The Daughters of Immigrants: A Multidisciplinary Study 1666941875, 9781666941876

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The Daughters of Immigrants

The Daughters of Immigrants A Multidisciplinary Study Edited by Asha Jeffers and Catherine Bryan

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Copyright © 2024 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Jeffers, Asha, editor. | Bryan, Catherine, 1980- editor. Title: The daughters of immigrants : a multidisciplinary study / edited by Asha Jeffers and Catherine Bryan. Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, [2024] | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2023041998 (print) | LCCN 2023041999 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666941876 (cloth ; alk. paper) | ISBN 9781666941883 (epub)  Subjects: LCSH: Children of immigrants—United States. | Children of immigrants— Canada. | Daughters—United States. | Daughters—Canada. | Immigrant families— United States. | Immigrant families—Canada. Classification: LCC JV6600 .D38 2024  (print) | LCC JV6600  (ebook) | DDC 305.9/069120971—dc23/eng/20230927 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041998 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2023041999 The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

The Curiously Reproductive Role of the Daughters of Immigrants Asha Jeffers and Catherine Bryan‌‌‌ PART I: ON AND ON: DOUBLY DIASPORIC COMMUNITY

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Chapter One: Daughters of Cane and Thread: Indo-Caribbean Identity as Diasporic Consciousness Tarika Sankar Chapter Two: Chinese Mexican Autoethnographies Yareli Castro Sevilla‌‌‌



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PART II: NOW YOU SEE ME: PATHOLOGIZED MOBILITY

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Chapter Three: The Daughters of Enforcement: Emotion Work and Immigration Arrests, Detentions, and Removals Joanna Dreby, Daniela Ugarte Villalobos, and Myia Samuels‌‌‌

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Chapter Four: Envisioning Palestine, Understanding America: Daughters of Immigrants in the Fiction of Susan Muaddi Darraj Robin E. Field

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PART III: ALL THE FEELS: EMOTIONS AND RACIALIZATION Chapter Five: Emotional Kinscripting: Managing Gender, Emotions, and Kinship among Children of Korean and Chinese Immigrant Families Angie Y. Chung and Xuemei Cao v

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Contents

Chapter Six: Young Love: Model Minorities, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary South Asian YA Novels Nalini Iyer‌‌‌ Index

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About the Contributors



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The Curiously Reproductive Role of the Daughters of Immigrants Asha Jeffers and Catherine Bryan‌‌‌

In the spring of 2021, a diverse group of academics gathered online at the Daughters of Immigrants Symposium to share research that explored the lived experience and artistic representation of the daughters of immigrants. Over the course of two days, scholars and artists from Canada, the United States, and Italy shared virtual space as they presented new research and engaged thoughtfully across national and disciplinary boundaries. In the context of a moment characterized by isolation, this Daughters of Immigrants Symposium facilitated new and deepened connections among scholars whose work spoke meaningfully to each other’s across boundaries of race, ethnicity, nation, and status. Building on the spirit of that event, this book brings together a multidisciplinary group of scholars whose work explores the ways in which the lives of immigrant daughters are shaped by forces of race, gender, migration, sexuality, family, and nation and examines how immigrant daughters navigate these forces as individual agents and as members of collectivities. Despite being born or raised from a young age in one nation-state, despite having no or little personal memory of the experience of migration, the children of immigrants—those belonging to “the second generation”—live the afterlife of migration through a complex set of relationships: with immigrant parents and the first generation more broadly, with an ancestral homeland of which they have a limited and heavily mediated experience, and with a site of settlement and perhaps also citizenship to which they ostensibly belong but which often casts them as outsiders. In this volume, we specifically explore how the afterlife of migration is experienced by the daughters of those who migrated. In so doing, both established and emerging scholars from the humanities and the social sciences take up the daughter(s) of immigrants as a topic of analysis and engage with their lived experiences and representations in diverse ways. Showcasing these varied perspectives, the collection draws 1

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meaningful connections across national and ethnic lines while attending to the particularities of specific histories, locations, and migration journeys. The multidisciplinary nature of this project highlights the relevance and usefulness of varied methodological and theoretical approaches for understanding the diverse lived experiences of the daughters of immigrants, as well as how those experiences are theorized and represented. While each chapter contains its own argument, assumes its own conceptual and disciplinary viewpoint, and tends to specific national and ethnic origins and sites of immigration, each offers meaningful insight into the gendered positionality of the daughters of immigrants as mediated by the complexities of migration, kinship, and culture. Taken together, these contributions point to the nuanced ways national, ethnic, and migrant identity function according to the logics and practices of gender, and in turn, how those not always well served by these socially constituted identities understand and navigate forces beyond their control. The term daughter is, by nature, gendered and relational. A daughter, in so far as she is a daughter, is defined by her designation as female and through her relationship to one or more people.1 The concept of being a daughter positions one as the product of another’s reproduction. Yet in our collective research on the daughters of immigrants, both in the flesh and in fiction, we see time and time again that daughters are also regularly positioned as reproducers. Sometimes the role of biological reproduction is foregrounded, referenced in discussion of future romantic partnership and familial lines, but far more often in their lives and in their writing the daughters of immigrants find themselves in socially and culturally reproductive roles vis-à-vis their families of origin. The form and function such a role might take is varied, as the chapters in this volume make clear, but the gendered imperative and, in turn, responsibility of daughters to engage in the reproduction of family and community are consistent across populations and localities. The social, cultural, and biological reproductive roles of the daughters of immigrants, then, emerge as the connective tissue between the multidisciplinary and diverse areas of research that this collection incorporates. Across the volume’s contributions, we encounter the efforts of the daughters of immigrants to navigate these roles, responsibilities, and the relationships that comprise them. Familial expectation, as each chapter articulates, takes on a particular reproductive quality, as the daughters at the center of each analysis ensure the survival—understood broadly—of kin, family forms, and community. So, what is it, exactly, that the daughters of immigrants reproduce? The fact that daughters of immigrants are often subject to more onerous familial expectations than sons is common knowledge even among those who do not study migration. But the particularities of such expectations and the forms they take are more complex than popular discourse suggests, especially in relation to how the daughters themselves conceptualize, consent to, and

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resist familial expectations. Moreover, expectations do not solely come from within the family; they can be applied by the wider ethnic community and mainstream society, and from within the individual herself. These multiple forms of expectation do not all exact pressure in the same way, but they all inform how immigrant daughters navigate the world and the home. As many feminist scholars have point out, the home is not a neutral, apolitical space. The immigrant home, especially, is fundamentally shaped by the economic and social imperatives that created the need for and the possibility of migration in the first place. In this context, daughters are often expected to engage in labor, both physical and emotional, that maintains the family and the home in both the short and long term. In some cases, the children of immigrants are expected to justify their parents’ migration through achieving success (often quite narrowly defined) in the site of settlement, and these dynamics too can be gendered. The historical, political, and social contexts that produce these conditions in the lives of the daughters of immigrants are myriad and varied, but for the purposes of this collection, some explanation of the legal processes that set the stage for our current moment may be useful. While the history of migration to and around the Americas is long and complex, the contemporary immigration landscape in the United States (where most of the contributors reside) and Canada (where the editors reside) is significantly shaped by legal changes in the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s that produced, for the first time, large-scape pathways for nonwhite immigrants to immigrate and settle. This volume also contains work that addresses some of the preexisting diasporic movements of the nineteenth century, including those shaped by indenture and other forms of labor migration, but even the communities they produced have often engaged in a second, postimmigration reform migration. Thus, it is fair to say that the twentieth century has seen a “new age of migration” that “possesses fundamentally different circumstances and dimensions when compared to earlier periods” (Miyares and Airriess 2007, 2). US immigration policies were long marked by a preference for European immigrants. Legal exclusions included the creation of the “Asiatic barred zone” by Congress in 1917, which included most of Asia and Oceania (Miyares and Airriess 2007, 36), and the 1924 National Origins Act, which established a quota system that “set the annual quota of any quota nationality at 2 percent of the number of foreign-born persons of that nationality already residing in the continental United States in 1890,” and as a result, “approximately 82 percent of immigrant visas under this law were allotted to northern and western European countries, 16 percent to southern and eastern European countries and 2 percent to all other Eastern Hemisphere admissible nationalities” (Miyares and Airriess 2007, 36). This quota system effectively reflects the hierarchy of national origin that remains in the public consciousness;

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southern and eastern Europeans, while seen as less desirable than their northern and western counterparts, are still perceived as more admissible into the body politic than non-European immigrants en masse. Before these laws were enacted, there of course existed nonwhite communities in the United States, whether they arrived under compulsion or as willing migrants, but rigorous efforts were made to prevent these communities from growing any larger, sometimes by limiting or preventing the migration of women and therefore the establishment of heteronormative familial structures. The reform that allowed for an explosion of migration from previously undesirable regions into the United States took place over the course of the 1950s and 1960s (somewhat earlier than it did in Canada). The 1952 Immigration and Nationality Act contained noteworthy changes; for example, it included the Asia-Pacific Triangle in the quota system and made all nationalities eligible for US citizenship (Miyares and Airriess 2007, 37). This act was amended in the Immigration Reform Act of 1965, which “finally eliminated national origin, race, ethnicity or ancestry as a basis for immigration” (Miyares and Airriess 2007, 39). This change created a significant shift in the demographics of the immigrant population over time; for example, “by the 1990s, nearly half of all new immigrants were from Asian countries” (Miyares and Airriess 2007, 40). There has also been a massive increase in immigration from both Africa and the Caribbean, currently making up 4.5 percent and 10 percent of the immigrant population respectively (Echeverria-Estrada and Batalova 2019, n.p.; Zong and Batalova 2019, n.p.). Alongside the legal processes of immigration, there has always been and continues to be undocumented migration, popularly associated with migration over the land border between the United States and Mexico, although people from all over the world engage in other forms of not legally recognized migration through activities like overstaying visas. The history of migration between the United States and Mexico is too extensive to detail here, but worth noting for our purposes is the elimination of the Bracero Program between the United States and Mexico in 1964 that had previously brought millions of Mexican workers to work temporarily in the States (Minian 2018, 3). The end of this program meant significantly less opportunity for Mexican migrants to engage in cyclical migration, forcing them to stay permanently in Mexico or the United States rather than alternating between both. While the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act created opportunities for migrants from other parts of the world, it restricted legal Latin American migration as it “imposed for the first time a numerical limit on the number of Latin American immigrants to the United States” (Minian 2018, 4). Rather than lessen Latin American migration, these changes massively increased undocumented Latin American migration. These changes in immigration patterns have had significant and ongoing effects.

