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102 3 MIXED RACE AND ETHNICITY IN CALIFORNIA Sonya M. Tafoya Over the past thirty years, California has undergone a phenomenal demographic transformation.1 As recently as 1970, nearly 80 percent of the state’s population was classified as white, non-Hispanic (Reyes 2001). By 1999, only 50 percent of the population was estimated to be white, non-Hispanic, whereas 31.6 percent was classified as Hispanic, 12.2 percent as Asian or Pacific Islander, 7.5 percent as black or African American, and fewer than 1 percent as American Indian, Eskimo, or Aleut (U.S. Census Bureau 1999a). California’s racial and ethnic diversity derives largely from immigration, yet even without further immigration the growing occurrence of mixed racial and ethnic births will give rise to even greater diversity. California has been on the leading edge of national trends in immigration and intermarriage. Indeed, the California Supreme Court ruling ending legal barriers to intermarriage in California took effect in 1948—nearly two decades before the United States Supreme Court took action, in 1967, to remove all remaining miscegenation laws in the nation (Bancroft Whitney Company 1949). As of 1997, about 25 percent of the state’s population was foreign born, compared with 10 percent in the nation as a whole (Schmidley and Alvarado 1998). Historically, the federal and statewide statistics used to document California ’s growing diversity have divided the population into discrete monoracial groups. However, new guidelines issued by the Office of Management and Budget (OMB) now allow respondents to check one or more racial categories.2 Census 2000 marked the first major employment of these new racial and ethnic standards. As a precursor to data that will be available as these standards are more widely employed and reported, this chapter documents the rise in multiracial-multiethnic births in California from 1982 to 1999, addressing the following questions: What is the overall trend in multiracial-multiethnic births in California? What is the relationship be- MIXED RACE AND ETHNICITY IN CALIFORNIA 103 tween immigration and multiracial-multiethnic births in California? What is the racial-ethnic profile of California’s multiracial-multiethnic newborns? How do racial and ethnic group size, maternal age, and maternal education affect the occurrence of multiracial-multiethnic births in California? Data Source Data for this chapter are derived from California Vital Statistics Birth Records . The birth records include information for nativity, race, and Hispanic origin of both the mother and the father.3 The records office employs a twoquestion format for collecting racial and ethnic information. Although the racial and ethnic data in the birth records distinguish several Asian racial subgroups and several Hispanic ethnic subgroups, in this chapter the data are aggregated into the current OMB one-question format. The racial options are American Indian or Alaska native, Asian, black or African American , Hispanic or Latino (of any race), Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander, and white, non-Hispanic. A multiracial-multiethnic child is defined as one whose father is from one of these six racial or ethnic groups and whose mother is from another. Because data on maternal and paternal race-ethnicity are coded in discrete monoracial and monoethnic categories, it is impossible to determine whether either parent is multiracial or multiethnic; thus, the number of multiracialmultiethnic births reported here may be biased downward. Conversely, because the race or ethnicity of the child in this study is derived data rather than self-identified data, it may overestimate the number of multiracialmultiethnic births. In other words, some infants classified in this chapter as multiracial or multiethnic might be identified by their parents as monoracial or monoethnic (Waters 1990). Trends and Patterns Although the state has a racially and ethnically diverse population, and although it abandoned legal barriers to intermarriage relatively early compared with many other states, California has experienced only a moderate increase in multiracial-multiethnic births over the past nineteen years. As a percentage of total births in the state, multiracial-multiethnic births rose from less than 12 percent in 1982 to 15 percent in 1999 (figure 3.1). This change represents a numerical increase in multiracial-multiethnic births from about fifty thousand in 1982 to about seventy thousand in 1999. The absence of a precipitous increase in the occurrence of multiracialmultiethnic births can be explained by California’s status as a large immigrant -receiving state. Numerous studies have shown that compared with the native born, immigrants are less likely to marry a member of a different [3.144.212.145] Project MUSE (2024...

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