and ponder potential racial futures. As these pairs coconstruct a home life together, they create a racial and cultural environment that they perceive to be safe, shared, and liberatory.
While the mainstream is remade by immigration,24 the extent to which minorities feel included in the mainstream is debatable. Of the twelve people represented in this chapter, six felt that they were peripheral to mainstream society, four said they fit within mainstream society, and two gave inexact answers.
All six people (50 percent of respondents) who said they were peripheral to mainstream society were immigrants to the United States, children of immigrants, or Native Americans. All were very familiar with their family’s immigrant narrative or their oppressed group history. Five of the six respondents were from Kansas, and one was from California. Being a racial minority in a dual-minority relationship has a different social meaning in predominately White Kansas than in racially heterogeneous California. People perceive themselves to be on the periphery of mainstream society if immigration is a generationally recent memory and if they reside in a predominately White social context. As a consequence of feeling like an outsider, four of these six people used their occupations related to racial diversity to offer social critique and remedy. Turning to the private realm, those who felt peripheral preferred to marry a fellow minority, and they anticipated that racial marginality would be a basis for bonding.
Four intermarried interviewees (one-third of respondents) said that they fit comfortably within mainstream society, whatever they envisioned that term to mean. Two (both Asian American men) of the four who said they fit mainstream society cited their middle- or upper-class status to justify their answer. Leveraging both birthright and socioeconomic status, Russ Cheng remarked, “I’d say that we’re Americans. Besides both born here, both of us worked and are retired, have a good retirement plan. That’s what mainstream America is.” Socioeconomic status is used here to compensate for a racial minority status and legitimate why he and his wife belong to mainstream society.
All four people who felt they were part of mainstream society lived in California. Living in a racially diverse environment like Los Angeles County normalizes both multiraciality and interracial romantic relationships. Two respondents called on multiraciality to justify their sense of belonging. Russ Cheng qualifies his statement of fitting in by saying that he fits in “multiethnic environments.” Darnell Korteweg says that as mixed race and intermarried he is a harbinger of a multiracial society: “I’m . . . what the world is becoming.” For both of these men who say they are part of mainstream US society, their vision of “mainstream” is specifically multiracial, not Anglo-dominant. Their local heterogeneous environment of Los Angeles County bolsters their claims of a racially mixed society. All four of the non-White respondents who do not feel outside of mainstream US society use justifications—either multiracial society as a the new norm or high class status—to qualify their belonging to mainstream society.
Oppression is remembered and discussed frequently among cross-racial minority pairs. Not only does conversation concerning historical eras of racial injustice produce a bond among interracial minority couples, it also lays the groundwork to connect past oppression to contemporary inequality. In cross-minority pairs we see an evaluative process of comparative subordination wherein individuals identify parallels with other non-White groups, underscoring how the power of race transcends the historical moment.
History was alive in the present in cross-minority couples due to their overt discussion of historical racial oppression. Historical events and power differentials informed interracial minority couples’ views on contemporary racial issues. Among couples with different racial backgrounds, group histories of race-based domination are a connective theme. Cross-racial minority couples, including half Whites, are outsiders within who possess two different racial minority perspectives, and they cast a bright light on how the nation has systematically used race as a tool to privilege some and oppress others.
Travis Strong, who works in building maintenance at Haskell Indian Nations University in Lawrence, Kansas, offers a striking example of how history is alive in the present. Operating since 1884 and originally a residential boarding school for American Indian children, Haskell attracts students from various tribal nations in the United States. Travis illustrates how Native experience with colonialism at the hands of the US federal government is alive in, and casts a pall on, the present day:
There was a person that came to Haskell, a White guy. He had something in a box and he said, “I’m lost, can you direct me to somebody? I need to give these to somebody.” Well, what is it? . . . He unveils it. He goes, “My grandfather gave me these years ago. He used to use these. . . .” It turned out to be a little kids’ handcuffs. Handcuffs. His grandfather would gather all these Indian kids and bring them to boarding schools. Forcefully. It just tore you apart because they were made for little wrists, they were scaled down. He said he couldn’t live with those handcuffs no more. . . . Man, we freaked out. We had to have [cleansing] ceremonies. It just tore everybody up. . . . It’s a good reminder, though, of what went on.
