South Asian Americans, one of the largest groups of immigrants in the United States, are the most diverse community defined by religious, linguistic, economic, and generational distinctions. The experiences of Indian Americans, alongside Pakistani and Bangladeshi Americans, tell a story of social and political inclusion in which the distinctions within the groups play a significant role.
Sangay K. Mishra shows how the internal characteristics and distinctions lead to multiple paths of political inclusion, defying a unified group experience. He analyzes features such as class, religion, nation of origin, language, caste, gender, and sexuality in group mobilization.
How, for instance, has religion shaped the fractured political response to intensified discrimination against South Asians in the post-9/11 period? How have class and home country concerns played into various strategies for achieving political power? Pursuing answers, Mishra finds that while ethnic mobilization remains an important component of Desi experience, ethnoracial identity is deployed differently to produce distinct mobilizations.
Another 2014 event, considered to be an important milestone for the Indian American community, was the opening of an exhibition on Indian Americans at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, D.C. The early impetus for the exhibition is attributed to president Bill Clinton's Executive Order 13125, signed in 1999, creating the White House Initiative on Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders, which included the Smithsonian in its broad mandate "to improve the quality of life of Asian Americans. through increased participation in Federal programs" (Srinivasan 2014). The exhibition, titled "Beyond Bollywood: Indian Americans Shape the Nation," was an explicit attempt to capture the multifaceted and complex history of Indian Americans and underline their contributions to the United States. Displaying diverse stories of members of the Indian American community-from railroad and farm workers in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries who were denied the right to citizenship to spelling bee champions, H-1B visa professionals, taxi drivers, and Silicon Valley entrepreneurs in the contemporary period-the exhibition was an at- tempt to create a narrative of Indian American contributions by going beyond stereotypes and clichés. Even as the exhibition won praise for celebrating the place of the Indian American community within the larger American society, it also evoked criticism that other South Asian com- munities-Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Sri Lankan, and others were made invisible in its storytelling (Kalita 2014).
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