Epilogue

The epilogue reflects on the contemporary experiences of Indian and Pakistani Americans in the greater Houston area. Using anecdotal evidence, it draws attention to the enduring lived reality of race, class, and ethnicity in South Asian immigrants’ lives, and immigrants’ conflicting understandings about identity. It also provides a conclusion to the book.

Prologue

The formation of the Indian middle class around the mid-nineteenth century and of policies of race-based U.S. immigration exclusion in the same time period bears some explanation, since these spatially distinct but temporally overlapping processes merged during the Cold War. The historical development of these eventually entwining, transnational narrative strands forms the substance of this prologue. Concentrating on the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the prologue provides the foundational context on which to build a narrative of postwar South Asian immigration to the United States. It provides historical context of the histories of anti-Asian immigration law in the United States and Indian immigration.

Getting Acquainted with the University and the City, 1960s–Early 1970s

Chapter 2 details the arrival of South Asian students and immigrants in Houston during the 1960s. Along with college towns and major cities across the United States, Houston was an ideal host city for would-be immigrants. South Asians constructed ethnic, national, class, and racial identities through the university and the city. The University of Houston became the cultural hub and a key site for identity formation.

Introduction

The Introduction explains the basic premise, argument, and organization of the book. It also describes the methodology and sources, while defining the subject-specific terminology. It frames the work within categories of analysis, particularly race and class.

Finding Whiter and Browner Pastures in the Ethnoburbs, 1990s–2000s

Chapter 6 sheds light on the ways Houstonians navigated their city in response to demographically changing schools and neighborhoods, again reinforcing existing class-and race-based segregation. It examines the terms and coded racial language (“suburbs,” “good neighborhoods,” “poor people,” etc.) that characterized residential decisions or micro-migrations across the city, showing how they were loaded with meaning. The chapter interrogates the actions of South Asian Americans as a window into Houstonians’ views of race, the city, and its environs in the aftermath of de jure racial segregation to the present, highlighting how the processes of white and brown suburban flight upheld de facto segregation.

Inhabiting the Internationalizing City, 1970s

As Indian and Pakistani students graduated from Houston’s universities, found employment, and reconstructed ethnic identity, they joined other South Asian residents in settling throughout the city in the late 1960s and 1970s. The local metropolitan context was that of an internationalizing, rapidly developing urban area. As the formal architecture of Jim Crow was dismantled in these very decades, South Asian immigrants’ engagement with the city illuminates the social and economic hierarchies that continued to shape the city.

Riding Up the Oil Boom, Sliding Down the Oil Bust, Mid-1970s–1980s

In response to the oil bust of the early 1980s and especially the much-delayed desegregation of Houston schools, neighborhood boundaries and demographics in the 1980s underwent reorganization. The overlapping processes of suburbanization from the mid-1970s and economic fallout in Houston in the 1980s contributed to sweeping change across the metropolis. These transformations nonetheless reinforced an entrenched culture of racial residential segregation.

U.S. Ideological Linkages with Indians and Pakistanis, 1950s–Mid-1960s

Chapter 1 is an examination of the major public diplomacy programs of the USIA and foreign policy initiatives of the State Department in the 1950s and 1960s. In the early years of the Cold War, the United States implemented a wide range of programs in India and Pakistan, as well as other Third World countries. It inadvertently laid the foundation for migration networks between South Asia and the United States.

The Formation of Interethnic Community, 1960s–1970s

Chapter 3 considers how South Asian immigrants reconciled notions of class and race from India and Pakistan with those of a changing American South. Tolerated but socially marginalized as too foreign, Indian and Pakistani students collapsed their own national identities to form an interethnic community identity, mainly through the university. Through the American Host Family program, a Cold War initiative, students also built an off-campus support network.