By Brian Melley/AP
In a park on the edge of Stockton, Calif.’s muddy shipping channel, a white man and an Asian American woman hold hands beneath a shade tree. A black man and his white wife squint in the sunlight as they push their three children in strollers toward a fountain choked with squealing children of different ethnicities.
On a spring day with temperatures soaring, this inland port city is a melting pot of many kinds.
Contrary to what demographers expected to find in the U.S. Census, California’s multiracial population — nearly twice the national average — is not concentrated in the urban coastal cities.
A “multiracial belt” runs through the agricultural heartland of the state, with Stockton in the center.
“Everybody’s assumption is to equate multiracial with cosmopolitan,” said Dowell Myers, a professor of urban demography at the University of Southern California. “That’s a gut assumption. I think virtually everyone assumed that, including myself when I started.”
While 1.6 million, or 4.7 percent, of the state’s 33.8 million people indicated they were more than one race on the census, Myers’ Race Contours 2000 Project found even greater percentages in a band of counties in the center of the state that is better known for rural farm land.
The nine counties, running from Yuba in the north to Madera in the south, have multiracial populations ranging from 5.2 percent to 6.4 percent.
Stockton, 85 miles east of San Francisco, and Elk Grove, just south of Sacramento, were the highest-ranked places in the area, each having 6.8 percent multiracial. That’s nearly three times the national average of 2.4 percent.
It doesn’t take more than a stroll through this once prosperous gold rush depot to witness the diversity that has grown up here since Chinese laborers arrived in pioneer days, and a newer wave of Asian Americans came after the Vietnam War.
A quick examination of birth records in the San Joaquin County seat also confirms the pattern across the region. On New Year’s Day, for example, twin girls were born to a Japanese American mother and a father of white and Native American origin. Casey Sayler, 23, a pizza maker from Lodi, said he let his daughters, Kaylee Akemi Mataga-Sayler and Alyssa Kimiko Mataga-Sayler, also have their mother’s name because it meant so much to her.
“I actually think it’s pretty cool,” he said. “It’s cool I have a bunch of races in me ... I don’t care if I’m a mutt or a pure breed.”
The pride that can go with acknowledging a mixed heritage was echoed by Carmen Grothe, a 26-year-old Chinese woman who lives in Stockton with her Latino husband and their three kids.
“My children are just a big pot of soup,” she said. “They make beautiful babies, though.”
The blurring color lines in the smaller inland cities reflects greater integration, Myers said. The places are ethnically diverse, yet small enough that cultures overlap.
“If you’re a Korean in Sacramento, your chance of dating other Koreans is a lot lower than if you’re in L.A.,” Myers said. “There’s a greater chance of socially interacting out of your own ethnic group. There’s also the additional factor that Los Angeles County has a lot of new immigrants, as does San Francisco, and newer immigrants are less likely to go out of their own groups.”
The interethnic mix also can be attributed to a greater multicultural acceptance that begins at childhood.
“There’s more of a mingling of the races together because they’re in school together,” said Stockton Mayor Gary Podesto. “Fortunately, young people don’t draw those hard lines that some of us older people have to overcome.”
Podesto said the many differences have not led to racial unrest, but that there’s much more work to be done to promote harmony among different cultures. The city is planning a series of forums for residents to discuss concerns about ethnic issues.
Lee Aundray, 31, a black man, and his white wife, Pamella Motten, 23, say they don’t encounter overt prejudice, but they do draw attention in some places.
“You catch a lot of attitudes, a lot of people looking at you crazy,” Motten said, while watching her three kids play in the fountain at Weber Point, a park where downtown meets the port.
Aundray gets frustrated at times, but mostly he tries to see through racial differences, and views everyone as a mix of cultures, ethnicities or religions.
“I don’t find myself different from anybody: blacks, whites or Orientals,” he said. |
