The forming of “mixed” couples for characteristics which are socially relevant is generally considered an indicator together of weakening of the social control of the communities on their own members and of social integration. Nevertheless, social integration is not an unambiguous concept. Especially on a practical level, it can mean very different things, as literature teaches us in general on relationships between groups and can be deployed between the opposing poles of assimilation and of “parallel separatism”. To an extent, these differences in models of integration not only count for groups (ethnic, religious, national, etc.), but also for “mixed” couples and families.

What are the differences which count?

The term “mixed couple” alludes to a form of heterogamy: to an alliance of couples socially different or where the specific content of relevant diversity can vary. Even without including in “mixed couples” those couples belonging to very different social classes – those mésaillances which in the long run have constituted the fear of relatives and produced a rich material for the bourgeois novel – the mixed couples include those where the partners are different for religious beliefs, or skin colour (“race”), or national origin, or ethnicity. It is worth noting that while in the United States mixed couples by autonomasia have been inter-racial and in particular those which see a “white” and a “black” person; in Italy even up to the eighties mixed couples by autonomasia were those between Italians of different religions, in particular those which saw a Catholic person with one from another religion. Only after the explosion of the migratory phenomenon did the meaning “mixed couple” partially change, and for mixed couples now, in everyday language we are talking about couples where one of the partners is foreign, especially if from a developing country and especially if they are perceived as very different ethnically speaking. We could say that today the image of a mixed couple by autonomasia in our country seems to incorporate both that which is prevalent in the USA (a “race”, not only a different ethnic group) and the “old” Italian image of different religions.

Even if the difference shown today is not really the one which exists between the various Christian religions, or among these and Judaism, but the Muslim difference. The “most mixed couple that there is” is between an Italian and an Islamic African. The fact that in some countries religious difference counts for more (especially if reinforced by the linguistic difference) compared to the ethnic-racial difference and in others the opposite happens, it was also noted by the study by Kalmijn and van Tubergen (2006) on Holland. These brief observations show how a couple can be considered mixed on a base of criteria and for different reasons and that “the difference that makes a difference”, for singles and their families, but also for the social context in which they live, changes in space and time. On the other hand, to open your eyes to consider the various ways in which a couple can be made up and can be considered mixed, allows us to see what there is in common in all the various ways of being a mixed couple and vice versa what makes one different from another. And in which way the formation of mixed couples can be considered an indicator of social integration.

Between secularisation and hegemony

First of all, couples which are a mixed match, together present a more explicit and more acute version of “evolutionary problems” which all couples must face, even the most socially homogamic ones, as long as they come from different family traditions. Every couple, in fact, has to build a “common way” as regards habits, traditions, different know how’s: what is eaten and how it is cooked, how Birthdays and festivities are celebrated, which are the important rituals and dates, how affection is expressed, what the standards of hygiene are, the gender models and parent-child relationships – these are all things which are perceived differently in more or less every family and make up the baggage and the navigatory map which every person takes with them when they form a couple and on which negotiations are made with their partner. When these differences are motivated, given importance, or even interpreted as having more than one origin, so to say, domestic idiosyncratic, but collective, things obviously become even more complicated.

It is no longer a case of inter-individual and inter-domestic differences, but of differences between social groups, populations, cultural worlds. “Them” and “us”, “your parents” and “my parents” become global worlds of different lives – which can attract or on the other hand put off – which in a certain sense swallows the single individual and the single family, taken on as mere representations of that world, at the same time giving a particular form to conflicts and negotiations (on gender models, on relationships with relatives, etc.) which in a “non-mixed” marriage would take on another code (see also Collet and Varro 2000). It is an evident phenomenon, not only when there are conflicts, but in actually looking for the “different” partner, whether it be the search for a Latin-American woman because she is “more woman”, or “more sensual”, or a woman from Eastern Europe because she is “more emancipated” than an “Italian woman”.

