Redefining the Immigrant South
Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston during the Cold War
Uzma Quraishi
Publisher: University of North Carolina Press
Imprint: The University of North Carolina Press
Published: 03/2020
Pages: 336
Subject: History, Social Science
Print ISBN: 9781469655192
eBook ISBN: 9781469655208
DESCRIPTION
In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted
expansive public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including
initiatives with the recently partitioned states of India and
Pakistan. U.S. operations in these two countries became the second-
and fourth-largest in the world, creating migration links that
resulted in the emergence of American universities, such as the
University of Houston, as immigration hubs for the highly
selective, student-led South Asian migration stream starting in the
1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston's South Asian
community had become one of the most prosperous in the metropolitan
area and one of the largest in the country.
Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow, Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States.
Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow, Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race, class, and ethnicity in the United States.
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