Remarriage and intermarriage of Asians in the United States of America

The U.S.A. has witnessed a phenomenal increase in the number of Asians (U.S, Bureau of the Census, 1981). This increase has brought about a number of social science studies (see for example Yu, 1980; Chiswick, 1483; Gardner et al., 1985; Wong, 1986; Kelly, 1986; Denton and Massey, 1988) of the socioeconomic adjustment of this subpopulation. However, despite this research attention much remains to be known about their mate selection practices. Racial and ethnic intermarriage is an important determinant of the social and cultural adjustment of Asian nationalities, meriting detailed analysis. It is for this reason that in this study we analyze the impact of the patterns of remarriage of Asians in the U.S.A. on their ethnic and racial exogamy. This research provides needed cross-cultural testing to existing empirical generalizations regarding remarriage and intermarriage.This paper examines in a multivariate context the relative importance of remarriage as a correlate of ethnic and racial exogamy among Asians in the U.S.A. It is known that remarriage is the most important predictor of exogamy in the general population (Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan. 1990; Coleman and Ganong, 1990; Bumpass, Sweet, and Castro Martin, 1990; Berardo, 1981). In this paper we ascertain whether remarriage is associated with the racial and ethnic intermarriage of Asians. The research tests the hypothesis that the remarriages of Asians are associated with relatively greater ethnic and racial exogamy. In this, we follow. the lead of other studies that have shown that remarriage, when compared to first marriage, is associated with greater exogamy in the general population of the U.S.A. (for Blacks see Tucker and Mitchell-Kernan, 1990). At least three lines of argument support the hypothesized relationship between remarriage and exogamy. The first, a well known anomie explanation, is that the cultural norms guiding the selection of first spouses are more potent and reflect the value of endogamy. Remarriage is, in contrast to first marriage, a relatively new and emergent collective experience in North American and Asian cultures (Cherlin, 1981; Coleman and Ganong, 1990). Remarriage creates marriages and families that lack institutionalized guidance. In these societies, the majority of mate selection norms exist for first marriages rather than remarriages. The second is the view that previously unmarried spouses are usually young and lack the life experiences and maturity which oftentime come to invalidate many of the cultural blueprints guiding the selection of first spouses. The third is that the hypothesized relation between remarriage and intermarriage may be the effect of personality patterns; persons who break marriage norms in one area of their lives, such as divorcing their spouses and entering remarriage, are probably more likely to break other marriage norms such as marrying outside their ethnic and racial groups.Our study presents a corrective to the lack of attention to Asian remarriage. The literature on remarriage has not considered its impact on the racial and ethnic intermarriage patterns of Asian minorities in the U.S. (Coleman and Ganong, 1990). Yet, ethnic and racial endogamy may occur most often when members of Asian nationalities in the U.S.A. are in their first marriages and foreign-born. Asians should be more willing to break endogamous norms when the ethnic cultural influence on their behavior is relatively weaker, i.e., when they are native-born and in second marriages. Moreover, the well-known relationship between foreign birth and endogamy may be excised by remarriage. Foreign-born remarried Asian men may have a greater proclivity to cross ethnic and racial boundaries to select, as is true for their counterparts in the general population (Aguirre and Parr, 1982), younger, previously unmarried wives.Of course, they may be motivated by other considerations, for remarriage, to the extent that it is associated with the crossing of racial and ethnic boundaries in mate selection, may be involved in the facilitation of immigrant adaptation. …