On the other hand, family cultures, the ways of making a family, are among the most distinctive elements of society, being part of the long term characteristics: the importance of relatives, gender models and relationships between generations more or less clearly distinguish society even belonging to the same geographical area, as shown by the levels of female occupation, rather than matrimonial instability or the spread of more uxorio cohabitations or still the types of political debates on the family and the juridical solutions given in different European countries. This is shown in the comparative studies on behaviour such as the World Value Survey or the European Value Survey. Not only, therefore, Italy is different from Morocco or from Senegal. As it is from Switzerland or from Germany or from Holland. These differences emerge more clearly when there are children, if the couple finds itself confronted with models of socialisation and of relations at times even very different and which cannot be recomposed once and for all; but they present themselves again in every phase of their children’s upbringing (Crippen and Brew 2007). The “trans-cultural work” of a mixed family in a certain sense is never done.

The “differences” are socially stronger and more organised, especially in the religious field, are those which are less open to compromise and therefore those which on the one hand have a limiting effect on the formation of a mixed couple, especially through marriage. On the other hand, in the case of a mixed couple, they demand more to be recognised and confirmed in particular when there are children. All the great religions, in fact, have precise norms in this sense. This means that one of the two has to renounce following the norms of their own religion to allow the other to follow their own. This can happen only if he/she does not place too much importance on their own religion – when they do not convert (collocating the couple on the pole of assimilation). Or rather, mixed marriages are made possible from a weak identification, on the part of both partners, with their own differences, seen by the fact that one of the two renounces giving importance to their own differences, again because one identifies little or does not consider it to be a differences whose reproduction merits entering into conflict or renouncing the relationship of the couple. On equal terms of “difference” (religion in this case), we are dealing with different mixed couples. But in both cases this is expressed in levels of weak mixité – or inter-culturalism. In the first instance because both partners are carriers of weak differences, in the second because there is a hegemonic difference. Furthermore, it seems that children of religiously mixed marriages are on average less religious, and identify less with one religion or another and the related behaviour, compared to children from religiously homogamic couples. A mixité – or inter-culturalism – promoted by the “private” path of a couple would therefore seem together asking and promoting the sense of belonging to an identity for weak groups, or the privileged.

Voas (2003) on this theme, speaks of “demography of secularisation”: the more a society is multi-religious, the higher the number of mixed marriages, and the more secularised it becomes. One can therefore understand how “strong” religions are hostile to inter-religious marriages, whatever the other religion may be: because these are both an indicator and a cause of secularisation. One can also understand why this risk is often compared to hyper-identifying reactions, not only by one part of a community against the other, but also within families: with young people, for example, who use the “finding themselves” religious identity to mark their own position compared to their parents and an “over secularised” society. The case of Christian women, married to an Islamic man, who convert and in a hyper-realistic way take on Islamic behaviour (full-length veil, acceptance of polygamy, full subordination to their husband) is another example of this possible anti-secularising reaction. The theme of secularisation, but also that of the “dominant difference”, could be an analogy even when “the difference that counts” is racial, or rather concerns visible somatic traits. Inter-racial marriages, in fact, mark a breaking down of barriers and of the hierarchy between “races”. Vice versa, as in the case of religion, they can also result in choices of allegiance regarding which race to favour and social allegiance, for oneself and one’s own children.

Nevertheless, it is precisely the visibility of mixité – first in the couple and then in any possible children – and the fact that racial belonging is a social construct which has many ramifications and pervasive consequences on social organisation – spaces, resources, systems of expectations and so on – forces the couple and then the mixed family to stay in the public eye and to account for their own choices in public, in a much more systematic and diffused way than for every other type of mixed couple. Waters’ observations (2000) on problems of “public” identification of oneself posed in the USA up until its censorship in 2000 of people of “mixed race” coming from multi-racial societies of Latin America where there are more differences than those between “white” and “black”, are from this point of view enlightening. The administrative definitions, which are by no means neutral culturally and in values, overlap like a rigid breastplate on identity and flexible affiliation, at the same time crystallising a hierarchy not only among the “races” but also among the ways of affiliation.

