Intermarriage Patterns among the Children of Hispanic Immigrants

Abstract

Utilising data from the 2005–07 American Community Survey Public Use Micro Sample (ACS-PUMS), this study investigates the intermarriage patterns of Mexican, Cuban and Dominican Americans who were born in the United States or came to the country as immigrant children. Using intermarriage patterns as an indicator of social relations, I examine how cultural and structural assimilation factors affect the marital assimilation process among the children of Hispanic immigrants. One of the major contributions of this study is the examination of diversity within the US census categorisation of ‘Hispanic’. Results from multinomial logistic regression analyses suggest that the marital assimilation process of Mexicans, Cubans and Dominicans varies across and within the groups according to their different individual characteristics and metropolitan context. My study is novel because it recognises that broad-sweep analyses of intermarriage patterns are overly simplistic renderings of racial/ethnic assimilation because they fail to reveal distinctive and noteworthy within-group diversity.

Keywords:

• Intermarriage
• Hispanic Americans
• Marital Assimilation

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Richard Alba, Glenn Deane, John Logan and Katherine Trent for their warm support and valuable comments. I would also like to thank the JEMS editors and anonymous reviewers for constructive suggestions.

Notes

1. The terms Latina/Latino and Hispanic are used interchangeably throughout this article.

2. Although Puerto Ricans are the second-largest Hispanic group in the United States, they are excluded from this study because all Puerto Ricans are US citizens by default; this makes their experiences quite different from those of other Hispanic immigrant-group members.

3. For example, sex ratios should be separately measured for each Hispanic group because their marriage pools for ethnic endogamy are unique.

4. The 2005–09 (five-year) ACS-PUMS data, which are comparable to the 5 per cent census PUMS, were not available at the time of writing this paper. Thus, the three-year ACS-PUMS offers the most recent and largest representative sample data of the US population (US Census Bureau 2009).

5. Many empirical studies define persons who immigrated before the age of 12 as the ‘1.5 generation’. This generation has been found to have different workforce experiences (Allensworth 1997) and to hold different values and identities (Rumbaut 1994) to their first-generation and US-born counterparts. If those who came to the US before the age of 6 are separated from the ‘1.5 generation’, they are tentatively fully Americanised in terms of their formal education because it has all taken place in the US. These individuals are sometimes called the ‘1.75 generation’ (Portes and Rumbaut 2006).

6. Some studies combine the two highest English proficiency categories of ‘very well’ and ‘well’ into a binary variable of FEP, but empirical tests in other studies indicate that persons who speak English ‘well’ are not that much different from those who do not speak English well, while those who speak English ‘very well’ are quite different from persons in the other three categories in terms of structural factors that are highly correlated with English proficiency (Chiswick and Miller 1995; Espenshade and Fu 1997; Shin and Alba 2009).

7. The results can be seen in a table which may be obtained from the author on request.

8. Again, table of results available on request.