Intermarriage and Integration Revisited

• Author: Dan Rodríguez-García
• Published date: 01 November 2015
• Date: 01 November 2015
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/0002716215601397
• Subject Matter: Introduction

8 ANNALS, AAPSS, 662, November 2015

DOI: 10.1177/0002716215601397

I

Intermarriage

and Integration

Revisited:

International

Experiences

and Cross-

Disciplinary

Approaches

By

DAN RODRÍGUEZ-GARCÍA

601397ANN The Annals of the American AcademyIntermarriage and Integration Revisited

research-article2015

Keywords: immigration; intermarriage; integration;

assimilation; social transformation; social

cohesion; race; ethnicity

Anthropologist Edmund Leach, in his discus-

sion of caste and class systems, stated, “In a

very fundamental way, we all of us distinguish

those who are of our kind from those who are

not of our kind by asking ourselves the question:

‘Do we intermarry with them?’” (1967, 19).

Indeed, social scientists have been drawn to the

investigation of intermarriage for over a century:

from the classic anthropological studies of the

nineteenth century (McLennan 1865; L. Morgan

1870; Tylor 1889); to the development of classi-

cal assimilation theory, first by sociologists of the

Chicago School led by Robert E. Park (Park and

Burgess 1921; Park 1928) and later entrenched

by Milton Gordon (1964); to studies from more

current times, in which the subject has been

analyzed from many different disciplines. This

fascination with intermarriage can be attributed

to the realization that the crossing of racial,

ethno-cultural, religious, or class boundaries

Dan Rodríguez-García is an associate professor of

social and cultural anthropology and director of the

INMIX Research Group on Immigration, Mixedness,

and Social Cohesion at the Autonomous University of

Barcelona. His areas of research are international

migration, immigrant integration, interculturalism,

ethnicity, intermarriage, and mixedness. His current

research focuses on identity processes of multiracial

youth.

NOTE: The editor of this volume would like to thank

the Russell Sage Foundation, Tom Kecskemethy, Emily

Babson, and Peter Geraghty for their generous help

and advice at various stages of this project. Thanks also

to Joanna Freedman for her excellent and very helpful

editorial feedback, to all the contributors in the volume

for their outstanding work, and to the anonymous

reviewers for their generous and thoughtful feedback

on earlier manuscripts.

INTERMARRIAGE AND INTEGRATION REVISITED 9

through partnering not only tells us about individual choices but also reveals the

scope of social divisions and the relationships between groups within a society. In

this way, intermarriage has been argued to be one of the most important tests for

determining societal structure and for exposing social boundaries (Davis 1941;

Leach 1967; Mare 1991; Merton 1941).

For this same reason, the subject of intermarriage has also been a leitmotiv in

literature over the centuries and later in cinema: Shakespeare’s Othello and Romeo

and Juliet, Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, D. W. Griffith’s Broken Blossoms,

Robert Wise and Jerome Robbins’s West Side Story (original book for the musical

by Arthur Laurents), Stanley Kramer’s Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, Mira Nair’s

Mississippi Masala, Mina Shum’s Double Happiness, Walt Disney’s Pocahontas,

Ken Loach’s Ae Fond Kiss, Gurinder Chadha’s Bride and Prejudice, Nia Vardalos’s

My Big Fat Greek Wedding (play), and Amma Asante’s Belle, among many other

examples. All of these cultural artifacts remind us that endogamous unions (i.e.,

partnerships within the same group, whether in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality,

religion, or social class) have historically been the ones promoted socially and insti-

tutionally, whereas mixed unions have traditionally been unconventional and even

forbidden partnerships (Moran 2001; Rodríguez-García 2013).

However, these “barrier-breaking” relationships are increasingly becoming more

common. The intense migration flows of contemporary times (Castles and Miller

2009; Massey et al. 1998), the continual advancement of transport and communica-

tion technologies, and general processes of globalization and transnationalism

(Castells 1996; Sassen 1998; Vertovec 2010) have expanded the possibilities for

individuals to meet and marry across national, cultural, racial, religious, and class

borders, leading to the “internationalization of intimacy” (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim

2014; Constable 2003; Hull, Meier, and Ortyl 2010; Mai and King 2009), the emer-

gence of transnational marriage markets (Bryceson and Vuorela 2002; Charsley 2012;

Heikkilä and Yeoh 2010; Kofman 2004; Scott and Cartledge 2009; Trask 2010;

Williams 2010), and the growing diversification of family forms (Rosenfeld 2007).

Consequently, especially in recent decades, “mixed” (binational, bicultural, and trans-

national) couples and “mixed-background” people—or “world families” (Beck and

Beck-Gernsheim 2014)—have increased dramatically worldwide (Alba and Waters

2010; Collet and Santelli 2012; Edwards et al. 2012; Goulbourne et al. 2011;

Rodríguez-García 2006, 2014; Rosenfeld 2008; Wang 2012).

Yet what are the social implications of intermarriage? How does it contribute

to social transformation? The growing incidence of mixed families is a social phe-

nomenon, and fostering the integration of immigrants and social cohesion is one

of the greatest challenges that modern societies face (for the United States, see,

for instance, Putnam 2007; for Europe, see, for instance, Huddleston, Niessen,

and Dag Tjaden 2013). It might be assumed, then, that the link between “mixed-

ness”—including both the formation and outcomes of mixed unions and mixed

families—and immigrant integration is a research area that has been avidly pur-

sued by scholars and policy-makers alike. In actuality, though, relatively little is

known about the scope, internal dynamics, and social consequences of mixed-

ness. Does intermarriage lead to greater social, cultural, economic, and/or politi-

cal integration for individuals and groups that have not been considered part of