Latinas’ Transition to First Marriage: An Examination of Four Theoretical Perspectives

National Longitudinal Survey of Youth and census data are used to examine the effect of both individual- and contextual-level determinants on Latinas' transition to first marriage (n = 745). Hypotheses derived from 4 leading theories of marriage timing are evaluated. Discrete-time event-history models that control for clustering within Labor Market Areas suggest that foreign-born Latina and Anglo women have virtually identical marriage trajectories. Analyses further demonstrate that Latinas' individual human capital, and residence in areas characterized by a relatively large supply of single foreignborn Latino men, are associated with higher probabilities of marriage, whereas women's aggregate economic opportunities are correlated with the predicted postponement of first marriage. Key Words: assimilation, familism, Latino, marriage, marriage market, women's economic independence. Latinos represent a numerically growing and socially significant segment of the U.S. population. Data from the Census Bureau's Current Population Survey (CPS) indicates that Latinos recently became our nation's largest minority group (Ramirez & de la Cruz, 2002). Nevertheless, relatively little is known about Latino marital behavior at a national level. The overwhelming majority of quantitative examinations of this and other life course transitions exclude Latinos, limiting analyses to Black-White comparisons. As a result, there is a surprising lack of empirical information regarding the determinants of marriage among people of Spanish origin who reside in the United States. The present analysis begins to fill this gap by examining the transition to first marriage among a nationally representative cohort of Latinas using data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY), census, and Statistical Abstracts of the United States. The NLSY provides individual-level data representing a sample of 1,002 Latinas, aged 14-22 years at the time of their initial interview. Latinas' marital transitions are examined over a 16-year period from 1979 through 1994. Data from the census and Statistical Abstracts provide contextual-level data. By so doing, the analysis strives to answer three questions. First, to what extent can the marital timing of Latinas be explained by the predictors indicative of the four leading theories of women's marriage timing: familism, assimilation, women's economic independence, and the marriage market? second, what are the similarities and differences in the determinants of Latinas' transition to first marriage when compared with Anglo and African American women? And finally, to what extent can ethnoracial differences in marital timing be explained by the predictors indicative of these leading theories? By incorporating both conventional individual-level predictors as well as aggregate contextual measures, the analysis makes numerous contributions to existing literatures on race/ethnicity and marriage timing. First, by examining the determinants of marriage among a nationally representative sample of Latinas, the analysis provides a needed balance to previous studies that emphasize a Black-White dichotomy in marital behavior. Second, the analysis represents one of the first examinations of the effect of aggregate contextual characteristics on Latinas' marital transitions. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, the analysis provides an examination of several leading theories of Latino marriage in a way that previous research has not. These strengths lead to a fuller understanding of how cultural, generational, socioeconomic, and structural characteristics work in tandem to shape U.S. Latino families. Following a brief summary of the literature on familism, I turn to additional theoretical discussions of assimilation, women's economic independence, and the marriage market, focusing on each theory's tenets regarding women's marital timing. Testable hypotheses are derived from each theory. Table 1 summarizes these hypotheses by separating them into those concerned with individual versus contextual influences on Latinas' transition to first marriage. …