The author examines the paths South Asian immigrants in Chicago take toward assimilation in the late 20th century United States. She examines two ethnic institutions to show how immigrant activism ironically abets these immigrants' assimilation.

Desi Land is Shalini Shankar’s lively ethnographic account of South Asian American teen culture during the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. Shankar focuses on how South Asian Americans, or “Desis,” define and manage what it means to be successful in a place brimming with the promise of technology. Between 1999 and 2001 Shankar spent many months “kickin’ it” with Desi teenagers at three Silicon Valley high schools, and she has since followed their lives and stories. The diverse high-school students who populate Desi Land are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs, from South Asia and other locations; they include first- to fourth-generation immigrants whose parents’ careers vary from assembly-line workers to engineers and CEOs. By analyzing how Desi teens’ conceptions and realizations of success are influenced by community values, cultural practices, language use, and material culture, she offers a nuanced portrait of diasporic formations in a transforming urban region. Whether discussing instant messaging or arranged marriages, Desi bling or the pressures of the model minority myth, Shankar foregrounds the teens’ voices, perspectives, and stories. She investigates how Desi teens interact with dialogue and songs from Bollywood films as well as how they use their heritage language in ways that inform local meanings of ethnicity while they also connect to a broader South Asian diasporic consciousness. She analyzes how teens negotiate rules about dating and reconcile them with their longer-term desire to become adult members of their communities. In Desi Land Shankar not only shows how Desi teens of different socioeconomic backgrounds are differently able to succeed in Silicon Valley schools and economies but also how such variance affects meanings of race, class, and community for South Asian Americans.

In this compelling look at second-generation Indian Americans, Khyati Y. Joshi draws on case studies and interviews with forty-one second-generation Indian Americans, analyzing their experiences involving religion, race, and ethnicity from elementary school to adulthood. As she maps the crossroads they encounter as they navigate between their homes and the wider American milieu, Joshi shows how their identities have developed differently from their parents’ and their non-Indian peers’ and how religion often exerted a dramatic effect. The experiences of Joshi’s research participants reveal how race and religion interact, intersect, and affect each other in a society where Christianity and whiteness are the norm. Joshi shows how religion is racialized for Indian Americans and offers important insights in the wake of 9/11 and the backlash against Americans who look Middle Eastern and South Asian. Through her candid insights into the internal conflicts contemporary Indian Americans face and the religious and racial discrimination they encounter, Joshi provides a timely window into the ways that race, religion, and ethnicity interact in day-to-day life.

American Routes provides a comparative and historical analysis of the migration and integration of white and free black refugees from nineteenth century St. Domingue/Haiti to Louisiana and follows the progress of their descendants over the course of two hundred years. The refugees reinforced Louisiana's tri-racial system and pushed back the progress of Anglo-American racialization by several decades. But over the course of the nineteenth century, the ascendance of the Anglo-American racial system began to eclipse Louisiana's tri-racial Latin/Caribbean system. The result was a racial palimpsest that transformed everyday life in southern Louisiana. White refugees and their descendants in Creole Louisiana succumbed to pressure to adopt a strict definition of whiteness as purity that conformed to standards of the Anglo-American racial system. Those of color, however, held on to the logic of the tri-racial system which allowed them to inhabit an intermediary racial group that provided a buffer against the worst effects of Jim Crow segregation. The St. Domingue/Haiti migration case foreshadows the experiences of present-day immigrants of color from Latin-America and the Caribbean, many of whom chafe against the strictures of the binary U.S. racial system and resist by refusing to be categorized as either black or white. The St. Domingue/Haiti case study is the first of its kind to compare the long-term integration experiences of white and free black nineteenth century immigrants to the U.S. In this sense, it fills a significant gap in studies of race and migration which have long relied on the historical experience of European immigrants as the standard to which all other immigrants are compared.

This edited volume brings together scholars from various disciplines to discuss how language is used by, for, and about refugees in the United States in order to deepen our understanding of what ‘refugee’ and ‘resettlement’ mean. The main themes of the chapters highlight: the intersections of language education and refugee resettlement from community-based adult programs to elementary school classrooms; the language (of) resettlement policies and politics in the United States at both the national level and at the local level focusing on the agencies and organizations that support refugees; the discursive constructions of refugee-hood that are promulgated through the media, resettlement agencies, and even the refugees themselves. This volume is highly relevant to current political debates of immigration, human rights, and education, and will be of interest to researchers of applied linguistics, sociolinguistics, anthropology, and cultural studies.

Learning to Be Chinese American aims at exploring the complicated identity production process among Chinese immigrants in the United States in relation to the rapidly changing global and local contexts. Based on original ethnographic material collected in an upper-middle class Chinese American community, the author argues for the need to move beyond the framework of traditional nation-state boundaries in order to examine the identity production process of contemporary Chinese Americans. In doing so, we can better understand how this particular group, in response to changing economic and social conditions, actively takes part in the production of their unique ethnic identities through local institutions such as community-based organizations and ethnic education. This book expands the scope of existing literature on identity production among immigrants of color in both empirical and methodological terms.

Asian Americans are the fastest growing minority population in the country. Moreover, they provide a wonderful lens on the experiences of immigrants and minorities in the United States more generally, both historically and today. In this timely new text, Pawan Dhingra and Robyn Magalit Rodriguez critically examine key sociological topics through the experiences of Asian Americans, including social hierarchies (of race, gender, and sexuality), work, education, family, culture, identity, media, pan-ethnicity, social movements, and politics. With vivid examples and lucid discussion of a broad range of theories, the authors demonstrate the contributions of the discipline of sociology to understanding Asian Americans, and vice versa. In addition, this text takes students beyond the boundaries of the United States to cultivate a comparative and global understanding of the Asian experience, as it has become increasingly transnational and diasporic. Bridging sociology and the growing interdisciplinary field of Asian American studies, and uniquely placing them in dialogue with one another, this engaging text will be welcome in undergraduate and graduate sociology courses such as race and ethnic relations, immigration, and social stratification, as well as on ethnic studies courses more broadly.