”We had one or two unpleasant incidents, nothing much,” adds Pat, who also works at the UIC campus, in the School of Education. ”Once we were all in a paint store. The clerk just stared at our 2-year-old and 9-month-old daughters and asked if they were Jim`s. Stuff like that.”
Although they haven`t encountered much pressure from society, Pat and Jim say they sometimes have to work very hard to bridge the cultural gaps that lie between them.
”There will always be situations where one of us will feel out of place,” Jim says. ”Pat`s family moved here from Mexico when she was 5. When they get together, the men and women talk separately, and all the conversation is in Spanish, which I don`t understand. Until one of her brothers helps out by translating, I have no idea what they are talking about. I`d like to learn the language, but right now I`m working and trying to earn my master`s degree in public administration. I don`t have time to breathe.”
Pat nods. ”I was worried about our differences before we were married, when I first met his friends at a party. All of them were white, and a lot of them smoked and drank, two things I was raised never to do. I really felt like I didn`t belong.”
Jim slings his long arm around her shoulders. ”I convinced her that we belong together and that`s all that matters,” he says.
Like all married couples, they have their points of contention. Pat refuses to dance in the clubs Jim used to frequent, because the pop music they play ”is too white.” Jim feels awkward dancing to salsa. Pat would like to have her baby daughter`s ears pierced because that`s what`s done in her culture. Jim says earrings can wait.
Most of the people they socialize with are friends they`ve made since they were married. ”They`re mostly people from work. They`re students from everywhere. It`s like the United Nations in our offices,” Pat says.
The couple met in 1985 when they worked in the same UIC office. ”We were attracted to each other immediately,” he says. ”We used to kid around and yell at each other. But I didn`t think it was smart to date someone I worked with. So I waited until a year later when I switched departments. ”Pat lived with her folks in Pilsen (a South Side, predominantly Mexican community), and I was very uncomfortable in her neighborhood at first. I also didn`t understand why she didn`t ask me inside to meet her family.”
Pat grins. ”I was trying to avoid trouble. I`d never dated a non-Hispanic before, and when I finally told my parents about Jim a month later, they weren`t too happy. My father worried how Jim`s family would feel about me. He said: `You`re not white. They may not treat you well.` ”
Jim waited three months before introducing Pat to his widowed mother.
”My mom`s not the most open-minded person in the world. Her first comment when I told her about Pat was something like, `I hope you like brown babies.` ”
But Jim was determined. He pursued Pat in spite of her mother`s coolness towards him and the 10:30 p.m. curfew her father gloweringly imposed on their dates. ”Now everything`s much better on both sides. Once you marry into the Garcia family, like it or not, you are a Garcia,” he says.
Two years ago Jim and Pat traveled to the Mexican village where many of her extended family still live. ”It was really a learning experience for me. Pat had to translate everything, but everyone was really warm.”
Jim says their bicultural marriage has enriched their lives. The couple`s desire that their girls be bilingual is all but assured by Pat`s Spanish-speaking mother, who baby-sits while Jim and Pat work. Jim, the chef in the family, loves his mother-in-law`s spicy cooking and is learning to emulate it.
”I`m very happy, but I don`t fool myself about the prejudice,” he says. ”If I`m in a group of whites and someone makes a bigoted statement about Hispanics, I usually consider the source and feel insulted.”
How would he react if someday, one of his daughters brings home a boyfriend of a different race?
Jim laughs. ”That`s easy. They`re my little girls. No matter whom they bring home, I`ll just take lessons from my father-in-law.”
ROBIN & TERRY MCGARRIGLE
ROBIN AND TERRY MCGARRIGLE feel very positive about the future. Gradually, they believe racial relations will improve.
”We`re moving toward the year 2000. Look at what`s happening in the Communist bloc. If they can free their people, maybe we can free our minds,” says Robin, 33, a Lake County probation officer.
Although they can`t control society`s progress, Robin and Terry say that within the walls of their rambling, turn-of-the-century home, their family functions like any other.
”Sure, we`re a biracial couple, but first, we`re a couple, two people who love each other,” says Terry, 32, a soft-spoken photographer who works in a photo equipment store.
Lean, with brown curly hair, a mustache and deep-turquoise eyes, Terry is all Irish. His wife is one of those people who, when asked to check a box describing her race, checks ”Other.”
”I don`t like racial classifications,” she says. ”Mostly I`m black, but my maternal grandmother was half American Indian, and my father has Indian blood too.”