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This brief description of the legal and historical context of immigration to the United States provides an explanation for the emergence of what some scholars call the “new second generation” specifically referring to children of post-1965 immigrants (Zhou 1997) in the decades that followed. This large second-generation racialized population was more than 30 million strong in 2005 and had a median age of eighteen (Portes and Rumbaut 2014). This context also demonstrates how this demographic development has challenged long-held ideas about what an appropriate or even legitimate citizen looks like. The elimination of barriers to nonwhite immigrants did not eradicate the white supremacist logics that had previously kept them out from affecting numerous areas of life once they arrived. The children of post-1965 immigrants enter into a context where their legal citizenship may be assured (although this too is not always the case, as some of our contributors make clear), but their belonging within the nation-state is not. Canadian legal scholar Audrey Macklin discusses citizenship through a metaphor of capacity, arguing that “citizenship might be thought of in terms of a container that is seldom completely empty (statelessness) or completely full” (2007, 337). While she works out her argument through a consideration of statelessness, she also points out that “gross inequalities between citizens of a given polity on the basis of class, race, sex, ability, ethnicity and other variables mean that the heft of citizenship varies internally as well as externally” (Macklin 2007, 356). The “heft” of second-generation citizenship can vary significantly; othering experiences as small as being ask “where are you from?” by a stranger and as consequential as being perceived as lacking legal status by those in positions of power because of your ethnicity play meaningful roles in how the children of immigrants understand their political and social belonging or lack thereof. This book’s focus on the daughters of immigrants specifically means that we explore the effects of this history through a gendered lens. Core to the aim and the value of this volume is that it prioritizes the voices and viewpoints of the daughters of immigrants. In both the literary analysis and the social scientific research, the daughter of immigrants as interpreter of her own experience is given primacy. This framing is important because we have no wish to reproduce the real-world issue of the daughter of immigrants being positioned as supporting cast in her own life. Thus, while we explore the daughters of immigrants as reproducers, we also want to highlight their ability to be producers. That is, the agency that these daughters seize for themselves even in instances of significant constraint needs to be acknowledged and appreciated. The daughters of immigrants produce literature and art, community, chosen and biological families of their own, political organizations and movements, histories, and new cultural formations that draw on past forms but are not limited by them. This collection does not shy away

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from the difficulties experienced by the daughters of immigrants, nor does it shrink from representing their power. SOCIAL SCIENCE CONTEXTS The last four decades have seen the establishment of a robust, explicitly feminist migration scholarship in the social sciences that has focused on identifying, elaborating, and revealing the gendered realities and dilemmas that attend contemporary migration (Lawson 1998; Momsen 2003; Kofman 2004). Central to these discussions has been consideration of migrants, as both mothers and daughters, whose mobility and subsequent employment contributes to the reproductive projects of family (Parreñas 2008). Here, scholars have tended to the growing ubiquity of transnational social and family life prompted by the acceleration of human migration since the 1950s, but also the availability of new technologies that make ongoing connection to places of origin more possible (Kim 2017). In this scholarship, daughters are seen to take on roles that, though new, are reflective of existing cultural, gendered norms. In this way, the migration of daughters—here, often as young adults—emerges as a novel strategy responsive to contemporary conditions, as well as an extension of existing gendered practices of care and reproduction (Gamburd 2000). Migration, in turn, both produces opportunities for emancipation, while reproducing strictures that serve to limit such opportunity (Chin 2013). Taking as a starting point the growing academic and activist interest in women’s migration in the 1970s and 1980s, we can, in some instances, view the daughters of immigrants encountered in this volume as those of earlier waves of daughters whose migration aimed to ensure the livelihoods, survival, and upward mobility of their families—women, who through their own mobility, became immigrant mothers to the subsequent, second generation. Revealed in the volume’s contributions are the ways in which the daughters of immigrants continue to confront and navigate the tensions, possibilities, and constraints experienced by their mothers—the earlier subjects of social scientific inquiry. Research into these experiences points to the gradually shifting terrain of immigrant life and subjectivity in sites of resettlement, particularly in its gendered and feminized forms. Indeed, immigrant mothers and their daughters encounter conditions that differ according to legal status, levels of attachment to places of origin, degrees of acculturation, language acquisition, and gendered norms and practices. Yet, each generation assumes a decidedly similar set of gendered responsibilities intended to ensure the short- and long-term continuation of social, cultural, and economic life in contexts that—though

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separated, at times, by decades—remain suspicious of migrants and immigrants. The suspicion and, at times, hostility, directed at migrants and immigrants has been demonstrated to have specific ramifications for the children of immigrants in both Canada and the United States, as chronicled by a range of empirical research spanning the last several decades. Highlighting the intergenerational experience of social exclusion (Litchmore et al. 2016; Kropiwicki 2013), much of this research focuses on the mental health outcomes, educational acquisition (ljaz and Abbas 2010), and employment attainment (Hum and Simpson 2007) of the second generation. Although some variation exists and upward mobility has been realized, much of this research demonstrates the challenges faced by immigrant children and youth, particularly those who are racialized and subject most overtly to anti-immigrant sentiment (Marrow 2020). An important subsection of this scholarship also documents transmission of cultural norms and practice. Here, researchers elaborate the complicated acceptance and contestation of “culture” by the children of immigrants broadly, and the impact of such navigation on the relationship between children and their parents, children and their communities of origin, and children and their peers and compatriots in the country of residence. Central to many of these is consideration of language proficiency, and in turn, the roles of second-generation children as linguistic, cultural, and social brokers, serving as intermediaries between their parents and social, cultural, and economic institutions in the place of residency (Delgado 2020; Del Torto 2008; Villanueva and Buriel 2010). While much of this research highlights the gendered parameters of such familial involvement and responsibility, the extent to which it constitutes a key social reproductive function has gone unexplored. This volume seeks to redress this by situating, through a diversity of examples, the emotional, relational, and care work performed by immigrant daughters as social reproductive in nature. Social reproduction, then, provides a critical conceptual framework for understanding the experiences of immigrant daughters in this work, as well as their complicated relationships to the reproductive projects of family and community in sites of resettlement. A growing body of social scientific work, particularly work oriented toward understanding the gendered implications of contemporary political economy, has taken up social reproduction as an organizing theory to identify and understand the labour, institutions, and practices through which reproduction is realized (Bhattacharya 2017). Operating across manifold registers, from very small scale and intimate to the structural, social reproduction is achieved through efforts, relationships, and processes that produce and reproduce the very substance of social, cultural, political, and economic life (Bakker 2007; Katz 2001). In these ways, social reproduction as a practice and set of outcomes refers to the biological reproduction of

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the human species, the reproduction of labor, and the reproduction of social systems and orders, including those that naturalize and reinforce inequality. Of additional relevance to this volume, given its association with biological reproduction, social reproduction has long been theorized in relation to women’s socially constituted roles as mothers, care givers, and child-rearers (Federici 2019). Representing a critical contribution of early feminist political economy, scholars have stressed that despite the perception that reproductive labour is inconsequential to the operations of capitalist political economy, it is, in fact, fundamental. Since the 1970s, understanding how this labor functions and is valued (or not) has been a key focus of feminist sociologists, political scientists, and anthropologists (Laslett and Brenner 1989). More recently, renewed interest in social reproduction as an analytic has prompted a new generation of researchers to consider the social reproductive function of state policy both globally and more locally. Importantly for the purposes of this volume, migration and the systems that govern it have increasingly been identified and problematized as central to the social reproduction of family, community, and society (Bryan and Barber 2021). Here, immigration policy—as described in the previous section—shapes the opportunities available to families vis-à-vis their reproduction; determines the parameters of their mobility and inclusion in the site of resettlement; makes available dependent, precarious labour to local labor markets; and in turn, reinforces labor market stratification, which has consistently disadvantaged newcomer and migrant workers. In determining the parameters of inclusion and exclusion, immigration policy also mediates cultural practice and transmission, creating the material conditions through which immigrant collectives remember the past, experience the present, and anticipate the future. Providing immediate and sustaining care for kin and community, the subject of this volume, immigrant daughters, engage and work across these registers. LITERARY CONTEXTS Scholarship concerning immigrant literatures is widely established, but there is a relative scarcity of criticism discussing the growing body of texts and other creative works about the daughters of immigrants. The majority of works that do address this literature does so in an ethnonational or diasporic context (see, for example, Yoo 1999, Ty and Verduyn 2008, Palumbo-Liu 1999, McGill 2005). By this I mean that much scholarship on literary and cultural production by or about the daughters of immigrants situates their studies in relation to works with writers who share the same ethnic or national identity; a text by a Chinese American writer is compared primarily to works

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by other Chinese American writers, for example, or, if the scholar approaches the work through a more diasporic lens, perhaps also to Chinese Canadian or Australian works. It is less likely to be compared to a, say, Guyanese American writer’s work. These approaches, while valuable, can also obscure the consistent themes, events, and ideas that appear across multiple ethnic and geographical contexts. This collection is not just multidisciplinary in its approach; it is also multiethnic in its subjects, and both of these investments are central to our argument that it is worthwhile to think through the daughter of immigrants as a positionality that cuts across ethnicity and nation. Despite the historical lack, recent interest in second-generation cultural production among literary and cultural critics has been mounting. Both established academics and emergent scholars such as Stella Bolaki, erin Khuê Ninh, Lisa Lowe, and Lisa D. McGill, among others, have written about the second generation. This increasing interest can be reasonably connected to the same social and cultural factors that this introduction has described: the numerical growth of the second-generation population and the resulting explosion of second-generation cultural production, picking up steam in the 1990s and continuing its upward trajectory into the present. This includes several high-profile, award-winning works such as Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, Julia Alvarez’s How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents, Jessica Hagedorn’s The Gangster of Love, Jhumpa Lahiri’s The Namesake, Taiye Selasi’s Ghana Must Go, and Ling Ma’s Severance. Popular film and television representations of second-generation experiences have also contributed to the growing interest from both the general public and scholars over the same period, including such films as Real Women Have Curves, Mississippi Masala, Crazy Rich Asians, and The Farewell, and such television shows as Never Have I Ever, Jane the Virgin, and Kim’s Convenience. The above are only those significant examples which are by daughter of immigrant writers and/or prominently feature daughter of immigrant characters because of the focus of this volume; there has also been an increase in the literary and media representation of sons of immigrants. As the body the literary and visual texts have proliferated, so too have discussions of the lives of the daughters of immigrants on social media platforms like YouTube, Instagram, and TikTok. Some of this increased visibility has been through comedy content, as exemplified by online personalities like Lilly Singh’s Superwoman and Christine Gambito’s HappySlip, whose joking portrayals of immigrant family dynamics were a part of a broader genre of what might be called relatable racial humour online. More serious discussion of the struggles of the daughters of immigrants circulates on social media as well. Greater mainstream attention to the daughters of immigrants as producers and subjects of cultural and literary production has opened up more space for scholars who are interested in the ways that the generation that follows migration and settlement are still

