Pew Research Center (February 20, 2012)

Washington, DC – Marriage across racial and ethnic lines continues to be on the rise in the United States, according to a new report by the Pew Research Center’s Pew Social & Demographic Trends project. The share of new marriages between spouses of a different race or ethnicity increased to 15.1% in 2010, and the share of all current marriages that are either interracial or interethnic has reached an all-time high of 8.4%.

According to the report, intermarriage rates are highest among Hispanics and Asians. In 2010, more than a quarter (26%) of Hispanic newlyweds, and 28% of Asian newlyweds, married someone of a different race or ethnicity, or “married out.” By contrast, about one-in-six (17%) newlywed black non-Hispanics married non-blacks, and less than one-in-ten white non-Hispanics (9%) married someone who is not white, the lowest among all groups. Whites are by far the largest racial group in the United States, meaning that marriages between whites and minority groups are the most common types of intermarriage.

Among the report’s findings:

* Of the 275,500 new interracial or interethnic marriages in 2010, 43% are white/Hispanic couples, the most common type of intermarriage couple.

* Native-born Hispanic newlyweds are more than twice as likely as foreign-born Hispanic newlyweds to marry out—-36% versus 14%.

* About one-in-five (19%) of all newlyweds in New Mexico between 2008 and 2010 were white/Hispanic couples, a share higher than any other state. States with the next highest shares of newlywed white/Hispanic couples were Arizona (12%) and Nevada (11%).

* Between 2008 and 2010, the share of college-educated couples (both husband and wife) was 19% among intermarried white/Hispanic couples, but just 5% among Hispanic couples.

* Just as intermarriage has become more common, public attitudes have become more accepting. Nearly half (48%) of Hispanics, and 43% of Americans overall, say that more people of different races marrying each other has been a change for the better in our society, while only about one-in-ten of both groups think it is a change for the worse.

The report, “The Rise of Intermarriage: Rates, Characteristics Vary by Race and Gender,” authored by Wendy Wang, Research Associate, Pew Social & Demographic Trends, is available at the Pew Social & Demographic Trend’s website, www.pewsocialtrends.org.

The Pew Hispanic Center and Pew Social & Demographic Trends are projects of the Pew Research Center, a nonpartisan, non-advocacy research organization based in Washington, D.C. funded by The Pew Charitable Trusts.

By Hope Yen

San Jose Mercury News (February 16, 2012)

WASHINGTON (Associated Press) — Interracial marriages in the U.S. have climbed to 4.8 million — a record 1 in 12 — as a steady flow of new Asian and Hispanic immigrants expands the pool of prospective spouses. Blacks are now substantially more likely than before to marry whites.

A Pew Research Center study, released Thursday, details a diversifying America where interracial unions and the mixed-race children they produce are challenging typical notions of race.

“The rise in interracial marriage indicates that race relations have improved over the past quarter century,” said Daniel Lichter, a sociology professor at Cornell University. “Mixed-race children have blurred America’s color line. They often interact with others on either side of the racial divide and frequently serve as brokers between friends and family members of different racial backgrounds,” he said. “But America still has a long way to go.”

The figures come from previous censuses as well as the 2008-2010 American Community Survey, which surveys 3 million households annually. The figures for “white” refer to those whites who are not of Hispanic ethnicity. For purposes of defining interracial marriages, Hispanic is counted as a race by many in the demographic field.

The study finds that 8.4 percent of all current U.S. marriages are interracial, up from 3.2 percent in 1980. While Hispanics and Asians remained the most likely, as in previous decades, to marry someone of a different race, the biggest jump in share since 2008 occurred among blacks, who historically have been the most segregated.

States in the West where Asian and Hispanic immigrants are more numerous, including California, Hawaii, Nevada and New Mexico were among the most likely to have couples who “marry out” — more than 1 in 5. The West was followed by the South, Northeast and Midwest. By state, mostly white Vermont had the lowest rate of intermarriage, at 4 percent.

In all, more than 15 percent of new marriages in 2010 were interracial.

Due to increasing interracial marriages, multiracial Americans are a small but fast-growing demographic group, making up about 9 million, or 8 percent of the minority population.

Together with blacks, Hispanics and Asians, the Census Bureau estimates they collectively will represent a majority of the U.S. population by midcentury.

By Russell Contreras, Associated Press

The Fresno Bee (February 11, 2012)

SANTA FE, N.M. — The name George I. Sanchez has been celebrated for years among Mexican Americans in Texas and California.

A son of an Arizona miner, the Albuquerque-born Sanchez worked his way out of poverty as a rural public school teacher in New Mexico to become a pioneer scholar and education activist. His 1940 classic book “Forgotten People” brought attention to the plight of poor Mexican Americans in Taos.

His writings on racial segregation attracted the attention of Thurgood Marshall, the lead NAACP attorney in the landmark Brown v. Board of Education case and later a U.S. Supreme Court justice.

But while a dozen or so schools in Texas and California are named in honor of Sanchez – including the School of Education building at the University of Texas where he taught for many years – not a single school in New Mexico bears his name. Few New Mexico educators or activists know much about him, according to historians and educators. No plaque exists to show his birthplace or the school where Sanchez taught. He is not listed among the state’s notable figures in New Mexico Centennial guidebooks.

In a state obsessed with its Hispanic heritage, its most celebrated Latino civil rights leader and “dean of Mexican American studies,” ironically, is seldom mentioned. His political fallout with state lawmakers in the 1930s over education reform and a divorce with his first wife, Virginia Romero, who was from a politically connected New Mexican family, diminished his stature at the time. Forty years after his death, few memories of him remain.

“He’s a forgotten man for a forgotten people,” said his granddaughter Cindy Kennedy, 48, a Santa Fe teacher.

Sanchez developed his theories on school inequalities using New Mexico’s Hispanic and Navajo populations as examples. He argued that bilingual students were discriminated against by monolingual school systems and testified in landmark court cases about the negative effects of segregation and IQ testing on Hispanic, American Indian and black children.

That work seldom comes up in present-day discussions about education reform in the state.

“It does surprise me that New Mexico doesn’t honor Sanchez,” said Carlos Blanton, a history professor at Texas A&M University, who is writing a book about the educator. “Maybe it’s because he left, and you just don’t leave New Mexico.”

Born in Albuquerque in 1906, Sanchez became a public school teacher at a small rural school in Yrisarri, N.M. just outside of Albuquerque at the age of 16. Within six years, he became superintendent of the Bernalillo County school district while taking classes at the University of New Mexico. It was this teaching experience among the children of poor Hispanic ranchers that he would later say sparked his mission to reform the state’s educational system, particularly IQ testing of Hispanics and American Indians, which he viewed as racial bias.

Eventually, Sanchez became what would be equivalent to the state’s secretary of education thanks to a grant from the Rockefeller Foundation while he also finished his Ph.D. at the University of California, Berkeley, said Blanton.

But Sanchez clashed with the state’s governor for pushing a state equalization funding formula for schools and came under fire from some lawmakers for helping with a University of New Mexico professor’s survey on racial attitudes in schools, said Blanton. The highly publicized fights resulted in the state opting not to fund a Department of Education, ultimately leaving Sanchez without a job.