Sturdily built, with chin-length black hair, cinnamon-colored skin and cheekbones a model would kill for, Robin sits with Terry at the dining table in their rambling home in Waukegan. The couple, who`ve been married eight years, chose to live on the city`s far north side because of its racial diversity.
But when they go out, the McGarrigles still have to deal with grocery-store clerks who inquire whether the food that fills their basket is all one order and waitresses who ask whether they want separate checks.
Rather than reacting angrily, they try to understand. ”If you make that stuff a big deal, it becomes a big deal,” Terry says. ”People here may say the wrong thing, but generally they`re just flustered. They`re trying to be polite.
”Outside big urban areas, it`s a different story. We lived in Normal when our first child was born. Just by looking at him, you couldn`t really tell his racial background. Whenever Robin took the baby out, perfect strangers would come up to her and ask if she was his nanny.”
Robin grimaces and softly says: ”It`s hard to explain how that made me feel. I began channeling that negative energy into building my son`s and, later, my daughter`s self-esteem. I know that as they grow up, they may feel socially stigmatized in some circles. I want them to be strong enough to handle it.”
The McGarrigles are convinced that education is the only way to combat prejudice. They serve as consulting counselors for the Waukegan public school system, helping students and their parents deal with such issues as discrimination and interracial dating.
But their own children don`t attend public school. ”When our 7-year-old was in kindergarten in a Waukegan public school,” Robin says, ”he came home one day all upset and said: `Mommy, am I Spanish? If I`m Spanish, how come I don`t speak it?` It turned out the kids on the bus were taunting and pressuring him to identify himself as one thing or another. At that point, we decided to enroll him in the Forest Bluff Montessori School in Lake Forest. It`s expensive, but the financial sacrifice is worth it. The education is better and the atmosphere is more tolerant.”
Private schools and prejudice were the last thing on their minds when Robin and Terry met at Illinois State University in Normal 10 years ago. Art majors living what they now call ”the bohemian life,” Robin studied fine jewelry, while Terry concentrated on clay sculpture.
”Our studios were next to each other. We went to a couple of gallery openings together, casual dates,” Robin says. ”Our friendship quickly blossomed into more.”
In those days, the two thought they were a lot alike. Terry was raised in far north suburban Mundelein in a family of 10. Robin grew up in nearby Zion in family of nine. Both had strong maternal role models. Terry`s mother was a nurse, Robin`s a community-minded public administrator.
”Now that we`re married, we know the truth,” she chuckles. ”He`s a homebody, I like to go out. I like contemporary jazz, he likes bebop. I don`t cook. Shoveling the sidewalk`s more my kind of thing.”
”Yeah,” Terry adds. ”The kitchen is mine!”
”Honestly, in those days, all we were thinking of was art,” Robin says. ”We just found a niche together. I`d always shied away from dating other artists, because they were so wild. But Terry was more reserved than I was. In his quiet way, he somehow could make such strong statements. I saw him as unique and special. What we had had nothing to do with color.”
The McGarrigles dated for two years before they decided to marry. At first Robin referred to her boyfriend only as ”Terry” when she talked to her parents. But as the couple became more involved, she told them Terry was white.
”They were happy about us. It turned out that some of our brothers and sisters actually knew each other. Besides, I wasn`t first in the family to intermarry. My mother`s brother`s wife is Polish.”
Because he was the proverbial ”seventh son” in his family, Terry says his parents responded ”pretty well” to the news. ”If I`d been one of my older brothers, it may have been more of a problem. But my parents had so many kids that by time they got to me, they were pretty mellow.”
Robin, who was baptized in the African Methodist Episcopal Church, and Terry, a Catholic, were married by a judge in a courthouse in Normal in 1982, with a few siblings and a lot of good friends attending. ”It seemed like the easiest way,” she says. ”Neither one of us was really a practicing anything.”
The next day they returned to Zion for a huge reception attended by both families.
The McGarrigles have kept close relations with both sets of parents, and both families celebrate birthdays together.
”You know, you talk to some interracial couples, and you hear a lot of anger,” Terry says. ”Mostly we just feel lucky. Things have turned out really well for us.”
TED YASUDA & ELAINE SIEGEL
WHEN TED YASUDA AND ELAINE Siegel married seven years ago, they assumed that their biggest problems would stem from the difference in their age, not their race.
Now they say they were naive.
Yasuda is Japanese. He was 26 and just out of law school when he pronounced his wedding vows. Siegel, who is white, was 33 and had already completed five years of graduate school at Harvard and traveled in Europe before she enrolled in the same class as Yasuda at the Law School of the University of Indiana in Bloomington.
