Latino Endogamy: The Role of Racialized Experience, Advice, and Discriminatory Practices

• In Event: 468 - Regular Session. Racialization of Latinos/as

Abstract

While racial and ethnic intermarriage is heralded as the last stage in integration processes, endogamy (intra-group marriage) is the overwhelming norm and safeguards group closure and relative privilege. What are the dating and marriage processes through which the contemporary racial hierarchy is maintained? Drawing from seventy in-depth interviews with Latinos concerning dating and marriage, this article reveals the social pressures that bear on intimacy and support the current racial hierarchy. Leveraging Foucault’s concepts of surveillance and discipline as well as race literature on symbolic boundaries, this article argues that what are typically construed as highly personal romantic preferences are socially constructed. I argue that Latino endogamy is a response to accumulated racial messages and boundary-policing enforced by physical or symbolic violence. Surveillance and punishment serve to discipline (constrain through the internalization of social pressures) romantic preferences and choices. Families of non-Hispanic whites violently and symbolically discipline their white kin and prospective Latino mates in order to maintain social distance. This censure produces an interpretation of Latinos as “incompatible” with non-Hispanic whites. Latinos enjoy ethnic privilege relative to African Americans and attempt to preserve this privilege by discriminating against blacks, excluding them as romantic possibilities.

Author

• Jessica M. Vasquez, University of Oregon