Dramatic Increase : Mixed Marriages Keep Pace With L.A. Diversity

Francisco Aguire, a Guatemalan immigrant, was spending a quiet evening at home with Somai, his Bangkok-born wife of one year. The television in their cramped Hollywood apartment was tuned to “Miami Vice.” Their thick English-Thai dictionary lay, as always, within easy reach.

They refer to the dictionary often. Somai’s English and Spanish are limited. Francisco does not speak his wife’s native tongue, but can converse in English.

Somai can tell that Francisco, although he never complains, finds her Thai dinners too spicy, and so on this night, the menu featured ropa vieja, a Central-American shredded-beef recipe she learned from her mother-in-law.

The Aguires are adjusting gladly, if not always easily, to their bewildering mix of cultures. They are two of thousands. A byproduct of Los Angeles’ emergence as a great center of immigration has been a dramatic increase over the past decade in marriages across racial, ethnic and religious lines.

The new combinations can be seen as a happy reminder that love conquers all. But the couplings do create sensitive problems of their own, including fears in some quarters about an impending loss of distinctive ethnic traditions. All marriages take work; these can take more.

“We’re trying to make our new life,” Francisco Aguire said, adding hopefully: “Maybe in six, seven years we’ll probably speak just English.”

The last national census in 1980 found intermarriage had increased among all racial groups during the previous decade, and experts who have studied the Los Angeles County population say the rate has accelerated since. Sociological surveys of attitudes of young single adults in various ethnic groups also suggest that reservations about intermarriage are fading.

There is anecdotal evidence as well.

Sally Chavez, who processes marriage license applications and performs weddings at the Los Angeles County courthouse downtown, has witnessed the change first hand. Over the last two years of her 14-year career, she has noticed markedly more interracial and intercultural couples, she said, “especially Orientals and Salvadorans with blacks and whites.”

Chavez said she often must translate the civil ceremony into Spanish for one partner, while it’s clear that the other understands only English.

“Evidently,” she said, “they’ve got something going.”

Group Formed

The increase also has attracted the attention of long-married interracial couples. “Seeing that more of us were around, we finally got the strength to affirm who we are,” said Nancy Brown, a white woman whose husband of 11 years is black. Eighteen months ago, she and seven others from interracial families founded the Multi-Racial Americans of Southern California. Now the group has 200 member families of all hues and combinations.

The pattern is as old as the settlement of North America. Benjamin Franklin worried about an influx of Germans into the predominantly British states. “I can remember when a mixed marriage was Irish and Italian,” said Charles B. Keely, a Georgetown University demographer.

The blending of skin tones, however--at least in such numbers--is new. Less than 25 years ago, interracial unions were not even legal in 16 states. With the latest wave of immigration bringing Asians and Latinos, rather than Europeans, “there’s more (minorities) around,” Keely said. “But I think there is a social change going along with that.” Historically, he said, “the least barrier is nationality. Next is religion and next is race.”

Indeed, more black Americans, whose ancestors arrived centuries ago, are also “marrying out” these days. The number of marriages with one black partner nearly doubled nationally from the 1960s to the 1970s, with a higher than average rate in the western region, according to the 1980 census.

Though intermarriages are still rare--less than 5% of all marriages in the United States--they appear to be more common in California than elsewhere. For example, 1980 census figures showed that, across the country, 39% of the more than 45,000 Japanese who married during the 1970s had non-Japanese husbands or wives, most of whom were Caucasian Anglos. The figure was up from 29.5% during the 1960s.

UCLA sociologist Harry H. L. Kitano discovered that in 1984 more than 700 Japanese in Los Angeles County--51.2% of all Japanese marrying there--wed outside their nationality. His research was based on ethnic last names and Japanese birthplaces listed on marriage certificates. Race is not stated on California marriage license applications.

During the 1970s, Kitano also found Chinese in Los Angeles County intermarrying at rates of more than 40% and Koreans at rates of more than 25%. He is updating his statistics and predicts that “the numbers (will) continue to rise.”

Some scholars speculate that Asian and Latina women, who “marry out” in higher numbers than their male counterparts, do so because they want to escape limits traditionally imposed on wives by their cultures.

“Mexican culture is so rigid in the way they treat their women, who stay home and have kids,” said Nelly Salgado de Snyder, a UCLA researcher who is herself a Mexican married to an American Anglo. “Women who marry American men go to school, pursue an education.”

Still, said Kitano, among Asians, “it’s evening up rather rapidly. My guess is that it’s probably related to the upward mobility of Asian-American men. Asians males going into medical schools become very, very desired objects.”