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shaped by its effects in myriad ways to explore these dynamics through a wide variety of forms. Literary criticism on work about the daughters of immigrants often draws from other disciplines, particularly sociology, to situate their discussion of fictional texts within real-world dynamics, but the foregrounding of narrative means that the work approaches disciplinarily shared concerns from a different angle. For example, cultural difference between the immigrant family and mainstream society is a common topic of research and discourse. Writing in the British context, diaspora theorist and sociologist Avtar Brah incisively critiques the “simple bipolar cleavage” of the culture clash narrative, arguing that there is no unitary British culture or Asian culture and that “the emphasis on ‘culture clash’ disavows the possibility of cultural interaction and fusion,” and ignores the fact that “conflict is often a sign of the power relations underpinning cultural hierarchies rather than of ‘culture clash’ per se” (1996, 40–41). As such, she asserts that “Asian-British cultures are not simply a carry-over from the subcontinent but are now ‘native’ to different regions and localities of Britain,” so that each “Asian” culture of Britain is “simultaneously a dimension of region and locality—of ‘Englishness,’ ‘Scottishness,’ ‘Welshness,’ ‘Irishness,’ or of ‘Geordiness,’ Cockneyness,’ ‘Yorkshireness,’ and so on” (1996, 137). This intervention into the “culture clash” narrative and recognition of the new cultural and political formations that the second generation and beyond produce has contributed significantly to the literary study of the second generation as Brah theorizes what many literary texts demonstrate through the individual consciousness of a protagonist or the broader representation of a community. THE VALUE OF INTERDISCIPLINARITY The scholarship represented in this volume adds novel consideration of the manifold and curiously reproductive roles of immigrant daughters. Through its varied examples, it highlights the different ways second-generation daughters contribute to and facilitate the social reproduction of their families and communities, as well as the ways in which they resist the reproduction of social and cultural norms—both internal and external to family and community—that do not serve them. Of equal importance, these examples offer critical consideration of the representation of daughters of immigrants in both social scientific and literary form, and of how these representations themselves produce and reproduce ideas about immigrant daughter subjectivity. Indeed, each of the volume’s three sections responds to a theme while bringing into close conversation seemingly disparate disciplinary orientations, practices, and objectives. Despite these formal distinctions, however, what

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is represented in each section is a symbiotic and comprehensive account and representation of the experiences of immigrant daughters. Such disciplinary crosspollination is part of what this volume seeks to promote. Such a multidisciplinary approach to the daughters of immigrants contributes to several long-standing and more recent debates and conversations in both literary criticism and scholarship and the social sciences concerning immigrant life, family, and community; the implications of mobility intergenerationally; the social, relational, and cultural ramifications of migration governance; and the socially constituted gendered “nature” of care and social reproductive labor. The subject of this volume, immigrant daughters, as a group of people in the world and represented in works, both fictional and empirical, live deeply intersectional lives, perhaps inadequately captured and incompletely understood when viewed through a singular disciplinary lens. Weaving together the insights of empirical, ethnographic research with those of literary criticism, the volume brings into focus the material conditions, relational dynamics, and experiential details that together constitute the internal and external worlds occupied by the daughters of immigrants. From literature, the focus on individual characters and their emotional landscape, beliefs, and actions allows us to better understand the patterns and structures that preoccupy social scientists. In turn, the descriptions and analysis offered by the empirical and ethnographic work offers critical insight into the patterns, political and cultural landscapes, and systems navigated by the daughters of immigrants represented in literary works, even and perhaps especially when those characters are not representative of a norm or a majority. From these patterns and deviations, we garner not only insight into the lives of immigrant daughters, but into how authors—often the daughters of immigrants or immigrants themselves—process and react to the world. In addition, then, to more substantive offerings, this volume provides example of meaningful multidisciplinary exchange in the field of migration studies, and its potential. At the same time, the volume offers a vital platform to hear directly from the daughters of immigrants and to understand, from their point of view, the gendered parameters, restrictions, and possibilities of their lives and experiences. THEMES AND STRUCTURE A picture of the curiously reproductive role of the daughter of immigrants arises from the diverse contexts that the chapters of this book explore. Within this frame, several overarching themes emerge. These themes are the communal as productive and protective but also smothering and dangerous; silences, both familial and societal; transmission between generations; contested ideas of culture; labor, both physical and emotional; and translation, both linguistic

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and cultural. Each of these themes connects to reproduction because each one signals a tension between maintenance, creation, and destruction. The force of the communal in the lives of immigrants is often remarked upon. Migration reshapes social relations, and in the site of settlement, new bonds and ways of relating emerge. Crucially, this is a fundamentally multidirectional experience: daughters of immigrants must define themselves in relation to ancestral homeland(s), the mainstream societies of sites of settlement, the unique communities formed by immigrants in sites of settlement, and the other minoritized communities that they may encounter. Family and community can be both productive and protective as well as smothering and dangerous, even at the same time. On the one hand, family and community can provide shelter from the racism, racialized sexism, xenophobia, and other forms of discrimination that proliferate in the site of the settlement. It can provide models of mutual aid, shared worldviews, and comfort that build up the daughters’ sense of self and feeling of belonging. At the same time, a family or community can harshly punish those who stray from its accepted norms, sometimes all the more harshly because of fear of external threats. As erin Khuê Ninh astutely points out, while there is no question that the losses of immigration matter, that institutional racism and media representation figure into the second-generation experience, so too does power in the most intimate, vulnerable, and formative social contexts—one which may demand that the subject compensate for familial losses by successfully navigating hostile social and political waters, and which may very well redouble the stakes of ‘racial’ failure. (2011, 5)

The idea that the second generation must justify the first generation’s sacrifices can lead to a level of control, or the desire for control, over the children of immigrants that is at odds with the kind of self-determination and individuation that many young people strive for. One area where this kind of control is most starkly acted out is in relation to the body, especially for girls and women. The policing of women’s bodies and sexuality as a means of maintaining the community’s self-image is a practice particularly addressed in Robin E. Field’s exploration of Susan Muaddi Darraj’s fiction and Nalini Iyer’s discussion of young adult romances. All the chapters in this collection speak to the complex nature of community for the daughters of immigrants. Like the multivalent nature of community, the role of silence in the lives of the daughters of immigrants is also far from singular. In Body Counts, Yến Lê Espiritu points out that “as complex and subtle as spoken language, silence, as a language of family, can protect and cherish and/or deny and control” (2014, 147). In other words, silence does not have a singular meaning but gains its power from how it is applied. Sometimes silence is mobilized by

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the family to protect itself from a hostile outside world, sometimes daughters suffer in silence to avoid burdening those they already believe to be burdened enough, and sometimes parents try to silence the difficult past in an attempt to hide shame or to avoid burdening their children. The transmission of practices, ideas, values, traditions, and languages is another core theme that exemplifies the idea of reproduction. Absent from the ancestral homeland, immigrant families are the means through which the subsequent generations have access to a shared past, and the maintenance of connections to that past through everything, from food to religious ritual to linguistic ability, is often dependent on the immigrant generation. This sort of transmission is often perceived as intentional, but not everything that is passed down within families is done so purposefully. Children learn from observing their parents just as much, if not more, than they do from being directly instructed by them. In scholarship, the term “inheritance” is often used to describe what is passed down, in keeping with the reproductive structures that this volume highlights. The chapters in this volume examine a wide variety of intentional and unintentional family legacies and the ways that the daughters of immigrants embrace, reject, or modify them. It is especially clear that the gendered positionality of these daughters sometimes leads them to take a critical eye toward what is transmitted when it is shaped by patriarchal or sexist worldviews. Indeed, what precisely ought to be valued and is worthy of transmission is also a theme underpinning this collection. Migration reshapes social relations, but it can also produce a solidifying of ideas about culture once removed from its site of origin. This reification is resisted by many of the living and fictional girls and women explored in this collection. Beyond the maintenance of the family’s past and culture, the preservation of the family’s physical and emotional well-being and the role of the daughter of immigrants in it is another core theme of this volume. The physical and emotional labor expected of and performed by these daughters is a significant aspect of their reproductive role, and it is often gendered as well as being shaped by other factors, including class, legal status, cultural competency, and language ability. One form of such labor that appears in multiple contexts throughout the chapters is the work of translation, both linguistic and cultural. Born or raised in the site of settlement, the daughters of immigrants often have a stronger understanding of structures and norms and are expected to do the work of facilitating their parents’ relationship to institutions and mainstream society. Framing these relational practices as expected is not meant to suggest that they are always or even usually done unwillingly; instead, understanding them as labor is useful in thinking through how the daughters of immigrants balance them alongside other forms of responsibility to both collectivities and to themselves.

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This collection is divided into three sections of two chapters each. Each section contains chapters with different approaches and contexts that are nevertheless connected by a common thread. The first section, “On & On: Doubly Diasporic Community” focuses on the daughters of immigrants from two doubly diasporic communities. The term double diaspora refers to those diasporic communities “for which a second significant migration took place, shifting a diasporic culture, forged in a unique and complex political, cultural, and spatial context, to yet another place where a new set of factors contribute to a reformation of communities and identities” (Jeffers 2016, 31). Tarika Sankar’s “Daughters of Cane and Thread: Indo-Caribbean Identity and Diasporic Consciousness” explores the diasporic consciousness of Indo-Caribbean American daughters through poetry, film, and activism. Yareli C. Castro Sevilla’s “Chinese Mexican Autoethnographies” examines the ways that women members of the historically marginalized Chinese Mexican community both in Mexico and in the United States work to write their own histories and assert their identities. In both chapters, the authors engage with how communities produced by labor migrations in the nineteenth and early twentieth century transmit, silence, or reshape their complex histories in the twenty-first century. In particular, they show the creativity and tenacity of the daughters of these communities. Both communities carry heavy silences, though these come from different sources, and the breaking of such silences is a core part of how the daughters described in each chapter seek to contextualize their lived experience and forge new paths forward. The second section, “Now You See Me: Pathologized Mobility,” considers the enduring legacies of contested forms of mobility, and of those forms of statecraft that seek not only to restrict migration, but to define particular populations as inherently risky. In this section, borders emerge as sociopolitical and cultural constructs that follow the daughters of immigrants (and their kin) long after their physical manifestations have been crossed. As result, in the spaces of resettlement, even where permanent legal status has been realized, liminality persists as a key defining characteristic of social, familial, and community life. In such a context, the labor associated with care and reproduction takes on new urgency as it is transformed to respond to a suspicious and punitive state. As in the other two, this section elaborates the subjectivity and positionality of immigrant daughterhood through both literary and social scientific scholarship. In “Daughters of the Palestinian Diaspora in the Stories of Susan Muaddi Darraj,” Robin Field draws on the depth and breadth of Muaddi Darraj’s writing to explore the vastness and complexity of lives lived in the Palestinian diaspora. In “The Daughters of Enforcement: Emotion Work Related to Immigration Arrests, Detentions, and Removals,” Joanna Dreby, Daniela Ugarte, and Myia Samuels detail the emotional and affective labor of immigrant daughters in an increasingly exclusionary social and legal

