Over at 2 Blowhards Michael comments on the phenomena of the rise of the "desi," which is often take to be a generic term for American brown people (though if you read the comments you can see the problem with this appellation). As I noted over at Michael's blog, and as you can gather from previous posts, I am ambivalent about the coalescence of a "desi" ethnic awareness analogous to "African American" or "Asian American" or "Hispanic American."

On an unrelated note, I was checking out a wedding registry as a friend of mine is getting married next month, and I noticed that on Macy's website you can leave the first name off (it is an optional field). So, I decided to do an experiment, I typed in the names "Kumar," "Desai" and "Mehta" (which I believe are Gujarati, often Patel, names) [1]. I entered in 204 data points, and this is the breakdown I found:

All brown couple: 126
Brown male, non-brown female: 41
Brown female, non-brown male: 37

That's a 38% intermarriage rate for this subset. To do another run, I looked up some Bengali Hindu last names, and this is what I got:

All brown couple: 47
Brown male, non-brown female: 17
Brown female, non-brown male: 17

A 42% intermarriage rate.

I sampled a little more (tried a few Tamil names, etc.), and I got similar results (Trust me! Though sample sizes were too small taken alone. Gujaratis only have a few names and I know the Bengali names). Obviously, these individuals are not a representative sample of all brown people getting married in the United States. If they are being listed at Macy's it seems probable that they skew toward the higher SES brackets (or self-perceive in such a fashion), but it is interesting because this is the group that will contribute to the inevitable leadership cadre in any nacsent ethnic-block. As I have said before, the day of the desi might be over before it began, these results fit in with shockingly high intermarriage rates for first generation South Asians (as well as the relative gender-balance in intermarriage). Inspecting the pairings, I did note that South Asians with non-South Asian first names seemed more likely to be paired up with a non-South Asian (Stacy Mehta + John Anderson being more common than Himesha Mehta + John Anderson), perhaps because more (most?) of these individuals are American born. Additionally, many in California seemed to be marrying Latinos, though I also noted many Irish American surnames. It was also clear that a large number of "brown-brown" marriages were cross-communal (that is, various South Asian communities), implying they were not arranged. There were more interreligious (by origin) marriages than I would have expected, that is, a non-Muslim name with a Muslim name, and though it is harder to gauge it seemed that there were a fair number of interethnic marriages as well (my friends over at Sepia can collect the data and analyze it more in a more thorough fashion if they are curious!). This implies that a South Asian American identity decoupled from Indian ethnic/religious/caste awareness is forming in the United States. Finally, I noted only two examples of inter-Asian American marriage, that is, where a South Asian was marrying an Asian non-South Asian. That's less than 1% of the intermarriages, and indicates that South Asians and Asian non-Asians are going to continue to identify as two separate groups, no matter what identity politics activists might prefer in the interests of critical mass [2].

One thing is clear, America is becoming more complex as simplistic typologies simply won't do. I have not seen the rule of hypodescent at work among children of half South Asian origin (just like children who are half East Asian), so though a brown American identity is forming, it is being eroded by high intermarriage rates. Unlike Jews, who had a century of endogamy (1860-1960) to firm up their group identity in the face of internal divisions & compelled by external bigotry, I am skeptical that South Asians will be able to follow in the foot steps of this group, whom they are so often compared to [3]. That is was then, this is now.

Update: Manish replies.

1 - Searching for Patel required a first name qualifier, and this was problematic because it seemed to result in duplication. I could have narrowed the date restriction, but I have a finite amount of time.

2 - Since "Asian Americans" form nearly 5% of the people in the 20-40 age bracket, and many of these marriages seem to be based in California and New York where you would expect the two groups to meet regularly in social situations, it almost suggests an aversion between South Asians and Asian non-South Asians. Most likely, both semi-immigrant groups actually cluster closer in outlook and attitude to whites, who serve as the common cultural substrate to which they assimilate, than they do to each other. The main commonality is that neither is white, which frankly isn't much to go on unless your fixation on whiteness (or anti-whiteness) is the paramount concern in your life.

3 - There are multiple problems with an "optimistic" mapping of the Jewish experience with the South Asian experience. Though the difference between German and Eastern European, Reform and Orthodox, Hasidic and non-Hasidic, were deep, the differences between various South Asian groups are even wider. The proper analogy is with European Americans, not Jewish Americans, as the variation in religion, language and race makes South Asians much more intravariant as a group than Jews ever were. This internal substructure decreases with each generation in the United States, but there is also likely a proportional increase in the the possibility of out-group intermarriage. In other words, desi identity is a dynamic equilibrium between over there and here, situated in an optimal middle where non-browns are Other but out-ethnic, out-religious and out-caste differences are no longer as salient.