It Doesn’t Matter Because We’re Both Brown: Pan-ethnic Boundaries among Intermarried Filipinos

• In Event: 469 - Section on International Migration Roundtables (one-hour)
  In Refereed Roundtable: Table 17. Ethnic Identities and Boundary Movements

Abstract

The high rates of intermarriage between Asians and whites in the U.S. have led some scholars to argue that ethnoracial boundaries have blurred between these two groups. However, current data show that a large proportion of native-born Asian Americans marry Asians of different ethnicities, Latinos, and blacks, suggesting that ethnoracial boundaries may also be blurring between different non-white groups. Filipino Americans, who are the second largest Asian American group in the U.S. and are the subject of this study, are an interesting case to examine these issues. Filipinos report one of the highest rates of intermarriage among all Asian groups and their intermarriage patterns are much more varied compared to other Asians: they have one of the lowest rates of inter-ethnic marriage among Asian groups, second only to Indians, and the highest rate of intermarriage with non-Asian, non-white partners, i.e. Latinos and blacks. Drawing on twenty interviews with second-generation Filipinos inter-ethnically and interracially married to non-whites, I explore how Filipinos and their non-white partners drew on shared symbols of race to construct blurred racial and ethnic boundaries between themselves. In doing so, multiple pan-Asian, pan-Latino, and pan-minority bonds emerged among the Filipino participants:. However, these pan-ethnic bonds were often constructed in a way that highlighted a non-white/white boundary; many of the participants felt that they and their partners were very different from whites.

Author

• Brenda Gambol, City University of New York-Graduate Center