Far From Urban Gateways, Racial Lines Blur in Suburbs

By RAY F. HERNDON

Aug. 15, 2000 12 AM PT

TIMES STAFF WRITERS

FAIRFIELD, Calif. —

The fading of ethnic and racial lines that so rigidly defined much of America’s past is most evident here, in the flatlands northeast of San Francisco Bay.

In Solano County, a mix of fields, caramel hills and expanding small cities strung along Interstate 80, nearly 1 in 4 births over the past decade has been to parents of different races or ethnicities, according to an analysis of population data.

Though the state’s polyglot capital of immigration is Los Angeles, multicultural California may be getting its firmest foothold in places like this.

A bit to the east of Fairfield, in the leafy neighborhoods of Sacramento County, more than 21% of births have been to mixed parents. “It’s everywhere,” said Sacramento obstetrician Therese Rosellini.

She had just delivered a little girl whose father is white and mother is a Filipina. In her Elk Grove neighborhood on the outskirts of Sacramento, Rosellini said, “every other house has an interracial couple. It’s just accepted.”

Birth certificate data show the highest rates of interracial births in middle-class suburban and smaller metropolitan counties such as Sacramento, Alameda and Contra Costa in the north and Riverside and San Bernardino in the south.

In the so-called ethnic melting pot, “a good deal of the ‘melting’ occurs in the suburbs, and among the most upwardly mobile members of the new minorities,” said demographer William H. Frey of the University of Michigan’s Population Research Center.

Removed from urban immigrant gateways by distance and often a generation or two, they increase their “contact with other groups, begin to have more in common with them, socialize with them, date them and marry them,” he said.

Not all suburban counties, however, have high rates of mixed births. Some of the most affluent, such as Marin, Orange and Ventura, were below the state average, reflecting what some demographers call the essentially lower-middle-class nature of the trend.

Ranking even lower was Los Angeles County, which--for all its diversity--recorded a mixed-birth proportion of only about 1 in 9.

One only need look at the city of Los Angeles to understand why. Many of its neighborhoods are strikingly homogeneous, its immigrant populations large, relatively new and cohesive, its economic divisions deep.

No Agreement on Patterns

Experts differ on which pattern will prevail as California loses its white majority--the blending of Solano County or the relative separation of Los Angeles--or whether the two will continue to coexist.

Among the findings of a Times analysis:

* Statewide, more than 1 in 6 births in 1998 were to parents of mixed race or ethnicity, up from 1 in 7 in 1989--and the trend is accelerating. These figures count as mixed births children born to parents of different Asian nationalities--for instance, a newborn with a Korean father and a Vietnamese mother.

* Babies of mixed race or ethnicity are now the third largest group of newborns, after whites and Latinos.

* California’s rate of mixed births is well above the national average. Although the state accounted for only 13% of newborns nationwide in 1998, it had 24% of all births to parents of mixed race or ethnicity.

* The majority of mixed births in California involve Latinos, the state’s largest minority group.

* The statewide percentage of interracial births involving African Americans was more than three times the national rate.

Historically, California has hardly been a racial Shangri-La. Yet it has attracted non-European immigrants since its inception. The California Supreme Court struck down legal barriers to intermarriage in 1948, nearly two decades before the U.S. Supreme Court erased them nationally.

The Bay Area was the birthplace of the blossoming multiracial movement, which rejects the narrow boundaries of racial categories and succeeded in persuading the federal government to allow residents for the first time this year to choose more than one ethnic category on U.S. Census forms.

“In dismantling the ‘check-one-box-only’ system, we’ve basically opened the door to the idea that race is not fixed, that we’re not separate species--as some would like to think,” said Bay Area resident Ramona E. Douglass, a member of the Commerce Secretary’s Census 2000 Advisory Committee and past president of the Assn. of MultiEthnic Americans.

Indeed, UC Santa Barbara assistant sociology professor Reginald Daniel argues that people’s growing willingness to embrace a mixed identity is more significant than the increasing number of mixed births. “For a person to say ‘I’m going to be all of those’ is a new paradigm,” he said.

It also is one with broad implications, potentially reshaping notions of race and altering the balance of political power.

Johnna Moore is white, her husband Earnest Moore, African American. The Solano County couple have five children, with a sixth on the way.

“They know they’re both,” said Johnna, a medical assistant. “They have both white and black dolls.”

Michelle Hall and Paul Richard, another biracial couple in this bedroom community, said they are trying to imbue their two daughters, 7-year-old Darian and 3-year-old Kolbie, with a mixed identity.

In the years since Darian was born, Hall, an African American who is a train operator, and Richard, a white who works as a courier, said people have become less color-conscious.

“Before it was, ‘Oh, are they your kids?’ ” Richard said. “Now, it’s ‘Your kids are pretty.’ ”

The two could recall only one bad experience stemming from their girls’ mixed race.