Haskell began as a boarding school for Native Americans where they were forcibly taken to undergo cultural stripping and retraining in the name of “Americanization.” A harsh brand of Anglo-conformity assimilation, Americanization programs were not unique to Native peoples but also targeted other immigrant groups such as Latinos and Asians.25
Travis continues, “Haskell is still Haskell from years ago. It is very much alive. What I mean by that is the past still makes its presence.” He cited a recent example of an apparition caught on camera that the Cultural Center director confirmed wore the dress and haircut of the boarding school days. The past being very much alive is seen in Haskell’s concerted effort to preserve history, such as maintaining a graveyard on Haskell land and nearby wetlands and safeguarding historical records at the Cultural Center. For his part, Travis participates in the restoration of racial memory through race-conscious conversations with his family and his intentional transmission of Native culture.26
Travis sees the similarities between the Native and Mexican group histories as a reason for interracial coalition. His concluding remark reemphasizes interracial connections: “We consider the Mexicans as our brothers and sisters now. . . . A lot of boundaries went down: we need each other as allies. This is our Mexican and Native lands, you know. . . . We are coming back as Brown people.” Using the term “Brown people,” which refers more to skin color than political movements (which were two distinct movements, Brown Power and Red Power, during the civil rights era) rhetorically unifies Natives and Mexicans. By highlighting their similar dispossessed histories, their non-White phenotype, and other issues such as “violence, drug runs, land disputes, water rights . . . the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots,’” Travis enumerates the reasons to act as a coalition. Travis tacitly invokes the notion of linked fate,27 a concept that refers to political action whereby group interests are seen as a proxy for self-interest. Multiple subordinated groups identifying as “Brown” due to their interconnections would be a powerful way to combat race-based inequality. At minimum, this interracial solidarity is a solid foundation for his marriage.
Trinity Valencia’s ruminations on her intersectional oppression as a woman of color are also laced with history. When I asked about her experience as a woman of color, Trinity drew out the particular situation of Black women in America: “This entire nation was built on the backs of Black women. . . . Black women go through all this struggle and they still provide for their families and they’re still this strong rock. . . . A lot of time people count me out because I am a woman of color. . . . I . . . really identify with the Maya Angelou poem ‘Still I Rise.’ . . . Sometimes when I’m feeling . . . marginalized or invisible, I recognize that . . . people before me have played a strong role in creating the country and getting us where we are today.” Trinity has a sharply gendered racial consciousness, the long history of racial and gender inequality very real to her. Her narrative ushers history into the present moment, referring to Black women’s “struggle” in slavery and yet their persistence as “strong rocks.” Moving to the contemporary moment, Trinity says she is “counted out” as a minority woman, a modern slave of a gender and race hierarchy in which Black women are at the bottom. As a spokesperson for multiculturalism in her personal and professional life—she works in a multicultural office in higher education—Trinity credits historical figures who worked for equality. History is one way Trinity gauges the progress that has been made and the work still to be done. As we saw, Trinity selected her life partner based on their similarity of racialized and class-disadvantaged position. This motivation for marriage to a non-White is directly related to the consequence of cross-minority intermarriage: racist histories are alive in the present and intersecting oppressions are topics of concern.
Revivification of non-White culture is a critical response to historical racial oppression and contemporary racial marginalization. By bringing to the fore positive aspects of racial minority culture, these couples reposition themselves from the margin to the center. Caroline and Bryce Wu are teaching their five-year-old daughter English, Spanish, and Chinese and acquiring Chinese culture for their daughter’s benefit: “We had our first Chinese New Year party last year. . . . We [had] . . . some people over and [had] special foods.” The birth of their daughter ignited Bryce’s yearning to preserve his cultural roots. Bryce described being raised with a “behemoth of culture” and is trying to re-create that for his daughter: “I grew up . . . knowing . . . there was this . . . behemoth . . . of support and . . . culture and history and tradition. . . . It’s one of the reasons why we really want . . . to pursue the whole trilingual language thing.” A consequence of child rearing is the revivification of culture among adults as they acquire cultural knowledge to pass on to their children. Bryce and Caroline are learning Chinese to support their daughter’s ability to communicate with Chinese speakers, a move that honors global linguistic and cultural diversity.
