Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest by Amy Bhatt and Nalini Iyer (review)

Amy Bhatt and Nalini Iyer situate their book, Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest, using an informative and thoughtful discussion on the South Asian Oral History Project, from which their book draws, as well as each author’s disciplinary training, their methodology, and more general information about the communities of South Asians living in the Pacific Northwest. This discussion touches on questions that oral historians often have about the institutional relationships that allow a project to develop, an honest and subjective account of goals and challenges, and how a book develops as an appropriate outgrowth of an oral history project. This foregrounds and informs the content of the book, giving the reader a full sense of the South Asian Oral History Project’s goal to document pan-South Asian experiences of immigration to the Pacific Northwest and, in so doing, augments existing collections that underrepresent South Asians by focusing instead on East Asian experiences. Bhatt and Iyer in Roots and Reflections give scholarly and public attention to the experiences of South Asians in the Pacific Northwest, an endeavor that is, by many measures, the first of its kind.

The sorts of experiences shared in Roots and Reflections come from those which oral history is well-suited to provide; in the authors’ words, “Oral history allows for a more nuanced understanding of how communities are formed and how individuals situate themselves within larger cultural phenomena. It focuses on aspects of immigrant life such as creating friendships, starting families, raising children, and passing culture and traditions onto next generations” (9). In order to give a fuller description of the historic presence of South Asians in the Pacific Northwest, Bhatt and Iyer also rely on first-person written accounts of early South Asian immigrants to the region, who came in the late nineteenth century and who are obviously no longer living. Recounting the experience of these early immigrants, in conjunction with narratives of those who immigrated later and who were interviewed for the South Asian Oral History Project—thirty individuals who emigrated between the 1940s and the 1990s—provides a solid basis for Bhatt and Iyer’s interest in locating South Asian experiences within a larger transnational and geopolitical framework. The authors employ the narratives, both written and oral, to put lived experiences alongside over a century of relevant immigration policy as well as associated national shifts in attitude towards immigrants. Particularly notable are the Hart-Cellar Act of 1965, which made emigration easier and thus resulted in a dramatic increase in the South Asian population throughout the United States, and the misguided attacks on Sikhs and other South Asians following the terrorists attacks on the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001, which have informed intergenerational education and support networks across communities of South Asians. The result is a book that details the lived experiences of South Asians in the Pacific Northwest and makes those experiences crucial to any comprehensive study of immigration in the United States.

Having little prior knowledge of the communities whose lives are detailed in Roots and Reflections, I found the book to be informative, insightful, and a model for using oral histories as the primary narrative mechanism for driving a publication that has appeal for scholars as well as more general readership. Bhatt and Iyer touch on many subjects integral to the experience of South Asians in the Pacific Northwest, including colonial and postcolonial identities, the concept of “model minorities,” intergenerational transmission within immigrant families, and the gendered experience of emigrating to the United States; these are doors that open to the South Asian Oral History Project collection at the University of Washington and point to its potential to provide source material for additional scholarship on South Asians in the Pacific Northwest. The authors also write that collaboration “is by no means an easy task, as working together meant undoing...