Art in the Lives of Immigrant Communities in the United States

5. Desis in and out of the House: South Asian Youth Culture in the United States Before and After 9/11

89 South Asian immigrants in the United States are generally associated with popular culture and artistic expressions that are considered exotic, colorful, and traditional . There has long been a particular market in the United States for elite forms of South Asian culture, such as classical music and dance, performed by maestros at “high culture” venues and favored by world music aficionados as well as uppermiddle -class South Asian Americans. But there has also been a growing interest in more popular forms of South Asian cultural production, such as folk dance and Bollywood film and music, culminating in the fashionability of all things Indian since the mid-1990s (Maira 2000). The emergence of “trendy” South Asian popular culture, echoing the fascination with Indian aesthetics and spirituality in the 1960s and 1970s, draws attention to the ways that certain cultural productions of immigrant communities are labeled “art” and others “popular culture,” highlighting distinctions of cultural capital that rest on class hierarchies within these communities and the society at large (Bourdieu 1984), as well as American policies in South Asia at a particular historical moment. The surge in commodified “Indo-chic” in the 1990s coincided with an increasing diversification of South Asian immigrant communities in the United States. The Immigration Act of 1965 opened the door to the second major wave of immigration from South Asia since the early twentieth-century migration of agricultural laborers and railroad workers from the subcontinent. The revised immigration laws gave preference to highly qualified, technically skilled immigrants , so the South Asians who migrated in the 1960s and 1970s were largely affluent, highly educated professionals. The “model minority” image of South Asians, particularly Indian Americans, shifted after a third wave of less affluent and Desis in and out of the House south asian youth culture in the united states before and after 9/11 Sunaina Maira c h a p t e r 5  sunaina maira 90 educated immigrants began arriving in the 1980s and working as taxi drivers, convenience store owners, and restaurant workers. In this chapter I examine the popular culture practices of the children of these two major waves of South Asian immigration, first touching briefly on findings from a previous study of second-generation youth culture in the mid-1990s and then turning to a more detailed exploration of my new research on South Asian Muslim immigrant youth after September 11, 2001. I will only present a thumbnail sketch of my previous research on Indian American youth culture (Maira 2002) and will dwell more on my study of South Asian Muslim youth in the United States, a group that has not been adequately studied. I juxtapose the findings from this new research with those from my earlier work to draw out a comparative analysis of cultural consumption and production by middle-class, secondgeneration college students in New York, on the one hand, and working-class, high-school youth in the New England area, on the other. In addition, these observations are shaped by the historical moment in which they emerged, for my research on South Asian Muslim youth was conducted in 2001–2003 and was significantly shaped by the post-9/11 climate and the heightened scrutiny of Muslim, South Asian, and Arab Americans. The Indian American youth I studied in New York were largely Hindu, with a few from Christian and Jain backgrounds, and while non-Hindus certainly felt marginalized within Indian and South Asian immigrant communities, anti-Muslim sentiments were visibly heightened during the War on Terror. While both groups of youth displayed some common patterns in cultural consumption, such as the interest in Bollywood music and films and the growing affiliation with hip-hop, there were also several important differences that reveal the impact of class, in particular, and the state’s relationship to specific ethnic or religious groups at a particular historical moment. I want to note that this analysis does not emerge from a comparative study designed as such. For that reason, this chapter is solely a reflection on these two different groups of youth that highlights some important questions of the meanings of popular culture in relation to ethnic identification, racialization, nationalism, multiculturalism, and citizenship. What becomes clear is that cultural consumption and production are important sites in which ideas of national, subcultural, and ethnic belonging are produced and contested, and in which young people grapple with ideologies of ethnic authenticity, national allegiance, and transnational affiliation. “Desi Parties” in New York From 1996 to 1998 I did an...