Such theories are controversial. On an individual basis, the cause seems simpler. In a survey of 84 Mexicans and Mexican-Americans who “married out,” said Salgado de Snyder, “the reason I was given by most of my respondents was, ‘Because I fell in love.’ ”

Likewise, said Kirk Kita, a 20-year-old immigrant from Osaka, Japan, and Theresa Spencer, his 19-year-old Angeleno bride. The two met 10 months ago at a Buddhist study group. They married in a religious wedding in Japan Dec. 15 and a civil ceremony in Los Angeles last Friday.

“At first,” Kita said, “I thought about the difference, but I saw that still we get along.”

When Ambra Applegate and Al Wilson grew friendly over cafeteria meals at the University of Redlands, where both were students, neither cared much that she is white and he is black.

“He was friendly,” said Applegate, 32. “I had fun with her,” said Wilson, 35. They’ve been married six years now.

The romance of Francisco and Somai Aguire flourished in a three-story garment factory downtown. His job was cutting material. Two years ago, Somai arrived as a seamstress. They were assigned to work together.

She’d had a husband before, a Thai man, before she emigrated a decade ago. It was not a pleasant experience. She left him. “I thought I never get married again,” said Somai, who is 31. But Francisco, 25, was so helpful on the job, “I like him. I love him,” she said, smiling.

When traditions are shed, they are usually Somai’s. She is Buddhist; he is Christian. They married in a Christian wedding chapel. She told Francisco it was her faith’s New Year last April, but she rejected his suggestion that she take the day off. “I hate to waste money,” she said.

Carol Ratsamy Bracey and her husband, Houmphanh Ratsamy, try to blend their cultures. Bracey, a Caucasian who grew up in Orange County, was working at a Philippine refugee camp when she met Ratsamy, a Laotian on his way to the United States. They wrote every day after he moved to Modesto. When she returned to this country, they married and settled in San Diego.

The wedding was at her family church in Santa Ana 2 1/2 years ago. Bracey wore a passim, an elaborate sarong-like garment. The groom wore a suit. The readings were in English and Lao.

Some Barriers

“His father (in Thailand) had no (negative) reaction,” Bracey said. “And my family, if anything ever mattered, they didn’t say so.”

Still, there are barriers. Bracey’s parents and her husband “sort of still communicate through me, even though they could talk directly. . . . Now he’s getting better about saying ‘thank you’ to them directly,” she said.

And at first, Bracey said, she was self-conscious about the couple’s appearance. She stands 5-10 and he is about 5-4. She is heavy set; his build is medium. She is very pale; he is dark.

Nancy Brown has encountered more ignorance than hostility, but she worries about the possibilities. She doesn’t want to publicly reveal the section of the Los Angeles Basin where her family lives. She remembers the story of Tori and Robson Dufau, a black wife and white husband driven from Westchester in 1986 by hate mail, eggs thrown at their car and the shooting of their pet rabbit.

Much of the opposition to intermarriage, of course, stops well short of hatred. Jews have long discouraged marrying outside the faith, although such unions continue to increase. Soviet Armenians generally adopt a similar stance.

“It’s not motivated by racism,” said Harout Sassounian, editor of the California Courier, a local Armenian newspaper. “Armenians have lost their homeland. . . . There’s some unwritten agreement to hang on for dear life to every piece of our heritage.”

The added strains on mixed marriages can exact a toll.

“The basic generalization is that the divorce rate is going to be higher,” said UCLA’s Kitano. “The generalization that one hears is that (intermarriage) is a new source of stress.”

Celestino Fernandez, a University of Arizona professor who studied Latino intermarriage in his state, said he found more divorces among Latinos with non-Latino mates than among Latinos who married Latinos. But the intermarried couples divorced at about the same rate as the general population. Fernandez is now divorcing his Anglo wife of 18 years, but he said cultural differences have little to do with the split.

Emerging Question

A number of researchers are beginning to question whether intermarriage is necessary to blend ethnic and racial groups into the larger American society.

“They can be in the workplace and in schools and in recreational facilities without intermarrying,” said Gary A. Cretser, a sociologist at Cal Poly Pomona and editor of a book on the subject. “There’s probably some advantage in maintaining a solid approach, maintaining some integrity as a group.”

The effects of intermarriage on cultural heritage have not been fully examined. Intermarried Mexicans told Salgado de Snyder that they continue to watch Spanish-language television when they are alone, if they had done so before. They eat Mexican food and celebrate traditions such as Las Posadas at Christmas.

Those with children said they pass on their customs. But when Salgado de Snyder interviewed 33 of the children, “it turned out they weren’t as Mexican as their parents thought. They had great respect for the Mexican culture, but they lived mostly within the Anglo culture.”

Despite such conclusions, Salgado de Snyder believes intermarriage is “a good thing for the babies. These kids did not have any prejudice.”

She gave birth six weeks ago to a daughter. “We hope to raise a completely bilingual, bicultural child. I still think, in Los Angeles, that’s possible.”