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Intermarriage And Ethnicity: Punjabi Mexican Americans, Mexican Japanese, And Filipino Americans, Karen B. Leonard

Explorations in Ethnic Studies

The problem is intermarriage, specifically intermarriages patterned by gender (all the men are from one ethnic background and almost all of the women from another) which produce significant biethnic communities. The author's original research on Punjabi Mexican Americans, people whose fathers came from India's Punjab province and whose mothers were of predominantly Mexican or Mexican American heritage, combined field work and interviews with California county records and local historical materials to show the flexibility of ethnic identity. She compares the Punjabi Mexican Americans to Filipino European Americans and Mexican japanese, using studies done by Barbara Posadas and Chizuko Watanabe. She …