Marrying across Borders in Latin America: Visualizing Intermarriage Flows

Abstract

The authors propose an adaptation of the well-known “circular plot,” traditionally used to quantify international migration flows, to visualize patterns of intermarriage within Latin American countries. The authors present data on intermarriage flows between partners’ countries of origin using data from recent household surveys from five Latin American countries. The visualization allows an easy-to-grasp snapshot of marital pairings considering partners born in different countries, as well as the identification of their spatial patterns. In some countries, such as Colombia and Peru, most intermarriage occurs between natives and Venezuelans. Conversely, in Chile, Ecuador, and Uruguay, there is much wider heterogeneity in country-pair combinations. In Chile, no country-pair combination dominates, reflecting the more balanced nature of migration flows from a broader set of countries. Overall, the results aid the interpretation of trends and patterns in marriage across country lines by placing them within a comparative regional context. This is a flexible tool that could be easily adapted to multiple other countries within or outside of the region, to analyses over time, and to a heterogeneous array of couple-level characteristics.

Extensive scholarship exists in Latin America on patterns of intermarriage (Telles and Esteve 2019). Nonetheless, scholars tend to overwhelmingly study intermarriage across educational (Robles 2024; Torche 2010; Urbina, Frye, and Lopus 2024) or racial/ethnic lines (Telles, Esteve, and Castro 2023; Tomás 2017), paying little attention to partnerships that form across country borders (i.e., intermarriage by nativity). On one hand, this is not surprising, as Latin America has traditionally been a context of out-migration (Massey and Aysa-Lastra 2011) and the prevalence of intermarriage by nativity remains relatively low in absolute terms (Table S1, Supplemental Materials). On the other hand, this is an important research gap given increasing rates of intraregional migration within Latin America (McAuliffe and Oucho 2024), especially since the Venezuelan humanitarian crisis (Weitzman and Huss 2024), as well as diversifying migration streams (Inter-American Development Bank and Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development 2021). Leveraging data harmonized as part of a broader project on the intersection between migration and marriage patterns in Latin America, we take advantage of this lack of evidence to provide a cross-country snapshot on unions that form between partners born in different pairs of Latin American countries.

We propose an adaptation of the well-known “circular plot,” traditionally used to quantify international migration flows (Abel and Sander 2014; Sander, Stillwell, and Lomax 2018), to visualize heterosexual intermarriage between partners’ countries of origin. To this end, we use data from recent household surveys from a sample of five Latin American countries, namely, Chile (2022), Colombia (2022), Ecuador (2023), Peru (2022), and Uruguay (2022), a subset of countries that have witnessed consistent immigration in recent years; full details on the surveys and variable construction are provided in Table S2. Our approach provides information on the intensity and patterns of intermarriage by nativity leveraging a visualization design that is effective, visually appealing, and aligned with the increasing nature of Latin American migration as “circular” South-South migration (Cerrutti and Parrado 2015). The key elements of the design are (1) the arrangement of partners’ countries of origin in a circular layout; (2) the scaling of flows (on a logarithmic scale) to allow the entire system to be shown simultaneously; and (3) the expression of the volume of intermarriage between country pairs through the width of the flow, colored differently for each origin country. ¹ Ultimately, we aim to visualize, for each country, all country combinations of the couples who intermarry, not only the ones involving one native and one nonnative, as well as the sheer volume of marriages crossing country lines in a given year.

Results are provided in Figure 1, which includes two panels. Figure 1A shows, for each country, regional intermarriage flows between countries of origin of partners living in a given country in a given year. Each plot considers only married or cohabiting couples with partners born in different countries (i.e., couples for which both partners share the same country of birth are not included). Note that countries of origin may vary for each recipient country, although some countries appear in all five plots, such as Venezuela, reflecting the large recent out-migration from the country (Garcia Arias 2024). Countries of origin are represented as fragments of the circumference of each plot. The edges illustrate the presence of intermarriage, while the thickness of the connection captures the relative importance of each country-pair combination. As the likelihood of observing partnerships occurring across country lines in a country reflects the share of the migrant population in that same country (Domingo, Bueno, and Esteve 2014; Lanzieri 2012), Figure 1B presents, for each nation, the top five countries of origin in terms of migrant stock (2020, midyear estimates); alternative estimates replacing migrant stock on a logarithmic scale with stock as a percentage of a country’s population are provided in Figure S1. Not surprisingly, Venezuela is the only country that appears in the top five sending countries in each plot.

