Interethnic Marriage in Los Angeles, 1948–1959

Marriage license records of Los Anigeles County were examined for the 1948-59 period for wlhiclh data were available. Some 3,200 intermarriages were found. Negro-white and Filipinowhite marriages were imost commi1tion1. Intermarriage rates at the end of the eleven year period were about triple the rates at the beginning of the period. 11 aaj or g-roUps in the United States A today-racial. religious, or ethnic-look with favor on homogeneous marriage and caeiinite disfavor oni intermarriage. Thlus, all interli-larriage is relatively rare. In the most extremiie situatiolns, such as New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Plhiladelplhia, probably no miiore than one in two lhundred marriages lhas been interetlhiuic in the sense of involving the milarriage of Negroes, Filipinos, Chinese, Japanese, or Indians withi MWexicans or Anglos. At the otlher extreme the number is zero. Various meritorious attempts lhave been made to sttudy interracial miarriages on the mainland of the United States, but witlh a few brilliant exceptions they usually hiave resulted in reports valid only for a particular groUp in a particular city or cotunity at a particular date. Because of the difficulty of securing data, mllost researclhers lhave had to content thiemselves with a few years and a few dozen or a few hundred cases. Examples include studlies by Baber, Barron-, Catapusen, Davis and Garclner, Drake and Cayton, Golden, Klineberg, Lawrence, Risdon, MlcWilliatms, Rogers, Schuyler, and Smith. The present report suffers f rom these same (lifficulties, but through the special cooperationi of the County Clerk of Los Anigeles County and( of the Ford Foundation, it suffers somewhat less. That is, it covers eleven consecutive years, over 375.000 total marriages anid well over 3,200 mixed marriages in a coulnty having a sizeaMle number of each racial group. The termli 'mnixed marriage" as used lhere needs special definitioln immediately, for it has a special meaniing: "mnarriage" actually refers to taking' out a miarriage license, not the true marriage itself, on w;hich the gather-ing of data was prohibitive in lhoth time an-d nmoney. It furtlher was found that to refer to "couples whdio lhave taken out a marriage license, but who imiay niot have mlarried" was impossibly wordy anld cumbersome, so "married" wvas substituted. Iln Los Angeles County about five percent of imiarria-e licenses applied for are not uised within the time span of their validity, but there is no informiiation on wvlhetlher inlterethlic couples are miiore or less likely than otlhers to let their licenses lapse. "Interethlnic intermiiarriage" is usecl to meanl cases in wvlhiclh ani Aniglo or MexicalL married either a Negro, Filipino, Japanese, Clhinese, or Indian or memllber of anlotlher lnoln-European racial-etlhlnic grotip. A nutmlber of possible theoretical lhypotlheses are available and will be miientionied-, but this particular paper is concerned imiore witlh reporting facts and analyzing them than in deriving or provinig tlheories, whliclh will be (lone in a later paper. The data presetnted lhere hiave several inhlel-ent limllitatiolns. They are based solely oni miiarriage license applicationis, anid suclh applicationis conThis content downloaded from 157.55.39.163 on Wed, 21 Sep 2016 05:50:59 UTC All use subject to http://about.jstor.org/terms INTERETHNIC MARRIAGE 157 tain only very limited information about the persons applyinig for the license. * Further, this study is based on three separate projects of data-gathering, whichl unfortunately were not always fully comiiparable. The first of these studies is based on photostatic copies of raw data gathered by the office of the Los Angeles County Clerk for its own internal purposes. This office was intereste(l only in niames, race, age, and sex, so this was all of the data available. To secure something of a conitrol group the author himiiself gathered comparable data from an equal interval sample of iliterethnic marriages. This phase of data gathering produced the reports on the years 1948-1954. These data were reported in part previously.' The second data-gathering period covered the years 1955-57, and colnsists essentially of slightl\ (lifferent raw data made available by the office of the County Clerk of Los Anigeles County andl gatlhered by that office for its own purposes. but without the evidence of surnames of those marrie(l. Againi. control data were gathered, ut(ler the author's direction, for a regular interval samliple of iinterethnic marriages. Finally, whlenl the California legislature in 1959 forbade askinlg the race of applicants for marriage licenses, the autlhor secured financial assistalnce from the Ford Foundatioln to hire a direct study of the County Clerk's files for 1958 and 1959 . Tlherefore for these two finial years all the types of (lata used were gathere(d againi. Until November of 1948 the laws of tlhe state of Californiia prohibite(d the legal intermarriage of wlhites with persons of alny other race. Some interimiarriages did occur through the falsificatioIn of racial data, but little is klnowni of the numiiber of such cases. Panunzio reports for the years 1924-33, for Los Angeles County, "some"9 Mexicans mlarrying Asiatics; seven Anglo and Japanese marriages; possibly 85 Filipino and Anglo marriages (tlhen legal) one Chiniese and Anglo; 38 Indian and Anglo or Mexican marriages; and five Negro marriages with Anglos or Mexicans.2 When the Califorinia miiscegenationi law was held unconstitutionial, the earlier marriage license forms requiriing a statement of race continued in use, witlh somie registrars, at least in Los Angeles County, refusing to accept miarriage licenses unless the section oIn race was filled out with somiie accuracy. By "some accuracy" is nleant that the registrars looked at the words oIn the atppl:cation, looked at the persons, and if no discrepancy readily was observable, they accepte l the application. It must be remarked tlhat some registrars accepted applications with "r aces" suclh as "Korean," "Samoan," or "Guanianian," but in general there was considerable uniformity. As a sidelight, the author did liear a couple threaten the County Clerk with suit because he refused to accept "lhumilani race" as a satisfactory description. By observation it appeared both persons in the dispute were clearly Caucasoid. From 1948 througlh 1957 this study offers nio informiiationi oni the intermarriage of whites and American Indians. The County Clerk's office was not interested in these imiarriages anid did niot gather these data. Thle author was interested, but did not have the staff to go back and recheck all the records for this single item. Wheni more staff was available to study the licelnses for 1958 and 1959, white-Indian and Indian-white marriages were included as an index of wlhat presumably had been happeninig TArLE 1. INTERRACIAL AIARRIAGES IN LOS ANGELES COU NTY, 1948-59 Interracial Marriages Total Initerracial per 1,000 Year Marriages Marriages Marriages 1948 5,376 28 5.2 (2 mo.) 1949 31,779 187 5.8 1950 31,915 168 f5.3 1951 29,459 187 (; 4 1952 30,178 171 5.7 1953 31,980 197 6 2 1954 32,095 238 7.4 1955 33,996 264 7.8 195(i 36,365 268 7.4 1957 38,333 346 9. 9. 1958 37,700 465 1]2.3 1l959 39,300 631* 16. 1 k