Indian Americans

Indian American communities have been forming since the mid-19th century, when the first of the Punjabi laborers arrived on the U.S. West Coast. Early photographs and written descriptions of these migrants, who worked in lumber mills, railroad yards, and farm fields, often called forth a sense of the exotic that served the xenophobic and nationalistic agendas of the time. Some argue that not much has changed in this respect. In the media, from popular television shows such as The Simpsons to news programs like Fox News, representations of Indian Americans and their communities are often oversimplified and reduced to a single signifier, such as the turban or a heavy accent. Such figures both inform and confound the ability to ascertain what constitutes Indian American communities and how their unity and diversity can be understood.

Indeed, the multiple ways of being Indian American have much to do with the diversity of India itself. The population of India is more than a billion people, the second highest population in the world after China and nearly one-sixth of the planet's population. It is the world's largest democracy, with twenty-three official languages, and more than 1,000 dialects spoken. Within the nation's twenty-eight states, there exists a rich variety of regional and tribal cultures, in addition to a wide array of religious affiliations such as Buddhism, Christianity, Hinduism, Jainism, Judaism, Islam, Sikhism, and Zoroastrianism, to name but a few.

Consequently, the Indian American community exhibits a notable degree of variance in worldviews and lifestyles. This diversity is both a source of strength and frustration, for although many individuals share common goals of promoting a politically or culturally unified sense of “Indian-ness,” conflicts regarding issues such as communalism or caste continue. Members of the Indian American diaspora also must negotiate this complex set of identities with the wide range of values, beliefs, and practices they find within U.S. culture. Moreover, their community identities also are understood through a history of race and ethnic relations in the United States. Consequently, membership in this diaspora implies a state [Page 711]of multiplicity and an affiliation with many different and contextually shifting identifications.

Most generally, this entry considers the difficult questions of who might be named an Indian American and how Indian American communities have been constituted. In each section, issues specifically related to Indian American communities will be discussed, including (a) historical immigration patterns, (b) changing immigration law, (c) community identity building and maintenance, and (d) current community concerns.