L.A. County’s Answer for Racial Tensions: Intermarriage

Last month, the director of the Los Angeles County Human Relations Commission contended that bad race relations threatened to make America’s most ethnically, racially and culturally diverse metropolis unlivable. As evidence, he pointed to a report his office issued April 19, stating that nearly 800 hate crimes were perpetrated in Los Angeles County in 1995. Yet, to judge local race relations by the number of aberrant--and by definition, criminal--acts is to misunderstand the depth and fluidity with which race, ethnicity and culture mingle and cross-pollinate in this county of more than 10 million people.

The tendency to define minority groups by their most dysfunctional members leads many to confuse conflicts among gangbangers and convicts for the totality of, say, black-Latino relations. In South-Central, for example, blacks and Latinos have begun a relationship far superior to the one blacks and whites had in the late 1940s and 1950s when they shared the area. “The whites didn’t stay around long enough for us to even have a relationship,” recalls one black minister. The African American PTA mothers at McKinley Avenue School who voted a few years ago to have their children learn Spanish as a second language, or the Latino immigrants taking citizenship classes at the Estelle Van Meter Multi-purpose Center on Avalon Boulevard, will tell you that race relations in their neighborhoods are not as lopsided as the media would suggest. While it’s not always easy, Angelenos of all stripes are adjusting, making daily accommodations and learning to live with others.

L.A.’s notoriously segregated neighborhoods have rapidly diversified in the past two decades. Significant numbers of African Americans have moved out of the inner city, and the region’s black population has undergone tremendous deconcentration. Latinos have long since gone beyond the old barrios and are nearly omnipresent throughout the county. The Asian population has quadrupled since 1980, and Asian Americans have penetrated many formerly all-white suburbs. The younger Anglos who did not leave the county in the 1980s, or in the post-riot white flight, appear to be settling in for the long haul.

Overshadowed by highly publicized hate crimes is the county’s intermarriage rate, which is five times higher than the national average. Unlike hate crimes, which signify the sporadic release of venom on the part of a marginal few, intermarriage reflects long-term inter-ethnic commitment on the part of hundreds of thousands of average Angelenos. Angelenos are literally learning to love their neighbors. Indeed, racial and ethnic tensions exist more among leaders and activists fighting over political turf and government dollars than among neighbors.

Nearly 5,000 interethnic couples are married in Los Angeles County each year. While older Angelenos have intermarriage rates as low as the rest of contemporary America, roughly 20% of the county’s Generation Xers who have tied the knot have done so with a partner of another ethnicity. Intermarriage really began to gain currency in the 1970s. Each successive generation is more likely than the past one to intermarry. A twentysomething Anglo male is four times more likely than his father to marry a non-Anglo woman. More than 19% of married African American men in their 20s have non-black spouses. While data are still preliminary, the intermarriage rate for post-Generation X Angelenos is likely to go as high as 30%.

Intermarriage among the county’s enormous foreign-born population is still relatively rare. But their children and grandchildren more than make up for them. Some 28% of U.S.-born Asian American women who are married have non-Asian spouses. Fully one-quarter of married U.S.-born Latinos have non-Latino spouses. In past decades, intermarriage usually meant a black, Asian or Latino marrying an Anglo. The nonwhite partner would, more often than not, assimilate into the dominant Anglo American culture. Today, not only are the intermarriage combinations more diverse, but when Anglos marry Latinos, Asians or African Americans, they very often assimilate the other way. For example, Anglo/non-Anglo couples usually have more children than uni-racial Anglo couples. Surprisingly, in most homes headed by an Anglo/Latino couple, Spanish becomes the household language.

While Los Angeles has always been quite tolerant relative to the rest of the United States and thus would be expected to display a higher degree of voluntary integration after the desegregation of the 1960s, the region’s huge Latino population is another reason for the high intermarriage rates. More than two-thirds of the county’s intermarriages involve Latinos. For generations, U.S.-born Latinos have had greater numbers of intermarried in-laws than other groups. It has been observed many times that Latino cultures are syncretic and multiracial. They are, after all, the product of the collision of the old and new worlds.

Los Angeles County has tens of thousands of black Latinos and not insignificant numbers of Latino Asians. The Census Bureau counted 1,000 Vietnamese, and many more Japanese Latinos in L.A. The immediate past president of the California Hispanic American Medical Assn. was one of the sizable population of Jewish Latinos. Partly because Latinos have officially been considered white by the U.S. government since the 1940s, 43% call themselves “white.” Most significant, though, greater than half of L.A.’s Latinos refuse the standardized mono-racial classifications and categorize themselves as “other” when asked by the Census Bureau to choose their race.

Latinos, whose history has been one of mixture and among whom mestizos are the rule rather than the exception, understand hybridity, a notion that America’s discourse on race desperately lacks. According to the current customs of racial categorization, the children of intermarriages--the living and breathing solution to potential racial Balkanization--have to be assigned a single race on their birth certificates. The Census Bureau is considering adding a “multiracial” category to its decennial survey. Meanwhile, everyday, in their private lives, Angelenos are redefining the county’s ethnic dynamics and subsuming the intractable categories of race from the ground up. Perhaps once we have fully adopted the concept of mestizaje into our racial dialogue, we will recognize that Los Angeles is well on its way to becoming a mestizo metropolis.*