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Illuminating how international marriages are negotiated, arranged, and experienced, Cross-Border Marriages is the first book to chart marital migrations involving women and men of diverse national, ethnic, and class backgrounds. The migrations studied here cross geographical borders of provinces, rural-urban borders within nation-states, and international boundaries, including those of China, Japan, South Korea, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, the United States, and Canada. Looking at assumptions about the connection between international marriages and poverty, opportunism, and women's mobility, the book draws attention to ideas about global patterns of inequality that are thought to pressure poor women to emigrate to richer countries, while simultaneously suggesting the limitations of such views.Breaking from studies that regard the international bride as a victim of circumstance and the mechanisms of international marriage as traffic in commodified women, these essays challenge any simple idea of global hypergamy and present a nuanced understanding where a variety of factors, not the least of which is desire, come into play. Indeed, most contemporary marriage-scapes involve women who relocate in order to marry; rarely is it the men. But Nicole Constable and the volume contributors demonstrate that, contrary to popular belief, these brides are not necessarily poor, nor do they categorically marry men who are above them on the socioeconomic ladder.Although often women may appear to be moving \"up\" from a less developed country to a more developed one, they do not necessarily move higher on the chain of economic resources. Complicating these and other assumptions about international marriages, the essays in this volume draw from interviews and rich ethnographic materials to examine women's and men's agency, their motivations for marriage, and the importance of familial pressures and obligations, cultural imaginings, fantasies, and desires, in addition to personal and economic factors.Border-crossing marriages are significant for what they reveal about the intersection of local and global processes in the everyday lives of women and men whose marital opportunities variably yield both rich possibilities and bitter disappointments.

From about seven children per woman in 1960, the fertility rate in Mexico has dropped to about 2.6. Such changes are part of a larger transformation explored in this book, a richly detailed ethnographic study of generational and migration-related redefinitions of gender, marriage, and sexuality in rural Mexico and among Mexicans in Atlanta.

A wedding serves as the beginning marker of a marriage; if a couple is to manage cultural differences throughout their relationship, they must first pass the hurdle of designing a wedding ceremony that accommodates those differences. In this volume, author Wendy Leeds-Hurwitz documents the weddings of 112 couples from across the United States, studied over a 10-year period. She focuses on intercultural weddings--interracial, interethnic, interfaith, international, and interclass--looking at how real people are coping with cultural differences in their lives. Through detailed case studies, the book explores how couples display different identities simultaneously. The concepts of community, ritual, identity, and meaning are given extensive consideration. Because material culture plays a particularly important role in weddings as in other examples of ritual, food, clothing, and objects are given special attention here. Focusing on how couples design a wedding ritual to simultaneously meet multiple--and different--requirements, this book provides: *extensive details of actual behavior by couples; *an innovative format: six traditional theoretical chapters, with examples integrated into the discussion, are matched to six \"interludes\" providing detailed descriptions of the most successful examples of resolving intercultural differences; *a methodological appendix detailing what was done and why these decisions were made; and *a theoretical appendix outlining the study's assumptions in detail. Wedding as Text: Communicating Cultural Identities Through Ritual is a distinctive study of those who have accepted cultural difference into their daily lives and how they have managed to do so successfully. As such, it is suitable for students and scholars in semiotics, intercultural communication, ritual, material culture, family communication, and family studies, and will be valuable reading for anyone facing the issue of cultural difference. Contents: Preface. Introduction. Community. Ritual. Identity. Meaning. Conclusion. Theoretical Appendix. Methodological Appendix.

Interracial/interethnic marriage in America is a barometer of racial/ethnic relations and intergroup social distance. Using data from the 5-percent Public Use Microdata Sample of the 1990 and 2000 censuses, we interpret trends in intermarriage in light of new assimilation theory, recent changes in racial classification, and rapid demographic changes in American society. Our results indicate that changes in marital assimilation have taken on momentum of their own; that is, America's growing biracial population has fueled the growth of interracial marriages with whites. Analyses also shed new light on the effects of rapid immigration, rising cohabitation, and educational upgrading on intermarriage patterns, and yield both continuities and departures from the past. Historic patterns of racial/ethnic differences in intermarriage persist-Hispanics and American Indians are most likely to marry whites, followed closely by Asian Americans. African Americans are least likely to marry whites. Yet, the 1990s brought significant increases in intermarriage between blacks and whites; large increases in cohabitation did not offset the growth of racially-mixed marriages. The past decade also ushered in unprecedented declines in intermarriage with whites and large increases in marriage between native- and foreign-born co-ethnics among Hispanics and Asian Americans. The role of educational attainment in the out-marriage patterns of Hispanics and Asian Americans was also reinforced. Any evidence of differential growth in African American-white marriages among the highly educated African American population was weak. If intermarriage is our guide, any shifting, blurring, or crossing of racial/ethnic boundaries represent uncommonly weak mechanisms for breaking down existing racial barriers to black-white union formation.