We typically think of teaching and learning running across channels within the same generation (between friends, peers, or spouses) or from older to younger generations (from parents to children). However, knowledge can also move from younger to older generations.28 While people often intentionally pass cultural knowledge to their children, they can also act as conduits for their parents. This is a powerful, if unintended, consequence of marriage. In the Strong-Rio family, recall that Penelope’s Native American mother was taught by widespread anti-Indian policies that Native American was a shameful status. Through Penelope and Travis, Penelope’s mother revived a positive sense of her Native heritage, an illustration of what families are doing to repair history in the present moment. In this example, we see how cultural transmission can work its way up the generations from younger to older. Recall that Penelope grew up with a dearth of Native culture due to her mother’s aggrieved experience as a Native American during a time of high racial discrimination. Travis played an essential role in supplying both Penelope and her mother with information about their Native American history and culture. Penelope chokes up as she tells the story of how Travis introduced a positive image of Native American life to her mother:
One of our first social events [as a couple] with the family was . . . my great niece’s . . . first birthday party. Travis is a flute player, so . . . he took his flute out and played her a song. . . . My mom cried and said, “when I die, I want you to play at the funeral. . . .” She really clung on to Travis. And he brought so much to my mom during her last few years. . . . [Crying.] I think he’s kind of woken up everybody in my family about it’s okay to know things about your Native side and to celebrate it. . . . Right after that song he played, she was diagnosed with cancer, so she only lived two more years.
Near the end of her life, Penelope’s mother received positive Native American cultural messages and information that assuaged her race-related wounds. In the Strong-Rio family, Travis, as a husband, father, and son-in-law, was a vital cultural resource who passed decolonized cultural knowledge and healing to all three generations.
Not everyone wants to communicate culture to relatives. Due to concerns about male domination and class status achievement, the Nakamura and Korteweg families did not transmit culture to their children beyond a few foreign-language words. The emphasis in these families is on upward mobility and achievement of an unqualified American identity. Even as families deemphasize race, society nevertheless keeps racial issues alive. Inez cited Arizona SB 1070, a proposition aimed to allow police to racially profile Latinos to check authorization status, as a current example.
The Kortewegs simultaneously want to fit in and yet challenge the boundaries of racial categories. Because Darnell thinks that race should not matter, he resists using racial labels, choosing “none” or “all” racial categories on official forms. When I asked how he racially identifies, he deferred by saying, “my ethnic background is whatever you say I am because it changes even in that our definition socially changed.” He eventually answered using a hyphenated amalgam of his genealogy: Euro-Afro-Native-Asian-American. He was mindful of race when naming his son, citing his son as an example of multiracialism. Darnell suggests that his son is a racial mélange and harkens to the idea of a “cosmic race” whereby future racial admixtures combine admirable qualities of each contributing race.29 Through naming choices, Darnell and Inez destabilize assumptions and meanings attached to racial categories:30 “My oldest son’s name is Enrique. . . . And his middle name is Alejandro. Then his last name is Korteweg. That’s the part that I love. So his name is Enrique Alejandro, which is a beautiful Spanish sounding name, then Korteweg. I love that because it’s like, ‘Your name is Enrique Korteweg?’ . . . His name represents a lot of what I stand for. It should throw you for a curve. If you think you know who he is because his name is Enrique, that’s sad.” Wanting to “throw you for a curve,” Darnell, as a large, dark-skinned man and high school administrator in a low-income area of Los Angeles, is aware of racial disparities and uses his son’s name to trouble assumptions about identity. Naming is an important cultural decision that signifies ethnic identity,31 and, in this case, it is a political gesture toward toppling assumptions of monoracial families and racist assumptions.32 Even as Inez encouraged Americanness (“it’s important that you learn the [American] culture and you support your new country”) and Darnell rejected racial categories, these strategies acknowledge that racial status and nationality filter people into either the center or the margins of the US national imaginary.
This chapter began with questions about whether racial minority status promotes dual-minority pairings and how race operates within those relationships. Most of my respondents, as outsiders within, have a strong racial consciousness and consider racialized affinity a desirable basis for romance, which, in turn, directs them toward a minority from another racial group. Being a racial minority in a racialized society may also be a catalyst for sociopolitical critique. Gender enters the equation in that Latinas with domineering fathers did not want to replicate that dynamic in their marital life. They rejected Latinos and also spurned White men whom they viewed as too racially different in favor of non-Latino minorities with a shared position of racial subordination. These race- and gender-sensitive Latinas experienced a Goldilocks moment where they saw Latino men as too macho, White men as too dissimilar, but other men of color as just right. This is not only a critique of Latino men but also a critique of White men as inappropriate partners. These Latina women expressed their strong concern over gender subordination and their preference for a minority-minority connection in their selection of a spouse.
