Preserving Multiple Ancestry: Intermarriage And Mixed Births In Hawaii

Abstract

Most studies of intermarriage and mixed births rely on census and vital statistics data that allocate individuals among a set of mutually excl usive categories. This practice of assigning each individual to a single ethnic group unfortunately erases history twice for persons of multiple ancestry: it suppresses the mixed parentage of the children and it suppresses the fact that many parents were themselves of mixed parentage. We provide a simple method for incorporating estimates of the effect of mixed ancestry in analyses of mixed births and mixed marriages. We offer estimates of the actual rate of mixed births and mixed marriages in Hawaii by taking into account mixed racial and ethnic ancestry. Our estimates show that the rate of social and biological mixing in Hawaii has increased even faster than official data indicate. We develop the hypothesis that the presence of a sizeable group of individuals with mixed ancestry creates a momentum toward further mixing of the population, and show that our results are consistent with this hypothesis.