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environment that criminalizes migration, particularly from Latin America. Like in the writing of Muaddi Darraj, as reflected in Field’s work, the daughters of immigrants in Dreby, Urgarte, and Samuel’s research navigate extreme forms of precarity alongside and behalf of their families, while forging identities and futures, at times, divergent from the norms and expectations of parents, kin, and community. In both examples, the social reproductive roles of young women emerge as sites of new possibilities. As care for family, care for community, and care for self become bound to and contingent upon social and legal realities that are, at bottom, intended to do harm, the daughters of immigrants develop the skills and capacities required of such care. In other words, while family and community emerge as sites of protection and care, in many instances, it is through the efforts of children who assume new responsibilities in the face of extreme legal exclusion and the risk of deportation, and of social narratives that suggest an irredeemable difference from the broader body politic. The third and final section, “All the Feels: Emotions and Racialization” foregrounds the relationality of the daughters of immigrants by exploring familial and romantic relationships. In Angie Y. Chung and Xuemei Cao’s “Emotional Kinscripting: Managing Gender, Emotions and Kinship among Children of Korean and Chinese Immigrant Families,” they draw on in-depth interviews to explore how the daughters of Korean and Chinese immigrants rely on what they call “emotional kinscripting” to compensate for the limitations within individual immigrant family units. By emotional kinscripting, they mean the production of kinship networks, including blood relations and “fictive” kin, that provide emotional support, role models, and guidance. In Nalini Iyer’s “Young Love: Model Minorities, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary South Asian YA Novels,” she explores how contemporary young adult fiction about daughters of South Asian immigrants both contest and reinscribe their positions as model minorities. She engages with the work of several South Asian American writers whose works depict both the familial and romantic relationships of their young protagonists. Both these chapters explore the promise and the peril of community as the possibility of support beyond the family unit is shown alongside the limitations that kinship networks can have, including judgment, patriarchal norms, and even abuse. Chung and Cao’s sociological study and Iyer’s literary analysis have different methodologies but share an interest in the daughters of immigrants as agents within their own relational landscapes. While this collection provides a diverse look at the daughters of immigrants situated in a variety of locations and ethnic communities and through several methodological approaches, it only represents a fraction of what is being written and what has yet to be written about this diverse and ever growing population. This book is primarily focused on the United States but

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the conference from which it originated also contained presentations pertaining to Canada and Europe. It is our hope that this book is one step toward greater multidisciplinary engagement with topics related to the daughters of immigrants, as part of working toward the broader goal of transnational and intersectional feminist understanding and solidarity. NOTE 1. For trans people, both transmen assigned female at birth and transwomen assigned male at birth, daughterhood might be a fraught state. The experiences of those who felt like sons but were presumed daughters or those who felt like daughters and were presumed sons are not explicitly addressed in this volume but are a rich and important area of study.

REFERENCES Alvarez, Julia. 1991. How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents. New York: Algonquin Books. Bakker, Isabella. 2007. “Social Reproduction and the Constitution of a Gendered Political Economy.” New Political Economy 12, no. 4: 541–56. Bhattacharya, Tithi. 2017. Social Reproduction Theory: Remapping Class, Recentering Oppression. London: Pluto Press. Bolaki, Stella. 2011. Unsettling the Bildungsroman: Reading Contemporary Ethnic American Women’s Fiction. Amsterdam: Rodopi. Brah, Avtar. 1996. Cartographies of Diaspora. London: Routledge. Bryan, Catherine, and Pauline Gardiner Barber. 2021. “Parsing the Mobilities of Capital and Labour: The Case of Tim Hortons and Internationally Mobile Filipino Workers.” International Migration 59, no. 2: 72–88. Chin, Christine B. N. 2013. Cosmopolitan Sex Workers: Women and Migration in a Global City. Oxford UP. Delgado, Vanessa. 2020. “Children of Immigrants as ‘Brokers’ in an Era of Exclusion.” Sociology Compass 14, no. 10: 1–11. Del Torto, Lisa M. 2008. “Once a Broker, Always a Broker: Non-Professional Interpreting as Identity Accomplishment in Multigenerational Italian–English Bilingual Family Interaction.” Multilingua 27, nos. 1–2: 77–97. Echeverria-Estrada, Carlos, and Jeanne Batalova. 2019. “Sub-Saharan African Immigrants in the United States.” Migration Information Source: The Online Journal of the Migration Policy Institute. https:​//​www​.migrationpolicy​.org​/article​/ sub​-saharan​-african​-immigrants​-united​-states​-2018. Espiritu, Yến Lê. 2014. Body Counts: The Vietnam War and Militarized Refugees. Berkeley: University of California Press.

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Federici, Silvia. 2019. “Social Reproduction Theory.” Radical Philosophy 2, no. 4: 55–57. Gamburd, Michele Ruth. 2000. The Kitchen Spoon’s Handle: Transnationalism and Sri Lanka’s Migrant Housemaids. Cornell UP. Hagedorn, Jessica. 1996. The Gangster of Love. London: Penguin Books. Hum, Derek, and Wayne Simpson. 2007. “The Legacy of Immigration: Labour Market Performance and Education in the Second Generation.” Applied Economics 39, no. 15: 1985–2009. Ijaz, Aisha, and Tahir Abbas. 2010. “The Impact of Inter‐Generational Change on the Attitudes of Working‐Class South Asian Muslim Parents on the Education of Their Daughters.” Gender and Education 22, no. 3: 313–26. Jeffers, Asha. 2016. “Unstable Indianness: Double Diaspora in Ramabai Espinet’s The Swinging Bridge and M.G. Vassanji’s When She Was Queen.” South Asian Review 37, no. 1: 31–50. Katz, Cindi. 2001. “Vagabond Capitalism and the Necessity of Social Reproduction.” Antipode 33, no. 4: 709–28. Kim, Youna. 2017. Childcare Workers, Global Migration and Digital Media. Routledge. Kofman, Eleonore. 2004. “Gendered Global Migrations.” International Feminist Journal of Politics 6, no. 4: 643–65. Kropiwnicki, Zosa de Sas. 2013. “Childhood in Exile: the Agency of Second-Generation Exiles Seeking Refuge from Apartheid.” Refuge 30: 35–46. Lahiri, Jhumpa. 2003. The Namesake. Boston: Houghton Mifflin. Laslett, Barbara, and Johanna Brenner. 1989. “Gender and Social Reproduction: Historical Perspectives.” Annual Review of Sociology 15, no. 1: 381–404. Lawson, Victoria A. 1998. “Hierarchical Households and Gendered Migration in Latin America: Feminist Extensions to Migration Research.” Progress in Human Geography 22, no. 1: 39–53. Litchmore, Rashelle V. H., Saba Safdar, and Kieran O’Doherty. 2016. “Ethnic and Racial Self-Identifications of Second-Generation Canadians of African and Caribbean Heritage: An Analysis of Discourse.” Journal of Black Psychology 42, no. 3: 259–92. Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham: Duke UP. Ma, Ling. 2019. Severance. London: Picador. Macklin, Audrey. 2007. “Who Is the Citizen’s Other? Considering the Heft of Citizenship.” Theoretical Inquiries in Law 8: 333–66. Marrow, H. B. 2020. “Hope Turned Sour: Second-Generation Incorporation and Mobility in US New Immigrant Destinations.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 43, no. 1: 99–118. McGill, Lisa D. 2005. Constructing Black Selves. New York: New York UP. Minian, Ana Raquel. 2018. Undocumented Lives: The Untold Story of Mexican Migration. Boston: Harvard UP. Miyares, Ines M., and Christopher A. Airriess. 2007. Contemporary Ethnic Geographies in America. Lanham: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc.

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Momsen, Janet Henshall, ed. 2003. Gender, Migration and Domestic Service. London: Routledge. Ninh, erin Khuê. 2011. Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature. New York: New York UP. Palumbo-Liu, David. 1999. Asian/American: Historical Crossings of a Racial Frontier. Redwood City: Stanford UP. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2008. The Force of Domesticity: Filipina Migrants and Globalization. NYU Press. Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben G. Rumbaut. 2014. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: U of California P. Selasi, Taye. 2013. Ghana Must Go. London: Penguin Books. Tan, Amy. 1989. The Joy Luck Club. New York: Ivy Books. Ty, Eleanor, and Christl Verduyn. 2008. Asian Canadian Writing beyond Autoethnography. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier UP. Villanueva, Christina M., and Raymond Buriel. 2010. “Speaking on Behalf of Others: a Qualitative Study of the Perceptions and Feelings of Adolescent Latina Language Brokers.” Journal of Social Issues 66, no. 1: 197–210. Yoo, David K. 1999. Growing Up Nisei: Race, Generation, and Culture among Japanese Americans of California, 1924–49. Champaign: U of Illinois P. Zhou, Min. 1997. “Growing Up American: The Challenge Confronting Immigrant Children and Children of Immigrants.” Annual Review of Sociology 23: 63–95. Zong, Jie and Jeanne Batalova. 2019. “Caribbean Immigrants in the United States.” Migration Information Source: The Online Journal of the Migration Policy Institute. https:​//​www​.migrationpolicy​.org​/article​/caribbean​-immigrants​-united​ -states​-2017.

PART I

On and On Doubly Diasporic Community

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Chapter One

Daughters of Cane and Thread Indo-Caribbean Identity as Diasporic Consciousness Tarika Sankar

In her 2015 article “Material and Immaterial Bodies: Diaspora Studies and the Problem of Culture, Identity, and Race,” Aisha Khan problematizes “identity” and its necessary corollary, “culture,” arguing that in intellectual work these terms serve to unintentionally fix “ethno-racially defined groups, notably ‘African’ and ‘Indian’ or ‘Asian’” (30). She writes, “Despite the pushback in diaspora studies against the search for ‘cultural authenticity,’ many scholars still seem to be attached to the culture concept” (2015, 30). A shared “cultural identity” is what defines and holds together a diaspora. But “culture” when used in this way tends to be reified and essentialized, ascribing particular practices, rituals, “behavior, recipes, customs, programs, rules, or traditions” to each group (2015, 30). Vijay Prashad similarly critiques the “fetish of culture,” which he argues is frequently deployed by discourses of multiculturalism but in practice does little more than reproduce the biological determinism of race (2001, xi). Our overreliance on the “culture concept” for understanding diaspora obscures more than it reveals. Khan suggests that the Indo-Caribbean diaspora is characterized as a particularly “cultural” group, defined by its retention or relationship to Indian cultural practices in ways that other diasporas are not. Here she is critiquing, as many scholars have, the cultural retention model of Indo-Caribbean identity, which within Indo-Caribbean feminisms has produced things like “culturalist” explanations for gendered violence and oppression against Indian women, now mostly debunked (see Gaiutra Bahadur, Coolie Woman (2014) and Kaneesha Parsard’s essay “Cutlass: Objects Toward a Theory of 21