”When we first got together in school, we got some raised eyebrows and second looks,” says Siegel, a litigator specializing in education law. ”We ran into a few ugly incidents traveling through small Indiana towns. We were spat at. Once someone threw basketballs at us. But we didn`t worry too much about it-until we told our parents that we were getting serious.”
Says Yasuda, who works for the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services: ”I didn`t expect a negative reaction, because we`d had such a wonderful time with each other`s parents. Initially, my family gave Elaine a very hard time. Call it nostalgic, but they always hoped I`d marry an Asian girl. And they made no bones about it.”
The couple has since re-established good relations with both families, but they say they`re now ”very aware” that some segments of society frown on their biracial marriage.
”Socially, there`s probably been lots of subtle exclusion,” Elaine says. ”But we`re probably no more interested in associating with people like that than they are with us.”
Tall and quietly articulate, she looks almost stately in her black slacks, moccasins and understated black-and-white sweater. As she sits in a wicker rocker in front of the hearth in their Victorian home, firelight dances on her honey-colored hair.
Yasuda sits across from her. Compactly built, wearing round tortoise-shell glasses, he was ever the attorney in his weekend attire of tie and pressed jeans.
Like many interracial couples, Ted and Elaine consciously searched for an ethnically and racially diverse community when they moved to Chicago in 1982. They chose East Rogers Park on the city`s Far North Side, where they said they`ve encountered little or no prejudice.
”Our experience in this city is probably colored by our association with the Buddhist Temple of Chicago,” Siegel says (she and her husband are both practicing Buddhists). ”Everyone there is emphatic about the unity of all people. We hope to start a family, and I`d be happy raising kids in that environment.”
Yasuda laughs. ”I probably know more Japanese-Americans through Elaine`s involvement with the temple than I do on my own. Most of our friends are also couples of different races. We don`t actively search for them, but I think we attract one another because we share a certain open-mindedness.”
Asians in America have a much easier time than do other minorities such as African Americans, Ted says. That, he believes, accounts for the couple`s relatively trouble-free experience.
”The stereotypes of Asians are kind of positive in a goofy way,” he says. ”We`re supposed to be smart and work real hard. We might be a little too polite. And some might say we`re buying up their country. But there are people who don`t like Orientals. They don`t warm up. They meet you, and there`s an immediate barrier there.”
Elaine had no such preconception when Ted first sat behind her in property class in 1979. ”I took a look at him and thought, `Oh, I`ll be great friends with this guy for a long time` ”
Says Ted: ”I could tell right away that she was very smart. Then I found out that, like me, she liked jazz, even the stranger stuff. That`s what got me really interested. I would play the sax for her, and she`d listen.
”Law school is really a great place to get to know someone,” he continues. ”It`s like coed boot camp.”
Elaine and Ted quickly discovered that for all their superficial differences, they shared a lot in common. For instance, both were Buddhists.
”My parents raised me as a mainline Protestant, but they were skeptical about religion,” Elaine says. ”I began identifying myself as a Buddhist in high school. Then, through Ted and his father, I grew more involved.”
Both Hoosiers, each had grown up feeling culturally isolated.
”My parents came from Appalachia,” Siegel says. ”They`re Southern, and they raised us that way. My dad`s an insurance salesman, and we moved to Ft. Wayne for his career. But we never felt completely at home in the Midwest.”
Ted`s situation was more complicated. His father, a professor of Far Eastern languages at Indiana University, was born in Japan. He moved to the States as a young man and married a Japanese-American woman here. After being interned during World War II, he returned to Japan to serve on a war-crimes tribunal for the U.S. State Department.
Ted was born in Japan. His family returned to the States when he was 5.
”I began dating whites in high school,” he says. ”I didn`t have a choice. There were only about two other Asians in the student population.
”My parents had to know that the longer I stayed in the Midwest, the less the chances were that I`d marry a Japanese girl,” he says. ”The Japanese community here is so small. My older brother married a WASP, and my sister married a Puerto Rican.
”When we told my parents we were moving in together, they gave Elaine a hard time initially. Besides race, they were worried about the age thing and whether our romance would endure past law school.”
Elaine`s parents, too, questioned the couple`s staying power. ”They asked me if I was attracted to Ted because of the novelty of the
relationship,” she says.
”But we decided to go ahead anyway,” Ted says. ”And now it`s seven years later, and here we are.”