Non-White cross-minority marriages are founded in part on experiences of racial subordination. Romantic racialized affinity is developed out of a common experience of marginality on the US racial scene. This minority-minority connection is founded on experiences with historical or contemporary oppression, which fosters emotional attachment and allows race-conscious partners to feel that they are understood in fundamentally important ways. The distinction that these cross-minority couples make in their marital lives centers on Whiteness versus non-Whiteness. These couples undergo a process of comparative subordination wherein they identify correspondences between their own racial group and another non-White group. This recognition underscores a dominant/subordinate power dynamic between Whites and non-Whites. These couples’ non-White racial status influences their life experiences, and in order to be empathic with—and understood by—a mate, they pivot toward other non-Whites. Due to experiencing similar structures of discrimination and racial meanings within families and communities, these minorities prefer to marry other people of color. Most intermarried minority couples feel excluded from mainstream society and critique it from their racially marginal position. Yet those who assert they are part of the mainstream reveal split tendencies: those who justify their inclusion by virtue of their middle class status yield to conventional notions of the mainstream, while others who cite their racially diverse local environment expand the definition of mainstream.
These interracial minority relationships based on racialized affinity offer support, solace, and a like-minded perspective on race and are a home base for cross-racial coalitions. These cross-minority couples’ marriage choices, cultural practices, and racial awareness all demonstrate that they are sensitive to their positions in intersecting axes of domination and conscientiously build their families as havens from racial and gender imbalances of power. As a retort to the opening vignette justifying bans on interracial marriage, these families demonstrate the very opposite of a “degraded civilization”—they point out that cross-racial intimacies offer insight into civilization. Yet the judge’s fears about racial mixing destabilizing White supremacy may be well founded as these families with vibrant racial memories critique systemic racial inequalities.
1. Randall Kennedy, Interracial Intimacies: Sex, Marriage, Identity, and Adoption (New York: Pantheon, 2003), 20.
2. In Loving v. Virginia (1967), the Supreme Court later ruled antimiscegenation laws unconstitutional.
3. Kevin J. Mumford, Interzones: Black/White Sex Districts in Chicago and New York in the Early Twentieth Century (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997), xii.
4. Renato Rosaldo, Culture and Truth: The Remaking of Social Analysis (Boston: Beacon Press, 1993).
5. Patricia Hill Collins, “Learning from the Outsider Within,” Social Problems 33.6 (1986): 14–32.
6. While there is debate as to whether Latinos constitute a racial or ethnic group, I defer to my respondents’ understandings of their identities and therefore refer to Latinos as “non-White.”
7. Barney G. Glaser and Anselm L. Strauss, The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research (Hawthorne, NY: Aldine de Gruyter, 1967); Kathy Charmaz and Richard G. Mitchell, “Grounded Theory in Ethnography,” in Handbook of Ethnography, ed. Paul Atkinson et al. (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 2001), 160–174.
8. Erica Chito Childs, Navigating Interracial Borders: Black-White Couples and Their Social Worlds (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005); Heather M. Dalmage, Tripping on the Color Line: Black-White Multiracial Families in a Racially Divided World (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2000); Rachel F. Moran, Interracial Intimacy: The Regulation of Race and Romance (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001); Maria P. P. Root, Love’s Revolution: Interracial Marriage (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2001); Michael J. Rosenfeld and Byung-Soo Kim, “The Independence of Young Adults and the Rise of Interracial and Same-Sex Unions,” American Sociological Review 70.4 (2005): 541–562; Werner Sollors, Interracialism: Black-White Intermarriage in American History, Literature, and Law (New York: Oxford University Press, 2000); Paul Spickard, Mixed Blood: Intermarriage and Ethnic Identity in Twentieth-Century America (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1989).
9. Kelly H. Chong, “Relevance of Race: Children and the Shifting Engagement with Racial/Ethnic Identity among Second-Generation Interracially Married Asian Americans,” Journal of Asian American Studies 16.2 (2013): 189–221; Jiannbin Lee Shiao and Mia H. Tuan, “‘Some Asian Men Are Attractive to Me, but for a Husband . . .’: Korean Adoptees and the Salience of Race in Romance,” Du Bois Review 5.2 (2008): 259–285; Danielle Antoinette Hidalgo and Carl L. Bankston, “Blurring Racial and Ethnic Boundaries in Asian American Families: Asian American Family Patterns, 1980–2005,” Journal of Family Issues 31.3 (2010): 280–300; Rosalind Chou, Kristen Lee, and Simon Ho, “Love Is (Color)blind: Asian Americans and White Institutional Space at the Elite University,” Sociology of Race and Ethnicity 1.2 (2015): 302–316; Kumiko Nemoto, Racing Romance: Love, Power, and Desire among Asian American/White Couples (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2009); Jennifer Lee and Frank D. Bean, The Diversity Paradox: Immigration and the Color Line in Twenty-First Century America (New York: Russell Sage Foundation, 2010).