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Representation” (2016)). Brought as indentured laborers to supply labor to Caribbean plantations following the abolition of slavery in the British empire, Indo-Caribbeans still struggle to shake the identity of “foreigners” or “outsiders” to creolized Caribbean society. The depiction of Indians in the Caribbean as “cultural,” “traditional,” and in a particularly sinister logic, retaining a sense of “culture” and heritage that Africans in the Caribbean supposedly lack, dates back to colonial logics of governance and divide and conquer through racial segregation. But the attachment to culture persisted through Caribbean independence, where Indo-Caribbeans attempted to stake their claim in modern nation-building projects by asserting their distinct heritage, history, religion (often Hinduism) and culture. In this way, Indo-Caribbeans challenged what Jasbir Puar describes as the “Africanization of state-created identities” (2009, 5–6), but also, such ethnic division rapidly crystallized into the “problematic of black-Indian party politics” that continues to plague Caribbean nation-states and has erupted into racial violence, particularly in Guyana (Puri 2004, 172). Overall, Khan argues that the slippage between “diaspora,” “culture,” and “identity” tends to reproduce the African/Indian racial binary and therefore the oppositional racial politics of the Caribbean. As Khan puts it, the “indispensable use of the culture concept . . . keeps intact the boundaries that divide diasporas into distinct ethnoracial units” (2015, 30). Khan asks, what would a diaspora look like that is not predicated on or held together by culture? In her earlier essay from 2007, she offers the concept of diasporic consciousness, defined as “a particular consciousness about the experience of migration” and a “diasporic sensibility” (145). I adapt diasporic consciousness as a framework to describe how Indo-Caribbeans in North America release the culturalist mode of thinking and define identity outside of the bounds of ethnicity and race. I propose that an emerging generation of Indo-Caribbean writers, artists and activists construct their identity as a politicized consciousness of colonial labor exploitation, multiple displacements, and overlapping racial hierarchies rather than through shared cultural practices or “Indian” ethnic origins. I follow scholars such as Khan and Prashad in arguing that prevailing models for understanding diasporic identity over-rely on race and its corollary, “culture,” which risks reproducing conservative politics of racial purity and separatism between Asian and Afro-descended groups. Diasporic consciousness, on the other hand, illuminates how Indo-Caribbeans assert their identity amid competing discourses of multiculturalism, South Asianness, and anti-Blackness in the United States and Canada without reifying essentialist notions of race and ethnicity. From the work of Queens-based poet Nadia Misir and the explicit social justice activism of Jahajee Sisters, a gender-justice organization, my theorization of Indo-Caribbean diasporic consciousness gives coherence to a diverse group

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of cultural productions that are linked less by a shared race, ethnicity, or nationality than a positionality and shared diasporic experience as daughters of immigrants in North America. Of course, Khan is far from the first to theorize diaspora in these more flexible terms, and she draws heavily from Stuart Hall, in particular his essay “Cultural Identity and Diaspora.” Hall argues for thinking about diaspora as a process, a “a matter of ‘becoming’ as well as of ‘being’” (225). Hall wrote thinking about the global Black diaspora, from his particular classed and raced position as a Black Caribbean subject in the UK in the 1980s. He makes only passing references to the Asian population in the Caribbean; the presence of Indo-Caribbeans is not central to his theorization of diaspora. However, I contend that Hall’s framework of diaspora and identity as a political construction can in fact be applied to understand the Indo-Caribbean context in the North Atlantic in the contemporary moment. In the literary texts and film, I consider in this chapter, Indo-Caribbean identity is a process and “condition of possibility” constructed through a negotiation of racial discourses that would otherwise render Indo-Caribbeanness illegible (Khan, “Material and Immaterial” 43). This work is also indebted to Afro-Caribbean and Black diaspora scholars such as Paul Gilroy and Edouard Glissant, who have deconstructed race, ethnicity, identity and culture as essentialist or fixed categories in relation to Blackness. In The Black Atlantic, Gilroy critiques the “overintegrated conceptions of culture which present immutable ethnic differences as an absolute break between the histories and experiences of ‘black’ and ‘white’ people” (2). I translate that critique to the relationship between Indo and Afro-Caribbean diasporas, which are similarly constructed as “immutably different” through the collapsing of “culture” with ethnicity and race (Gilroy 2). This chapter also strives not merely to apply previous theorizations of diasporic Blackness to the Indo-Caribbean experience or construct them as analogous but different diasporas, but to understand the Indo and Afro as inextricably intertwined in a dialectic of solidarity and struggle. In this effort I draw on Lisa Lowe’s approach in The Intimacies of Four Continents, which attempts to read transatlantic enslavement and indenture relationally under a single frame of global colonialism and migration, and Vijay Prashad’s work in Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity, which looks at how Afro and Asian “cultural worlds are imbricated in complex and varied ways” (x). Conceptualizing Indo-Caribbean identity as diasporic consciousness rethinks identity beyond a racial or ethnic category, and its foundations, the amorphous idea of “culture.” If “Indo-Caribbean” is defined through an experience of the multiple migrations and inherited traumas of indenture rather than culture or race, it does not have to be defined in opposition to the “Afro-Caribbean” or Blackness. This flexibility in identity resists Indo-Afro

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antagonisms imported from the Caribbean and instead envisions solidarity among different marginalized groups, such as South Asian Americans and Black Americans. This chapter will explore how literary and visual culture by American-born, Indo-Caribbean daughters of immigrants formulate an Indo-Caribbean diasporic identity that refuses the reification of race and challenges anti-Blackness. Specifically, I examine Lissa Deonarain’s short documentary film Double Diaspora: A Portrait of Indo-Caribbeans in New York and Nadia Misir’s poem, “I Wait in Line to Thread My Eyebrows on Liberty Avenue.” The history of race and Indians in the Caribbean is marked by colonial discourses that pit Blacks and Indians against each other as a strategy for governing racialized labor (Lowe, The Intimacies of Four Continents). To summarize, these colonial divisions evolved into polarizing binaries and racial antagonisms that translate into politics even today, especially in territories like Guyana and Trinidad. Crucially underpinning the idea of Indians and Blacks as “distinct ethnoracial units” is the notion of culture (Khan, “Material and Immaterial Bodies” 30). Colonial methods of “racial governmentality” (Lowe 24) that sought to divide and conquer through racial segregation perpetuated the cultural tropes of the “lazy African/the hardworking Indian” and “the childlike African . . . /the calculating and ascetic Indian” (Puri, The Caribbean Postcolonial 173). Colonial discourses characterizing IndoCaribbeans as particularly “cultural” simultaneously excluded them from participation in creolized Caribbean society and positioned them as racially superior to Afro-Caribbeans, who supposedly lacked an ancestral “culture.” Thus, throughout and after the period of Caribbean independence, culture became capital wielded in attempts by Indo-Caribbeans to stake their claim in modern nation-building projects by asserting their distinct heritage, history, religion (often Hinduism), and culture (Puar 2009). One example would be national holidays like Indian Arrival Day, celebrated in Trinidad and Guyana, which institutionalize “Indians” as a distinct cultural plurality within the national imaginary. However, writers and critics like Rajiv Mohabir have critiqued the nationalistic impulse of such celebrations, and question why the inception of indenture, a violent and oppressive institution, is recognized instead of its abolition (see his 2016 article “Why I Will Never Celebrate Indian Arrival Day”). In this sense, the construction of “Afro-Caribbean” and “Indo-Caribbean” as racial categories can be considered transformations of colonial modes of governance into strategies that political actors maneuver for state power, more so than biological or social realities. Racial and gendered dynamics intersect in the maintenance of race lines between Black and Indian. Tejaswini Niranjana examines how the female Indian body becomes a battleground for contesting notions of racial identity. For conservative factions of the Indo-Caribbean community, “proper” Indian women’s tightly

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controlled sexuality maintains racial purity and avoids the specter of miscegenation. The figure of the “dougla,” a mixed-race person who is both Indian and Black, challenges the Afro-Indo binary, as theorized by Puri and others. Puri examines how race is mobilized by both African and Indian orthodoxies for competing purposes, but always in the interest of maintaining power through the policing of race lines (2004, 191). Therefore, “race” as it relates to the Indo-Caribbean is a permeable construction rooted in conservative conceptions of “culture” and “heritage” that is often strategically deployed for power. Moreover, women and daughters bear an additional burden of expectations to propagate the racially pure, heteronormative nuclear Indian family. However, this experience of race shifts in the double-diaspora, particularly when Indo-Caribbeans are born, raised, and formulate identity primarily outside the Caribbean. Doubly diasporic Indo-Caribbeans respond not only to the inherited history of lateral antagonisms between Indians and Blacks in their parents’ Caribbean homelands but also to the institutionalized anti-Blackness and modes of racialization specific to their new contexts of the United States and Canada. Michael Omi and Howard Winant have proposed understanding race in the United States through the framework of racial formations: “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, transformed, and destroyed” (2014, 55). Racial formations link racial projects (“an interpretation, representation or explanation of racial dynamics [in] an effort to reorganize and redistribute resources along particular racial lines”) to racial hegemony (how race is used to support structures of power) (2014, 56). Compared to the pluralistic ethnic societies of the Caribbean, where racial discourses center creolization, mixing, and Black-Indian oppositionality, American racial discourses are more often dominated by a Black/white binary. Other groups, when they emerge into visibility, are often positioned or mobilized in relation to white supremacy and anti-Blackness (see the work of Vijay Prashad, for example). Here I also draw on Laura Pulido’s insistence that all racialization is relational; that is, “the status and meanings associated with one group are contingent upon those of another,” so that Blackness, whiteness, Asianness, and so on must be understood as mutually implicated (2006, 4). The formation of Indo-Caribbean identity is shaped by these racialethnic politics and the context of a “post Civil Rights multicultural U.S.,” as Gauitra Bahadur puts it (2014, 11). I argue that a particular generation of Indo-Caribbean artists and activists in the double-diaspora are critical of their enlistment into racial projects of anti-Blackness in the United States. The historical racial antagonisms of the Caribbean latently inform and are translated into the double-diasporic context of the North Atlantic, but not imported wholesale nor entirely forgotten by migration. While Omi and Winant delineate that not all racial projects are racist, and that some marginalized groups mobilize “strategic essentialism” to advocate for themselves, I suggest that

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Indo-Caribbean diasporic consciousness also rejects strategic essentialism. The Indo-Caribbean writers, artists and activists I identify are wary of the ways that strategic essentialism has been mobilized by Indians within the Caribbean to challenge Afro-centric political power through cultural orthodoxy and understand the implications of these strategies being replicated in the United States to bolster anti-Blackness. Moreover, Indo-Caribbean daughters of immigrants are aware of the gendered ways that women can be “coopted into an Indian cultural nationalist and political agenda,” something that Gabrielle Hosein and Lisa Outar resist in their formulation of IndoCaribbean feminisms (4). Thus, an “Indo-Caribbean” identity emerges from the location of the double-diaspora with a kind of malleability around race and ethnicity, neither tied to the oppositional binaries (or hybridization, such as the dougla discourses) of the Caribbean, nor neatly slotted into the racial categories available in the United States and Canada. Diasporic consciousness is a framework that this generation of IndoCaribbean writers, artists, and activists mobilizes to understand and critique systems of racism and the production of power rather than achieve it by reproducing essentialisms and antagonistic racial boundaries. Like most social justice movements, it is not uniformly successful in this goal. Points of contestation remain, such as the centrality of Caribbean descendants of indenture over other sites of Indian indenture; the role of national identification (for instance, the hegemony of Hindu-Guyanese representation), and a lingering sense of segregation between Black and Indo-West Indians in diaspora. The texts I discuss articulate Indo-Caribbeanness in ways that are legible within the racial discourses of the United States and Canada while challenging dominant representations of South Asianness and anti-Blackness. Ultimately, these cultural productions come to define the Indo-Caribbean not by identifying with the cultural or racial groups available in North America, but as a political and historical position. Within the available racial categories commonly used in the United States, “Indo-Caribbean” is virtually impossible to locate. As one example of this, the structure of US Census categories, which represent one apparatus through which the state legitimizes and produces racial-ethnic categories, discursively write out of existence the possibility of an “Indo-Caribbean” identity. As Omi and Winant observe, census categories have evolved over time, and “variation both reflects and in turn shapes racial understanding and dynamics” (2014, 3). If such documents constitute a “racial project” of the state to enumerate possible categories for racial and ethnic identification and distribute resources accordingly, then the “Indo-Caribbean” is illegible in this project. In fact, the very nature of these single-selection categories, in which the only possibility of approximating “Indo-Caribbean” is by triangulating “Caribbean” or “Guyanese,” “Trinidadian,” and so on with those who also identify as “Asian

