Disciplined Preferences: Explaining the (Re)Production of Latino Endogamy

While racial intermarriage is heralded as the last stage in integration processes, endogamy (intragroup marriage) is the overwhelming norm in the United States. What are the familial, dating, and community processes that produce endogamy? Drawing from 70 in-depth interviews with heterosexual Latinos concerning dating and marriage, this article reports that surveillance, punishment, and self-discipline harden racial boundaries and induce endogamy. Typically construed as highly personal, romantic preferences are, in fact, socially constructed and policed through family, peer, and community-level processes. Third parties such as family members, friend, and community members enforce intramarriage via advice, threats, censure, and violence. In turn, outsiders' surveillance and punishment converts into self-discipline, which constrains romantic preferences and choices. To maintain social distance, both non-Hispanic whites and Latinos discipline their kin and their kin's cross-racial romantic interests away from those who stand lower on the racial order. Latinos enjoy racial privilege relative to African Americans and preserve privilege by excluding blacks as romantic possibilities. Latino endogamy is a disciplined response to accumulated racial messages and racial boundary policing. Results show that racial communities are invested in perpetuating endogamy to preserve relative privilege and exert social pressures that largely support the contemporary racial hierarchy.