10. Tomás R. Jiménez, “Negotiating Ethnic Boundaries: Multiethnic Mexican Americans and Ethnic Identity in the United States,” Ethnicities 4.1 (2004): 75–97; Sharon Lee and Barry Edmonston, “Hispanic Intermarriage, Identification, and U.S. Latino Population Change,” Social Science Quarterly 87.5 (2006): 1263–1279; Edward Murguia, Chicano Intermarriage: A Theoretical and Empirical Study (San Antonio, TX: Trinity University Press, 1982); Zhenchao Qian and José A. Cobas, “Latinos’ Mate Selection: National Origin, Racial, and Nativity Differences,” Social Science Research 33.2 (2004): 225–247; Jessica M. Vasquez, Mexican Americans across Generations: Immigrant Families, Racial Realities (New York: New York University Press, 2011).
11. Anthony C. Ocampo, “Are Second-Generation Filipinos ‘Becoming’ Asian American or Latino? Historical Colonialism, Culture and Panethnicity,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 37.3 (2014): 426.
12. Rodolfo Acuña, Occupied America: A History of Chicanos, 7th ed. (New York: Longman, 2011); Juan Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (New York: Viking, 2000).
13. Tanya Maria Golash-Boza and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo, “Latino Immigrant Men and the Deportation Crisis: A Gendered Racial Removal Program,” Latino Studies 11.3 (2013): 271–292; Cecilia Menjívar and Leisy J. Abrego, “Legal Violence: Immigration Law and the Lives of Central American Immigrants,” American Journal of Sociology 117.5 (2012): 1380–1421; Leo R. Chavez, The Latino Threat: Constructing Immigrants, Citizens, and the Nation (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2008); Nicholas De Genova, Working the Boundaries: Race, Space, and “Illegality” in Mexican Chicago (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005).
14. Christopher Wetzel, Gathering the Potawatomi Nation: Revitalization and Identity (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2015).
15. Jessica M. Vasquez and Christopher Wetzel, “Tradition and the Invention of Racial Selves: Symbolic Boundaries, Collective Authenticity, and Contemporary Struggles for Racial Equality,” Ethnic and Racial Studies 32.9 (2009): 1557–1575.
16. David Wallace Adams, Education for Extinction: The American Indian Boarding School Experience, 1875–1928 (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1995).
17. Brenda J. Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000); K. Tsianina Lomawaima, They Called It Prairie Light: The Story of Chilocco Indian School (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995).
18. Alejandro Portes and Rubén G. Rumbaut, Legacies: The Story of the Immigrant Second Generation (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001); Tanya Golash-Boza, “Dropping the Hyphen? Becoming Latino(a)-American through Racialized Assimilation,” Social Forces 85.1 (2006): 27–56.
19. Ocampo, “Are Second-Generation Filipinos ‘Becoming’ Asian American or Latino?,” 441.
20. Jessica M. Vasquez, “Gender across Family Generations: Change in Mexican American Masculinities and Femininities,” Identities 21.5 (2014): 532–550.
21. Julie A. Dowling, Mexican Americans and the Question of Race (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2014), 125.
22. Ruth Frankenberg, White Women, Race Matters: The Social Construction of Whiteness (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993). Even if interviewees were half White biologically, their non-White heritage carried significant social weight.
23. Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective,” Feminist Studies 14.3 (1988): 575–599.
24. Richard D. Alba and Victor Nee, Remaking the American Mainstream: Assimilation and Contemporary Immigration (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).
25. Tomás Almaguer, Racial Fault Lines: The Historical Origins of White Supremacy in California (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994); Gonzalez, Harvest of Empire; George J. Sanchez, Becoming Mexican American: Ethnicity, Culture, and Identity in Chicano Los Angeles, 1900–1945 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993).
26. Wetzel, Gathering the Potawatomi Nation.
27. Michael C. Dawson, Behind the Mule: Race and Class in African-American Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1994).
28. Vasquez, Mexican Americans across Generations.
29. José Vasconcelos, The Cosmic Race/La Raza Cósmica, trans. Didier T. Jaén (1979; repr., Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997).
30. Michael Omi and Howard Winant, Racial Formation in the United States: From the 1960s to the 1990s, 2nd ed. (New York: Routledge, 1994).
31. Christina Sue and Edward Telles, “Assimilation and Gender in Naming,” American Journal of Sociology 112.5 (2007): 1383.
32. Childs, Navigating Interracial Borders.