Whoever has a black forefather was automatically classed as black, irrespective of how far back and “isolated” this forefather was. It is a case in which the dominant race, more than appropriating “mixed” products, excludes them and defends itself from them. An analogous problem was posed in Italy and Alto Adige, for Italo-German mixed families. To the extent that in that province many resources are allocated based on ethnic-linguistic affiliation and the education system and distinct and separate social services for the two groups, identifying the affiliation of the children in an unambiguous – and therefore biased – way, putting them into one system of resources rather than another, as well as of identification. Mixed marriages should not only deal with possible conflicts of allegiance as regards the community of primal affiliation. Those which are mixed due to religion or to nationality (and even more when religion and nationality are combined) also always imply possible conflicts about rules, including juridical ones, and on appropriated authorities or institutions to turn to in case of conflict. The newspapers, but also bookshops, are full of cases in which the foreign parent has disappeared with the son/daughter under the protection of their own government and its laws. It concerns Islamic North-African fathers, but also fathers and mothers who are American, or English, or Slovakian, or Italian. Not only do the laws on care of the children in the case of marital separation vary from country to country, even within the European Union, but each country tends to give more recognition to the demands and rights of its own citizens.

Old and new asymmetries

Whether on an international level or in Italy, the combination of gender affiliation and of ethnic group/race produces specific configurations of mixed couples which reproduce social inequalities of gender and the social layering of ethnicity/races (without excluding great and marvellous love stories which overcome every obstacle). Firstly, as Rosina points out on this edition of the magazine, within the dominant ethnic group (whites, autochthones) it is more the men than the women ho form a mixed couple. Or rather, men in a dominant position “fish” in the marital market in all the other groups. Secondly, thus doing they follow hierarchies of ethnic-racial acceptance which strongly weigh on marital opportunities both for women and for men from other groups. This means that the mixed couples in which the man belongs to the dominant group (for nationality and/or race/ethnic group) are often more asymmetrical – for age first of all, but also for social conditions irrespective of education – than couples formed of people of similar ethnicity and nationality, especially if the wife of a different nationality/ethnicity comes from a country not within the EU or the OECD. Furthermore, the woman in this case can be weakened by finding herself deprived of her own informal networks – whether domestic or not – therefore more dependent on her husband. The situation is different when it is the woman ho belongs to the dominant group.

Not only does it concern a minority of mixed couples, indicating how women have more limited marital markets than men. These couples are apparently less asymmetrical and traditional, in that the age difference is less than in those formed with the man being dominant, and at times the reverse. Furthermore, the women find themselves with relatively strong negotiation resources: they belong to the community where they live and can in theory count on an intact social capital. To say that it concerns couples which are more symmetrical and more equal would be simplistic, in that when people from Western Europe or in any case, the developed world get married, the women often get in a couple with ethnic/racial/national groups in which it is less common to find an autochthon man “fish”. This somewhat indicates that it deals with women in weak positions on the autochthon marital market – for age and other personal characteristics – and that they “spend” their own affiliation to the dominant group as a resource on the inter-ethnic/inter-racial/international marital market, but “having to content themselves with” the men belonging to less appetising marital markets, given the social construction of the “differences which count”.

That is why it is true that they are in a relatively strong position of negotiation, to the extent that they allow access to precious resources. But they can be weakened by their partner’s social position (as well as exposed to conflicts on very different gender models and gender relations). In this case, the women belonging to less appetising groups for men in the dominant group can find themselves in a very disadvantaged situation on the marital market: it is difficult for them to be taken into consideration as a partner for dominant men; but also compared to men from their group they are competing against the women from the dominant group. In any case, these figures would seem to indicate that while men from a mixed marriage for nationality/ethnicity (especially if it concerns nationality/ethnicity not from the “first world”) often look to create a model of a couple which they fear they can no longer create with a woman from their own group, the women, whether they marry a Western European or an immigrant from a developing country, look rather to create a more symmetrical relationship. Naturally, one can find examples indicating the opposite and there would be research, even qualitative, which is more in depth than what is available. But these clues, if nothing else, indicate that the integration which mixed coupes and families are moving towards, can have very different contents.

This article was published in Reset, number 103.

Translation by Sonia Ter Hovanessian