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Indian,” cannot allow for a hybridized labor diaspora identity, and especially not a doubly diasporic second-generation Indo-Caribbean. For example, in Pyong Gap Min’s demographic study of Indo-Caribbeans in New York, he is unable to distinguish US-born Indo-Caribbeans in his data source, because the US Census Bureau asks foreign-born immigrants for their country of origin but only asks the American-born their state of birth. Thus, if US-born Indo-Caribbeans identify as “Asian” or “Asian Indian,” they are lumped together with all other Asian/South Asian ethnicities.1 These examples demonstrate that Indo-Caribbean identity cannot operate by the logic of discrete racial/ethnic labels. Instead, Indo-Caribbeans in the United States craft an identity based on diasporic consciousness of traumatic crossings that puts these very erasures front and center. While Jahajee Sisters, a grassroots Indo-Caribbean organization based in New York, has advocated for better representation of Indo-Caribbeans within the Census and conducted extensive outreach in the Richmond Hill neighborhood to “get [Indo-Guyanese] counted” for material and practical reasons such as adequate representation in political bodies, their conceptual framework for organizing places Indo-Caribbeans within an historical context of indenture and multiple migrations, something that cannot be captured in a census form (Jahajeesisters.org). Unsurprisingly, then, double-diasporic Indo-Caribbeans often express confusion and conflict around their place within the American racial and multiethnic topography. Lissa Deonarain’s 2018 short documentary film Double Diaspora: A Portrait of Indo-Caribbeans in New York depicts the densely Indo-Guyanese community in Richmond Hill, Queens, New York City. The film features interviews with several community members about grassroots Indo-Caribbean organizations specific to that place, as well as their individual migration stories and relationships to Indo-Caribbean identity. An almost self-contained world that begins where the A-train ends, the area is sometimes known as Little Guyana, because it has been densely settled by Guyanese, primarily of Indian descent, since the 1960s and 1970s. Richmond Hill might be considered the epicenter of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora in the United States, a place where Indo-Guyanese, Indo-Trinidadians, Indo-Surinamese, and others are not absorbed into other immigrant ethnic enclaves but recreate the distinct amalgamation of Indo-Caribbean identity through mandirs (Hindu temples), stores, grocery and fish markets, foodways, and even community organizations. Richmond Hill is the founding place and headquarters of the Indo-Caribbean Alliance (ICA) and Jahajee Sisters, two organizations featured in the film that specifically serve the Indo-Caribbean community. Deonarain’s documentary is crafted with a narrative arc that constructs identity as a process or “a matter of ‘becoming,’” to quote Stuart Hall (2019, 225). The documentary begins by introducing the ICA and the feminist

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gender-justice organization Jahajee Sisters through informational interviews with members of both. After framing the Indo-Caribbean community as a collective entity, Deonarain pivots to the personal narratives of her individual interviewees. A simple transition consisting of a few moments of black screen signals a shift in the tone of the film. While the first section featured public spaces like the streets of Richmond Hill, photos of vigils held for Indo-Caribbean women killed by their intimate partners, and the office spaces of the ICA, the next segment of the documentary features interior spaces that showcase the individual interviewees’ personalities. In Deonarain’s interview with Sarah Alli, an Indo-Guyanese filmmaker and photographer, Alli is seated in her bedroom in front of an impressive computer setup appropriate for film editing. A guitar hangs on the wall behind her, and some clothes are visible through the slightly open door of a wardrobe. In Miranda Deebrah’s interview, she is framed by shelves of worn books, board games, and crinkled flyers pinned to bulletin boards in what looks like the interior of a café or bookstore. In these interviews, carefully edited to construct a journey toward claiming Indo-Caribbean identity, many of the participants begin from a place of simply not knowing where they fit in. Susan Mahadeo, a co-founder of the ICA, says she frequently feels “misunderstood” and humorously recalls being asked if Guyana is in Africa, and having to “show [people] a map” (2018, 12:03, 12:25). Shabana Bachu, a volunteer with Jahajee Sisters, says that “for the most part growing up” she identified as “just Guyanese” and would explicitly refuse the label “Indian.” Sarah Alli recounts that during her first year of college in Boston, she assumed the identity of being “Black” because that was the category through which most of her peers made sense of her. As Alli puts it: “White America likes to lump white and nonwhite into these two separate categories, and that’s not how the world is” (2018, 15:07). American discourses of race, which often rely on a Black/white binary, or the model minority South Asian immigrant from India, leave little room for an identity like “Indo-Caribbean.” Neither truly “South Asian,” nor “Black” as defined in the United States, the double-migration of Indo-Caribbeans to America leaves them without a coherent identity—at least, not coherent in the terms of US identity politics. The dissonance between American taxonomies of race, the experience of the Indo-Guyanese community, and the inadequacy of cultural models of identity lead the various interviewees featured in the film to negate or disavow certain parts of their identity: the familiar cadences of Guyanese creole, Indian “culture,” or the frustrating exercise of identifying the small South American country of their origin. For instance, Alli contrasts her interests with those of her cousins, who embrace Indian dance and learn Indian musical instruments. Meanwhile, she is drawn to rock music, guitar, drums

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and other “Americanized” cultural forms that her family terms “white shit” (2018, 07:26). Moreover, she decides to move away from home for college, transgressing cultural expectations around children (especially young women) living at home until marriage. Conversely, performer and storyteller Miranda Deebrah describes the shame she felt as a child around speaking Guyanese English creole and celebrates embracing her indentured heritage and Guyanese roots in her spoken word performance “Sounds from Home.” Though Alli’s “psychic disavowal” (to borrow a term from Brinda Mehta) of culture appears to reject Indo-Guyanese identity while Deebrah desperately longs for connection to it, I suggest that they actually share a generational dissatisfaction with the “culture concept,” whether American, Guyanese, or Indian. Indeed, the fact that Alli ultimately claims a Guyanese and Indo-Caribbean identity, despite rejecting traditional Indian music and dance, demonstrates that her “identity” does not revolve around specific cultural forms or traditional Indian inheritances. Likewise, Bachu rejects the label “Indian,” and it is not through a return to Indian “roots” that these Indo-Caribbeans find their place. Both Deebrah and the community represented in Deonarain’s documentary find hegemonic American and Indian culture, respectively, insufficient paradigms for the formation of a doubly diasporic identity. According to Khan, diasporic communities vary widely in their historical contexts, but “what remains a key constant is a community’s emphasis on its awareness of its outsider-foreign origins, [and] the struggle in local contexts to overcome the stigma with which outsider-foreign origins contend” (2007, 147). Racially illegible to America, these second-generation Indo-Guyanese acutely feel the stigma of being outsiders in the form of displacement, alienation from the self, and a shattered sense of identity. The transition from Caribbean understandings of race to North American racial topography destabilizes culture and race-based formations of identity, which cannot translate because of their fixity. When it becomes clear that American racial logics and bounded concepts of culture cannot accommodate Caribbean peoples of South Asian descent, they forge new forms of identification that make sense in the context of a double-diaspora, which I term “diasporic consciousness.” The narrative progression of Double Diaspora suggests an alternative construction of identity, not as a gradual integration of “Indian,” “Guyanese,” and “American” cultures, but a de- and reconstructive process of coming to diasporic consciousness. The film’s focus on Richmond Hill, where the Indo-Guyanese community is most prominent despite a diversity of Indo-Trinidadian, Indo-Surinamese, Indo-Jamaican, Sikh Punjabi, and many other groups that reside there, points to an ongoing tension between national and pan-Caribbean South Asian identities. Although I use the terms “Indo-Caribbean” and “Indo-Guyanese”

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interchangeably in my discussion of Double Diaspora, the majority of the film’s interviewees are of Guyanese descent and to some, the specific national identity of “Indo-Guyanese” is meaningful and important. For instance, a critical part of Deebrah’s performance art piece “Sounds from Home,” excerpted in the documentary, is the symbolic dissolution and reconstruction of the Guyanese flag, represented by green, red, yellow, and black scarves tied around her wrists. To some extent, this is because Indo-Guyanese like Deebrah are aware of the historical specificities of the Guyanese context and can only claim to speak from a Guyanese experience, and not for Indo-Caribbeans from other nations. Paradoxically, however, the overrepresentation of IndoGuyanese within the Indo-Caribbean community, without an explicit theorization of a pan Indo-Caribbean identity that transcends nation, functions to fix “Indo-Guyanese” as the default Indo-Caribbean experience. A further example of the hegemony of Guyanese national identity within the IndoCaribbean community in America is the recent, highly celebrated renaming of the intersection of Liberty Avenue and Lefferts Boulevard in Richmond Hill as “Little Guyana Avenue.”2 Liberty Avenue is the main thoroughfare running through the Richmond Hill and Ozone Park neighborhoods in the southern part of Queens. While this act serves as symbolic recognition by the city of New York of the contributions of the Guyanese community and increases visibility of the largely unknown presence of Guyanese (or even the existence of Guyana), it also obscures the many other Caribbean countries that have Indian populations descended from indenture. As I gestured to in the introduction to this chapter, the dominance of national identification with Guyana is a limitation in the framework of Indo-Caribbean diasporic consciousness. Despite these challenges, I posit that a generation of Indo-Caribbeans like Deebrah, Bachu, Alli, and Queens-based poet Nadia Misir understand “Indo-Caribbean” identity as a diasporic consciousness rather than an ethnic or racial category. Mobilizing the language of contemporary social justice movements, they recognize how the intergenerational traumas of colonialism and indenture shape their place in the raced, classed, and gendered landscape of the United States. They negotiate the nuances of identity, seek solidarities, and ultimately refuse to view their Indo-Caribbean heritage as incompatible with gender and racial justice goals, despite the history of separatist racial politics between Indo- and Afro-Caribbeans. Misir’s poem similarly takes Richmond Hill as the backdrop for her critical reflections on Indo-Caribbean diasporic identity. Sitting in an Indian-run beauty salon on Liberty Avenue, Misir becomes acutely aware of this just before a Punjabi woman “shred[s] . . . [her] eyebrows into shape.” “Indian in looks, but not Indian enough,” Misir reflects, repeating this refrain twice throughout the poem. Indo-Caribbean Americans cannot rely on belonging to