Figure 1.

Intermarriage flows between partners’ country of origin (log scale), by country (A) and top five origin countries of Latin American migrants (migrant stock, log scale), by country (B).

The results unveil some interesting dynamics. Starting from Figure 1A, in each country, most intermarriage occurs between the native population and immigrants. In other words, “locals” are the most likely to enter partnerships formed across country lines, a by-product of the fact that, as we are plotting raw quantities, natives form the largest share of each country’s population. In some countries, such as Colombia and Peru, most intermarriage occurs between natives and Venezuelans. Colombia also shows sizable intermarriage flows between natives and Peruvians and natives and Ecuadoreans, while Peru shows sizable flows between natives and Bolivians and between natives and Ecuadoreans. In Uruguay, important intermarriage flows are between Uruguayans and Argentinians and between Uruguayans and Brazilians, likely because of geographical proximity. Conversely, in Chile and Ecuador, there is far broader heterogeneity in country-pair combinations. In Chile, for instance, no clear country-pair combination dominates, reflecting the more balanced nature of migration flows from a broader set of countries (all possible flows for each country sorted from most to least prevalent, alongside pairwise statistical tests between flows, are reported in Table S3). This higher balance is confirmed in Figure 1B, which shows that after Venezuelans, the most prevalent migrant groups in Chile in 2020 were Peruvians, Haitians, Colombians, and Bolivians, all in rather similar volumes. Conversely, in Colombia (and, to a lesser extent, in Peru and Ecuador) Venezuelans were by far the dominant migrant group. Only in Uruguay were Argentinians the dominant migrant group in 2020, followed by Brazilians and Venezuelans.

The intermarriage patterns uncovered in this visualization have multiple explanations, which we will explore in a series of future studies. First, flows partly represent the country composition of immigrants in each receiving context (“opportunity structure”). For instance, Colombia and Peru have received the largest inflow of Venezuelan migrants in the last decade (Weitzman and Huss 2024) and, consequently, feature a higher share of intermarriage between natives and Venezuelans. Meanwhile, Chile has implemented more stringent visa conditions since 2019, leading to a more restricted migration inflow (Del Real 2024) and, consequently, more heterogeneity in terms of intermarriage by country of origin. Second, aspects such as cultural closeness and ethnoracial distance remain key considerations in assortative mating behavior (e.g., among Uruguayans and Argentinians and among Colombians and Venezuelans) (Grill 2023). Third, intermarriage patterns seem to follow historical migration flows between neighboring countries. That is the case of Uruguay and Argentina, Peru and Bolivia and, to a lesser extent, Colombia and Peru, all country-pairings with long histories of circular migration (Cerrutti and Parrado 2015).

All in all, this simple visualization is effective at showcasing the varied nature of intermarriage by nativity in Latin America, as well as the significant cross-country differences in country-pair combinations. The adaptation we propose is a flexible tool that could be easily extended to other countries within or outside the region, to analyses over time (see, e.g., Figure S2 for an application to Peru at two different time points), to other couple-level characteristics (e.g., race, ethnicity, education), and to “margin-free” flows (e.g., propensities to marry purged by compositional factors such as population size or changes in population composition). Last, the graphs we present do not make any distinction by sex; that is, they do not distinguish between whether a country of origin is the wife or the husband’s country of origin, yet these distinctions could be easily captured in further adaptations, providing an interesting and novel glimpse into gendered aspects of intermarriage.

Supplemental Material

sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241290679 – Supplemental material for Marrying across Borders in Latin America: Visualizing Intermarriage Flows

Supplemental material, sj-docx-1-srd-10.1177_23780231241290679 for Marrying across Borders in Latin America: Visualizing Intermarriage Flows by Adriana Robles, Luca Maria Pesando, Alejandra Abufhele, Mauricio Bucca and Daniela R. Urbina in Socius