Marriage Vows and Racial Choices

Abstract

According to the U.S. Census, the overwhelming majority of marriages occur within racial and ethnic groups, including for Latinos. At the same time, Latinos seem to intermarry more than most other Americans. Marriage Vows and Racial Choices illuminates some of the dynamics behind those numbers, showing how these statistics obscure a great deal pertaining to Latinos. While on paper a marriage involving two Latinos can appear like an intra-marriage, author Jessica Vasquez-Tokos shows how immigrant generational status and nation of origin can complicate the notion of Latino homogamy. Unlike demographers who have already made these points, Vasquez-Tokos relies on qualitative interviews with over one hundred respondents in Kansas and California to reveal how couples draw on repertoires related to race, ethnicity, immigrant generation, class, and national origin to make sense of their decisions. Marriage Vows provides rich data on couples’ identities, how they met, and decisions leading to their marriages. In addition, through adding interviews with divorcées, the author also reveals negative cases in which those factors led to marital dissolution. As a result, VasquezTokos is able to place love front and center, something that is often missing in studies of marriage, whether intraor inter-racial. Marriage Vows illustrates how marriage formation involves negotiating desires for particular types of partners. Not only do opportunities structure preferences for qualities in ideal spouses; but also, people’s preferences shape the opportunities for meeting potential partners. Marriage Vows shows the differences between California and Kansas as research sites. For Angelinos, Latino (and particularly Mexican) culture is easily accessible and even a part of the mainstream of life there. This is different from Kansas, where church and family were central institutions for developing and maintaining Latino identities. In addition, Latinos in Los Angeles have to negotiate stereotypes of being poor and associated with gangster life and whiteness being associated with professionalism and being middle-class. As a result, Angelino husbands who desired upward mobility employed social distancing strategies, drawing on narratives of working-class origins being linked to gang life. This included those who married fellow Mexican Americans. Since gangs were not linked to Latinos in Kansas, social distancing was not a strategy there. Latinos’ decisions around marriage and family formation had different constraints in these two settings. Marriage was the outcome of assimilation strategies for many Mexican Americans. However, rather than assimilating into (mainstream) whiteness, several Latinos in the study who married whites have families in which they emphasize their own culture. The book shows how intermarriage with whites can lead to different family types of biculturalism. These can include ‘‘selective blending,’’ ‘‘everyday biculturalism,’’ ‘‘leaning white,’’ and ‘‘leaning Latino.’’ In addition, rather than taking for granted that Latinos who marry whites are on a steady march toward whiteness, Vasquez-Tokos shows how whites can also be altered through intermarriage by developing greater racial consciousness because of their marriage to a person of color. Marriage Vows emphasizes how several Latinas in the study purposefully married men who were unlike their patriarchal and even abusive fathers. Some women drew on these childhood experiences as an explanation for pursuing relationships with white men. Others partnered with non-Mexican Latinos to avoid replicating the gender dynamics of their natal family. Still other Latinas did not ‘‘color-code’’ their potential partners and instead ‘‘quality-coded’’ them by seeking fellow Mexicans who wanted to live out similar feminist principles. Reviews 105