Once at an amusement park, a boy told the oldest child she couldn’t play with his group because she was “not one of them.” Tellingly, Richard said, Darian didn’t know what the boy was talking about.

Northern California Noted for Tolerance

Certainly the Hall-Richard family is not a rarity in Solano County, which has a population of about 400,000 that is about 56% white. Among counties that recorded enough births to provide sufficient data, Solano topped the state in the rate of mixed ethnic and racial births between 1989 and 1998.

The ranking is attributed to everything from the presence of Travis Air Force Base--the military is one of the most integrated institutions in the nation--to affordable housing that attracts a racial cross-section. Also, the county’s minority groups are of essentially the same size and are established enough to be relatively assimilated.

“I live in a townhouse complex, and we have African Americans, Mexicans, Caucasians and Asians,” said Sally Martinez, a fourth-generation Californian and Latina homemaker who was grocery shopping with a white friend. “The kids all play together. They’re all mixed together.”

Northern California has a stronger tradition of racial tolerance, suggested Sonoma State University multicultural studies professor Larry Shinagawa, because many of its white settlers came from the Northeast. Southern California tended to draw from more Southern states, where the racial divisions were sharply drawn.

Both interracial and inter-ethnic marriages are on the rise in California, Shinagawa said. Asians in particular are marrying members of other Asian subgroups, he added, because the historical hostilities between them are eroding and because the overall number of Asians in California has increased.

Although social attitudes clearly influence intermarriage and mixed birthrates, they are very much affected by practical factors such as the size of immigrant populations and the length of time they have resided in the United States.

The larger and more cohesive an ethnic group, experts said, the better it is at enforcing internal social mores that frown on marrying outside.

“Just the presence of those big, strong communities tends to act as a retardant to intergroup romance,” said UC Santa Barbara history professor Paul Spickard.

Spickard said he has known Latino and Asian students who have chosen UC Santa Barbara over UC Berkeley or UCLA “in part so they can be free of surveillance” by members of their own ethnicity and thus socialize more freely.

Moreover, many new immigrants are likely to arrive in the United States already married, as well as have language barriers that circumscribe their social circles. In 1998, for instance, 83% of the adult Mexican women who legally immigrated to Los Angeles County were married.

The difference between intermarriage rates for first-generation immigrants and their children was noted in a recent study by Sonya Tafoya, a research associate at the Public Policy Institute of California.

Tafoya found that multiracial and multiethnic births to native-born women had risen markedly since 1982--from about 14% to 21% in 1997--while the rate for foreign-born mothers had remained fairly stable at about 7%.

That generational change is reflected in the Thao family.

Chia, Lo and Kaye Thao are teenage sisters who live in Solano County’s Suisun City. The three are the oldest of 11 children born in this country to an immigrant Hmong couple. They know their mother and father would like them to marry within Hmong, or at least Asian, circles.

Chia, 18, seems likely to do that, though she has dated whites. Her sisters aren’t so sure.

“Whoever I fall for, that’s who I’m going to be with. You can’t control it,” Kaye, 19, said with a smile.

It’s not simply the march of generations that erodes the boundaries of romance.

Christina Sanchez’s family has lived in the United States for more than a century, yet it has remained solidly Latino. When the Fairfield bakery worker dated non-Latinos, relatives’ eyebrows shot up.

“But I never paid attention,” said Sanchez, 22.

Why?

“Because,” she said, “it’s 2000.”

(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX / INFOGRAPHIC)

Melting Pot

From 1989 to 1998, nearly one-sixth of all births statewide were to parents of different races or ethnicities. In Los Angeles County, the figure was one in nine, the second-lowest rate in California.

MIXED BIRTHS as % of total

Counties with:

HIGHEST RATES

Solano 24.4%

Humboldt 22.6%

Sacramento 21.6%

Shasta 21.3%

San Joaquin 20.8%

LOWEST RATES

Santa Cruz 13.3%

Marin 12.9%

Nevada 11.8%

Los Angeles 11.6%

Imperial 9.2%

OTHER SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA COUNTIES

Riverside 18.6%

San Bernardino 18.5%

San Diego 18.1% Ventura 14.8%

Orange 14.1%

Parental Combinations

A Latino parent was involved in nearly three-fourths of the mixed-race or mixed-ethnic births in Southern California over the past decade. Here are the most common combinations.

*--*

Mother Father Children % of All Mixed Births

White Latino 119,001 24.4%

Latina White 111,484 22.9%

White Black 27,654 5.7%

Latina Black 19,284 4.0%

Filipina White 16,503 3.4%

Black White 8,308 1.7%

Black Latino 6,994 1.4%

Japanese White 6,783 1.4%

White Filipino 5,556 1.1%

Filipina Latino 5,472 1.1%