Skin Color Homogamy in Mexico

• In Event: 452 - Section on Racial and Ethnic Minorities Refereed Roundtable Session and Business Meeting
  In Refereed Roundtable 60min: Table 14. Racial Identity

Abstract

This paper investigates skin color homogamy in Mexico, using a new nationally representative dataset, the Mexican Marital Preference Pilot project (MxMPP). The MxMPP is one of the first datasets to include information on the skin color of both respondents and their spouses. We hypothesized that individuals’ preferences to form unions with lighter-skinned individuals combined with competition in the marriage market would lead to skin color homogamy. Using log-linear methods, we find evidence that skin color homogamy exists in Mexico. This is especially the case for couples in which both spouses attained a post-elementary school education. This finding indicates that the least educated couples are the most likely to form cross-color marital unions. We also find that the probability of forming a cross-color union decreases as the distance in skin color increases, specifically for couples with more than elementary school.We did not find evidence that supports “status exchange theory” which posits that light-skinned women exchange their higher color status for their partner’s higher socio-economic status in marital unions. Instead, we find that couples in which women marry darker men tend to be educationally homogamous and not educationally hypergamous, as status exchange theory suggests.

Authors

• Erika Arenas, UCLA

• Chinyere Osuji, Rutgers University at Camden