This study explored the experiences of parents in an interracial or interethnic marriage who were raising children under 10 years old. Nineteen parents married to someone of a different race or ethnicity and with at least one child under 10 years old were surveyed and interviewed between September 2020 and April 2021 as part of a larger study of interracial and interethnic families. A majority of the parents identified four themes that emerged from their parenting practices. These were: (1) racism/discrimination, which they saw or were concerned about in reference to their child(ren); (2) the child(ren)’s ethnic-racial identity development; (3) the child(ren)’s skin color; and (4) the benefits to the child(ren) of being multiracial, biracial, or bi-ethnic. In addition, some of the parents expressed heightened concern for their child(ren) due to the political climate as reflected by recent racial protests and anti-Asian and anti-Latinx hate crimes. Social workers should practice with cultural humility when helping families deal with racism, microaggressions, and the identity development of children. In addition, they should explore the strengths of interracial and interethnic families.

The Toba Batak people are known as people who like to migrate. They can easily adapt to new environments and cultures, but the cultures such as language and customs are not something that can be easily forgotten. One of the Toba Batak people's local wisdom that is deeply rooted and is very proud of in their life is dalihan na tolu (DNT)- which needs to be maintained so that it does not disappear. However, passing it on to children in the midst of modernization is difficult. Interethnic marriages of the Toba Batak migrants are such a challenge in internalizing the DNT values. This present study aims to analyze internalization stages of the DNT local wisdom values in the life of the Toba Batak migrants. This study was done using the explorative-qualitative research method and a case study approach to answer research problems. The data was collected through interviews, observations, and document analysis. The data obtained was validated using the data triangulation method. The results show that the internalization stages of the DNT local wisdom values included introduction, intimacy, acceptance, adjustment, implementation, and inheritance.

This essay explores the complex set of sociological barriers to interethnic marriage that the Khmer-Kinh couples face and the facilitating factors that bridge the gaps and facilitate interethnic marriage. The findings highlight that geographical and socioeconomic disparities, as well as stereotypes between the ethnic groups, are significant barriers to Khmer-Kinh interethnic marriage. The study unpacks the significance of modernization factors, as well as recent demographic and social changes in bridging the geographical, social, cultural, and psychological gaps between groups.

This study focuses on the factors underlying differences in relationship quality between interethnic and same-ethnic couples. Using the National Survey of Families and Households and the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, we examine relationship satisfaction, interpartner conflict and subjective assessments of relationship instability in married and cohabiting couples. Partners in interethnic unions generally reported lower levels of relationship quality than did partners in same-ethnic unions. These differences held for women as well as men, and for married as well as cohabiting couples. Differences in relationship quality were largely accounted for by more complex relationship histories, more heterogamous unions, fewer shared values and less support from parents. In contrast, differences in socioeconomic resources did not appear to play an explanatory role.

Assimilation theory holds that intermarriage between minorities and non-Hispanic whites is a gauge of integration and assumes that minorities jettison their ethnic identification in favor of whiteness. Drawing on race relations theory to argue that intermarriage is potentially transformative for non-Hispanic whites as well as Latinos, this article challenges assimilation theory's bias that minorities (should) undergo cultural change and that non-Hispanic whites remain unmoved. This article uses in-depth interviews with Latino and non-Hispanic white married couples to assess the consequences of ethnic intermarriage from the perspectives of both partners. Inter ethnic partners engaged in four \"ideal types\" of biculturalism, running largely contrary to assimilation theory's social whitening hypothesis. Due to boundary blurring, exemplified by affiliative ethnic identity, non-Hispanic whites can migrate into Latino culture.