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the South Asian diaspora for a sense of identity. Their lineage interrupted by a detour to the Caribbean and the ravages of indentured labor on the plantations, Indo-Caribbeans are a “disavowed diaspora,” according to Monisha Das Gupta (126). One reason for this is their loss of ancestral languages. Watching the Bollywood movie playing on a TV in the salon, Misir says, “I remember I am Guyanese when my eyes stick to the English subtitles floating at the bottom. . . . I measure the impact of colonialism by all the languages I do not know.” If language is tied to identity, Indo-Caribbeans are barred access to certain dimensions of Indian and South Asian identity because continental languages did not often survive indenture on the plantation. Indeed, the languages that would have been spoken by indentured ancestors are not modern Bollywood Hindi, but a mixture of regional languages such Bhojpuri, Awadhi, and Tamil. Furthermore, to quote Deebrah, Indians and Africans in the Caribbean forged a “new language” to “call their own,” a pidgin language known as Guyanese English creole or Creolese. Misir does not search for identity in Indian culture, language, or customs, instead historicizing her current position by understanding “the impact of colonialism” on her complex relationship to South Asia. Moreover, in the beauty salon, her inherited trauma collides with contemporary Western beauty standards, where at the age of fourteen, she begins regular threading to remove her unibrow. As a daughter of immigrants, Misir begins to assimilate to American beauty norms, while her mother attempts to preserve her childhood innocence. “Why yuh wan tread yuh eyebrow so young? In Guyana I din know wan ting about eyebrow,” Misir’s mother says in Guyanese creole. However, this conversation is clearly a recollection of a past conversation, because while in the salon, her mother speaks “standard” American English, anxiously cautioning, “Don’t take too much off. No arch. Just clean it. Keep it thick.” According to Misir, “Guyanese-Creole English has no home in Kaya’s [beauty salon] unless you wish to be exposed as Indian, but not Indian enough,” again drawing attention to the marginalization of Indo-Caribbean identities within South Asian American spaces. Through the politics of eyebrow grooming and gendered beauty norms, Misir marks a generational identity shift between her Guyanese mother and herself as an American-born daughter of immigrants. Her mother’s anxieties about the appropriateness of hair removal for a teenage girl evoke the gendered Caribbean discourse of “force ripe,” a term that polices girls deemed to be too “grown up” or sexually mature for their age. Such perceived promiscuity would be dangerous for an Indo-Caribbean woman in Guyana, whose sexual purity, as discussed earlier, is essential to maintaining the ethnic insularity of Indians. Thus, the poem conjures a complex intergenerational negotiation of shifting gender and race norms from Guyana to America through a seemingly minor mother-daughter conflict about threading eyebrows.

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Misir continues, “Colonialism uprooted a timeline of my ancestry. I cannot locate the village my ancestors migrated from in South Asia, or the port of the boat that ferried them across the Atlantic to British Guiana’s plantations.” Here Misir recognizes that Indo-Caribbean identity cannot be traced as a straight line from South Asia; instead, she understands that a fragmented genealogy and diasporic routes rather than roots, to borrow from Paul Gilroy, are central to diasporic consciousness. However, this does not always mean that an Indo-Caribbean identity is legible within the multicultural vocabulary available in America. “Still they ask me where are you from? Before cutting the skin near my temples,” says Misir. “Where are you from,” a question that haunts all daughters of immigrants, insists on a singular origin point, something that the Indo-Caribbean diasporic journey cannot give. “Temples,” while literally referring to a part of Misir’s body, also evoke the many spaces of Hindu religious worship that dot Liberty Avenue, another bastion of Indian cultural inheritance. But the Hindu temple is not a safe space for all—Indo-Caribbeans are also Muslim and Christian; Brahminic ideals of womanhood conscript women’s agency in more “traditional” congregations, and the threat of co-option by Hindu fundamentalism always looms. While religion might be one tie to India, conflating the woman’s body and the temple can be dangerous, and Misir delves into this gendered legacy inherited by descendants of indenture. “Cutting,” though an unintentional consequence of having her eyebrow hairs removed with thread, also evokes the history of the plantation. Misir writes, “A taut piece of thread is sharper than a cutlass used to cut cane.” For Indian ancestors in the Caribbean, cutting sugarcane was the livelihood of the indentured, but also common was men cutting women in acts of jealous rage and violence (see Bahadur, Coolie Woman). In the feminized space of the beauty salon, during the intimate embodied act of hair removal, Misir’s exploration of Indo-Caribbean identity is experienced through the female body, reminding us of the central place of Indian women, and their violent exploitation, in histories of indenture. The sting of having each eyebrow hair removed is a reminder that her own body, despite being twice removed from India and the brutal experience of indenture, still carries her matrilineal ancestors’ pain. “Diaspora haunts me where white thread meets flesh,” she writes; flesh that she shares with her indentured forbearers, flesh that was imported, disfigured, and converted to labor and profit for “white” British colonizers. The “thread” is also the link that connects her to genealogies of indenture, even in faraway Queens, New York. Indo-Caribbeanness understood through diasporic consciousness expands our notions of what identity can be, showing that it is not easily reducible to a set of cultural practices, rituals, shared language, or customs. Instead, Misir centers the process of returning to indentured and colonial history and growing awareness of how these past violences and displacements continue to “haunt”

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her. She understands her gendered and racialized experience in the salon as a direct product of her ancestors’ migration, labor, and trauma, from the loss of language to the violence inflicted on the skin of the female body. Misir also belongs to a generation of Indo-Caribbeans that is acutely aware of the particular histories of injustice that shape the United States. As discussed earlier, colonial discourses about race and later the politics of racial purity/plurality in the Caribbean stoked racial animosity between Blacks and Indians (despite ample evidence of racial intermixing between the groups). But in the context of America, South Asians are frequently cast as a “model minority” and used as a wedge to prop up white supremacist oppression of Black Americans. Misir is keenly aware of the ways that race relations from the Caribbean were imported to the States. As she eloquently puts it: “We are descended from enslaved Africans and indentured Indians yet we settled in two different boroughs along the border of race.” Misir is referring to the fact that despite hailing from the same country, Indo-Guyanese primarily settled in Richmond Hill and Ozone Park in Queens while Afro-Guyanese communities are concentrated in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Flatbush and Canarsie. “The border of race” is precisely what Aisha Khan argues that culture-based identities keep intact. Race is spatialized and recapitulated in the States even after migration. But Misir is clearly uneasy with the ways that Caribbean race-based politics have translated in her new homeland, writing: “For every anti-black comment an aunty makes about Serena Williams or my curly hair I curse the sugar trade, the British, boats, maps and Sir Walter Raleigh.” Crucially, Misir understands that racial antagonisms between Blacks and Indians do not result from biological or cultural differences, nor the recent slights of one political party against the other. She historicizes these uncomfortable dynamics as products of colonialism. With sophisticated awareness, she understands the nuanced ways that these inherited legacies of enslavement, indenture, and colonialism map onto the complexities of race in the United States—a terrain that the double-diaspora must learn to navigate. I want to close by highlighting the work of grassroots gender-justice organization Jahajee Sisters, a group created for and by Indo-Caribbean women and survivors of gender-based violence that consciously attempts to build solidarities and work toward transformative justice. The organizers, just like Misir, became conscious of the racial prejudices that continue to fester within the Indo-Caribbean community, and last summer hosted a series of community workshops on addressing anti-Blackness within Indo-Caribbean spaces and families. Not surprisingly, the workshops included history lessons on the colonial and Cold War era origins of racial tensions between Afro- and Indo-Caribbeans, much like Misir historically contextualized race relations in her poetry. Moreover, they centered instances of solidarity between Blacks and Indians, such as the Working People’s Alliance, founded in Guyana in

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the 1970s by Dr. Walter Rodney. I highlight this work because it exemplifies what I have conceptualized as diasporic consciousness: a way to build identity centered on a political awareness of the historical traumas of migration, colonial violence and indenture that refuses to reify race and therefore can expansively build solidarities with other groups. While, as Misir’s poem acknowledges, negotiating race and gender can be fraught and weighty, and daughters inherit a heavy burden, writers and organizers of this generation have rethought Indo-Caribbean identity in a way that honors their history without playing into culturalist stereotypes about Indianness, race, and patriarchy. Identity is a “condition of possibility” rather than a discrete box. NOTES 1. This report from the most recent (2020) US Census breaks down how race and ethnicity are categorized and how diversity is measured in the census: https:​//​www​ .census​.gov​/newsroom​/blogs​/random​-samplings​/2021​/08​/measuring​-racial​-ethnic​ -diversity​-2020​-census​.html. According to this report, the US Census follows standards on race and ethnicity established by the US Office of Management and Budget (OMB) in 1997. These standards, including definitions for each of the racial categories and parameters for inclusion, can be read here: https:​//​www​.govinfo​.gov​/content​ /pkg​/FR​-1997​-10​-30​/pdf​/97​-28653​.pdf. 2. https:​//​www​.cbsnews​.com​/newyork​/news​/little​-guyana​-avenue​-richmond​-hill​ -queens​/

REFERENCES Bahadur, Gaiutra. 2014. Coolie Woman: The Odyssey of Indenture. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Deonarain, Lissa. “Double Diaspora (2018).” Lissa Deonarain. Accessed April 2, 2021. http:​//​www​.lissadeonarain​.com​/doublediaspora. Gilroy, Paul. 1993. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso. Hall, Stuart. 2019. Essential Essays. Volume 2, Identity and Diaspora. Hall, Stuart, 1932–2014. Works. Selections. 2016. Durham: Duke University Press. https:​//​ ebookcentral​.proquest​.com​/lib​/miami​/detail​.action​?docID​=5609563. Hosein, Gabrielle Jamela and Lisa Outar. 2016. Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought: Genealogies, Theories, Enactments. New York: Palgrave Macmillan. Khan, Aisha. 2007. “Rites and Rights of Passage: Seeking a Diasporic Consciousness.” Cultural Dynamics 19, nos. 2–3: 141–64. ———. 2015. “Material and Immaterial Bodies: Diaspora Studies and the Problem of Culture, Identity, and Race.” Small Axe 19, no. 348: 29–49. Lowe, Lisa. 2015. The Intimacies of Four Continents. Durham: Duke University Press.

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Min, Pyong Gap. 2013. “The Attachments of New York City Caribbean Indian Immigrants to Indian Culture, Indian Immigrants and India.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 39, no. 10: 1601–16. Misir, Nadia. 2018. “I Wait in Line to Thread My Eyebrows on Liberty Avenue.” QC Voices, September 19. http:​//​qcvoices​.qwriting​.qc​.cuny​.edu​/nmisir26​/2018​/09​/19​/i​ -wait​-in​-line​-to​-thread​-my​-eyebrows​-on​-liberty​-avenue​/. Mohabir, Rajiv. 2016. “Why I Will Never Celebrate Indian Arrival Day.” Asian American Writers’ Workshop. Accessed October 25, 2021. https:​//​aaww​.org​/indian​ -arrival​-day​/. Omi, Michael, and Howard Winant. 2014. Racial Formation in the United States. 3rd ed. New York: Routledge. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.4324​/9780203076804. Parsard, Kaneesha Cherelle. 2016. “Cutlass: Objects toward a Theory of Representation.” In Indo-Caribbean Feminist Thought, 241–60. New Caribbean Studies. New York: Palgrave Macmillan US. Prashad, Vijay. 2001. Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: Afro-Asian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity. Boston: Beacon Press. Puar, Jasbir K. 2009. “Chutney to Queer and Back: Trinidad 1995–1998.” Caribbean Review of Gender of Studies 3. Pulido, Laura. 2006. Black, Brown, Yellow, and Left: Radical Activism in Los Angeles. 1st ed. Acls Humanities E-Book. Berkeley: University of California Press. Puri, Shalini. 2004. The Caribbean Postcolonial: Social Equality, Post-Nationalism, and Cultural Hybridity. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.

