233 notes Preface 1. Richa Nagar and Amanda Lock Swarr, “Introduction: Theorizing Transnational Feminist Praxis” in Critical Transnational Feminist Praxis, ed. Swarr and Nagar (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2009), 14. introduction: situating stories 1. We use the term Pacific Northwest to refer to the states of Washington, Oregon, and Idaho, although during the time of the actual interviews, the narrators were all located in the greater Seattle area. The stories they tell of their journeys to Seattle also involve other locations in the Pacific Northwest, such as university towns in Oregon, Washington, and Idaho. Several of our narrators have connections to Canada and the proximity of Vancouver, just two hours from Seattle, makes British Columbia an important site as well in our conceptualization of the region. Thus, while our project is primarily circumscribed to the greater Seattle region, the Pacific Northwest as a site of imagination crosses the boundaries between Canada and the United States. 2 In general “South Asia” refers to those countries primarily located on the Indian subcontinent: India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bhutan, and the Maldives. Though these countries have different religious, cultural, linguistic, political, economic, and social histories, South Asia has been solidified as a category in the study of international relations and the field of “area studies” more broadly in the United States. Scholars such as Tani Barlow in “Founding Positions ,” Postcolonial Studies 3, no. 1 (1999): 19–29 argue that current formations of area studies evoked in American universities have legacies in Cold War–era attempts to increase knowledge about particular regions to promote U.S. military and economic interests. Nalini Natarajan, in “South Asian Area Studies in Transatlantic Dialogue,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 27, no. 3 (2007): 591–600, builds on this point and argues that the influx of South Asian professionals and intellectuals to North America in the 1960s worked to further solidify the category as both a regional marker and a wider imaginary that includes a broad range of actors associated with the culture and history of the 234 d Notes to introduction region. Thus, the legacies of colonialism and still-shifting national boundaries (as well as lingering territorial disputes and historical linkages that complicate clear boundaries between nation-states) make the classification of South Asian countries under a single umbrella possible. At the same time, the South Asian communities residing in the United States are internally variegated and continue to be differentiated thanks to contemporary events and geopolitics. Therefore, we use the term “South Asian” to represent the geographic region, but also as a political marker of a pan-ethnicity, which binds together a diversity of people. The oral histories profiled in this book require us to carefully use the term as a marker of new community constellations that are not only rooted in South Asia but also reconfigured in particular ways in North America. 3 Oral history projects use the term narrator, rather than interview subject or participant , because the narrator is an equal participant in the interview and is telling his or her story through his or her own reflections. 4 For an extensive history of this early migration, see Joan Jensen’s Passage from India: Asian Indian Americans in North America (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1988). 5 The narrators’ fluency in English is both a product of colonial and postcolonial state policies and a marker of class and education. We discuss these confluences in chapter 3. 6 Oral histories have been a crucial tool in documenting the formation of Asian American communities. See Eric C. Wat’s The Making of a Gay Asian Community: An Oral History of Pre-AIDS Los Angeles (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield Publishers, 2002) and Kenneth Kaname Takemoto, Paul Howard Takemoto, and Alice Takemoto’s Nisei Memories: My Parents Talk about the War Years (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2006). 7 Sandhya Shukla’s India Abroad: Diasporic Cultures of Postwar America and England (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2002); Sunaina Maira’s Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in New York City (Philadelphia, PA: Temple University Press, 2002); and S. Mitra Kalita’s Suburban Sahibs: Three Immigrant Families and Their Passage from India to America (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2003) represent just a small sample of the growing archive of ethnographic and journalistic accounts of South Asians living in the United States. 8 Dan Ouellette, “South Asians’ Growing American Clout,” Adweek, http://teens. adweek.com/aw/content_display/special-reports...