Chapter Two

Chinese Mexican Autoethnographies Yareli Castro Sevilla‌‌‌

“Y todos los días créeme que sigo recuperando algo. Todos los días hay algo nuevo. Y valoró muchísimo eso. Entonces me genera un amor y crecimiento personal y de admiración y respeto por mis ancestros.” (And every day, believe me, I keep recovering something. Every day there is something new. And I appreciate that so much. It generates love and personal growth and admiration and respect for my [Chinese Mexican] ancestors.) —Jeanett Woong

During one of our pláticas/talks, Jeanett Woong, a third-generation Chinese Mexican from Guadalajara, Jalisco, described the process of publishing her grandmother’s biography. After a trip to China that brought up many memories, Jeanett began a series of long conversations with Mamá Alicia, her grandmother, wanting to know more about Alicia’s life. The transpacific journey Jeanett uncovered took her family, the Woongs, from China to Mexico, to China, and then back to Mexico again, subject to global forces and rampant anti-Asian sentiment during the twentieth century. The conversations between Jeanett and Alicia culminated in self-publishing the book Mi Nombre es Alicia Woong Castañeda in 2005. Not only does this book provide historical descriptions of how anti-Chinese campaigns throughout most of the twentieth century decimated Chinese Mexican communities and families that had established themselves in Mexico, it is also a testament to the memories and love cultivated by the grandma-granddaughter duo while creating it. 37

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This autoethnographic project brought together past and present histories of the Woongs and Chinese Mexicans, providing crucial insights into the interplay of race, diaspora, gender, nationalism(s), migration, and xenophobia in Mexico beginning in the twentieth century. Feminist writers have long modeled autoethnographic approaches to academic work (Moraga and Anzaldúa 1981; Anzaldúa 1987; Levins Morales 2001; Hartman 2007). When we acknowledge the silences embedded at all stages of archival production (Trouillot 1995), autoethnographic approaches become crucial to telling complete histories. This could not be truer in Mexico about Mexican national archives and narratives, where Chinese Mexicans and their histories are notably absent or excluded from national narratives and school curricula. At the turn of the twenty-first century, the search for redress and archival inclusion animated a group of Chinese Mexicans to cultivate a virtual community, engage in widespread projects for self-archiving, and produce numerous expressive forms detailing uncovered histories. From dishes that hold identities and tell stories, to gendered revisionist histories, to visual culture in celebrations, my current work ethnographically details these acts as moments of exchange, negotiation, and intimacy. As a fifth-generation Chinese Mexican from Sinaloa, Mexico, when I began to look for Chinese Mexican stories for my dissertation, I realized the proliferation of historical work about “the Chinese in Mexico”1 (Schiavone Camacho 2012; Peña Delgado 2013; Castillo Muñoz 2017; Chang 2017; Gonzalez 2017) obscured the presence of Chinese Mexicans in present-day Mexico. While I wanted to name the silences implicit in my family history and why we, as a family, do not acknowledge or speak about our Chinese roots, I also wanted to understand why Chinese Mexicans are continuously referred to as forgotten, overlooked, or never recovered (Hu-DeHart 1980 and Fong 1999). While conducting extensive fieldwork throughout Mexico for my dissertation—which ethnographically details the practices for negotiating Chinese Mexican roots and histories—a subset of Chinese Mexicans stood out: Chinese Mexican women. Chinese Mexican women’s life histories and writings tell their own family stories from their perspectives, with distinct storytelling approaches, and using familial and community archives. Their stories bridge past and present histories and explore multiple migrations, gendered and xenophobic violence, and lasting reverberations. Within waves of storytelling, Jeanett Woong and Monica Cinco, the daughters of Chinese Mexican immigrants, embarked on journeys that negotiated daughterhood and identities. A close look into their expressive forms reveals complex processes while searching for their family histories: how they begin to have these difficult (and often painful) conversations with their families and how the search for histories shapes Chinese Mexican families, identity,

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and community. I argue that Chinese Mexican daughterhood can be articulated through acts of storytelling, autoethnographic projects, and relentless quests to learn more about intimate familial histories to circumvent epistemic and material violence. Historian Nicole Guidotti-Hernández has described this impetus as “both a formalistic narrative practice and a way to mourn for past violence” (Guidotti-Hernández 2011, 7), the logical desire to put dates and names to our collective histories. In this essay, I center Chinese Mexicans’ stories and writings, like those lovingly cultivated by Alicia and Jeanett Woong, as a counterarchive (Magaña 2022) of a community shaped by parallel pasts. I model the scholarship of Chicana and Latina feminist writers by centering memories and writings of mujeres chinodescendientes (Chinese descendant women) alongside my autoethnographic memories as a diasporic Chinese Mexican and the daughter of undocumented immigrants living in the United States. In doing so, I situate autoethnographic projects as crucial to understanding the more extensive histories of Mexico, the United States, Chinese Mexicans, and immigrant daughters’ current interactions with self-archiving, intimate pláticas, and material culture. The increased relevance of terms such as “organic intellectual,” theorizing “from within” or “from the flesh,” and “collective testimonio/collective testimony” allows me to highlight the words, writings, and expressive forms of Chinese Mexican daughters as theories of their everyday lives, telling me in their own words their hopes, futures, and visions for their histories. Scholar Aurora Levins Morales succinctly calls this process “truth telling from personal knowledge” (2001, 29), conceptualizing the body and our lived experiences as the basis for intellectual knowledge and ways of knowing. Gatherings with a side of storytelling are customary within the Chinese Mexican community. Throughout the twentieth century, teatime, lunchtime, or game night with paisanos2 served as a crucial space to remember, grieve, long, and reflect. For Chinese descendants in present-day Mexico, the gatherings and pláticas with their families have become the principal avenue to learn about their family histories. The intimate ritual of having gatherings in their porches or backyards, often over tea, created a welcoming atmosphere and allowed for the circulation of stories, stories that many descendants had never heard of or had been apprehensive about asking about, fearing what remembering might entail for their ancestors who suffered historical anti-Chinese sentiment in Mexico.3 In a part of Mexican history rarely told, Chinese living in Mexico suffered the brunt of Sinophobic violence roughly from 1900 to 1960. Similarly, for me, the pláticas with Chinese Mexicans as part of my dissertation fieldwork, often via video conferencing platform Zoom because

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of the COVID-19 pandemic, provided an insight into a generation that still suffers the remnants of Sinophobic violence. Our chats transport me into diasporic Chinese Mexican women’s living rooms and homes in Mexico, Canada, and Germany. In a standard plática, we explore our backgrounds, the histories Chinese Mexicans have been able to reconstruct through oral histories and archival work of their own families and larger communities, and how the community and their lives have changed due to their ongoing quests in search of Chinese Mexican spaces. I usually tell them about myself, my background, and what brought me to the work. I’m received as “una de nosotros/one of us.”4 I was born in Culiacán, Sinaloa, Mexico. Usually, when I tell people about my birthplace, I am met with simplistic views of the city as dangerous and controlled by cartel violence. For my family and I, insecurity coupled with a lack of economic opportunities led to our migration to the United States during a time when our story mirrored that of many families in search of the lauded American dream. In 2005, my family and I began a journey as undocumented immigrants in southern California. It would not be until over a decade later that I would learn that I come from a lineage of immigrants, not just undocumented migrants, who assert their rights to migrate and remain. The everyday experiences of being an undocumented immigrant in the United States have been detailed extensively by immigration scholars. Upon our arrival to California, the family structures that we relied on for support turned to phone calls and longing from afar. From having our family car taken for driving without a license to lacking IDs to the rhetoric on the TV that vilified our existence, quotidian experiences reminded us of our precarity in the country. Precarity transformed my position as a daughter. I remember being thrown in the classroom, struggling to learn the language while my classes were in English only. However, I was no longer just a student; I became a translator, a broker, a mediator. I translated quotidian messages like grocery ads, promotions, and necessary legal and school documents. The passing away of my grandfather and our inability to attend his funeral solidified our status as undocumented. As I watched my mom attend her father’s funeral on her phone—until this day, she has not been able to go back and grieve him properly—I found refuge in books and immigrant groups to think through trauma and what separation meant. Fierce activists in undocumented spaces taught me the power of learning our histories and understanding the real reasons our families migrate to the United States, including the complicity of the United States in destabilizing Latin American and Caribbean nations. Books like Harvest of Empire: A History of Latinos in America (González 2000) and We Are Americans: Undocumented Students Pursuing the American Dream (Pérez 2009), alongside my talks with young undocumented organizers, named my feelings and experiences

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with immigration and as an undocumented person. In hindsight, immigrant spaces were crucial to my formation as a daughter, undocumented immigrant, and now a scholar, and why I center the teachings and epistemologies of my interlocutors. As I have written in two autoethnographic articles (Castro Sevilla 2021, 2023), nearly fourteen years after leaving Culiacán and becoming one of the over eleven million undocumented immigrants in the United States, I returned to my native state of Sinaloa. I visited the places I longed for, reunited with family members, ate the food of my childhood, and crossed the borders I had not been allowed to for over a decade. When I visited my grandma in Guamúchil, a city over an hour away, she introduced me to my bisabuela/great-grandma Josefina, who commented, “qué bueno que no saliste tan china/good thing you don’t look too Chinese.” The compliment over my lack of Chineseness set me on a journey to discover why we hide our Chinese lineage and what other family histories I can find underneath the silences. In their monographs, numerous mixed-race scholars have detailed the impetus to learn the histories of their own families, using their lived experiences as knowledge in their scholarly endeavors (Siu 2005; Chao Romero 2010; Guevarra 2012). The scholarship of Monica Cinco Basurto, a second-generation Chinese Mexican, provided me with the blueprints for this personal research approach within my community. Monica opened her arms to me as I started my doctorate in 2018. I had heard Monica’s name countless times and had encountered her name written all over the acknowledgments of the most influential academic books about Chinese Mexicans. None, however, centered her lived experiences and the stories she told of her family, the Cinco family, as theory. Her anthropological doctoral dissertation, “‘A mi no me pueden volver a sacar’: Etnografía práctica desde los márgenes de la diáspora chino mexicana,” tells the long history of Chinese Mexicans from their arrival to Mexico at the turn of the twentieth century until the end of fieldwork, roughly 2016 (Cinco Basurto 2017). Pushing boundaries, Monica tells this long history through the lens of her family history, the talks she conducted with her father Jorge Cinco, and paisanos she interviewed. Crucial to new methods in ethnography, Monica included autoethnographic narratives of her trips to China as she traced the transpacific journeys the Cincos took, from their arrival in Macao to the house where they lived in Toisan, to the churches her family attended. When I inquired, Monica explained her trajectory, including the research she does, is due to her unique experience as the “daughter of a Chinese man and a Mexican woman.” This phrase commonly resounds in Monica’s speeches, talks, and writings; her experience as the daughter of immigrants is informed by her family’s migration journey and the spaces her parents cultivated in Mexico City.

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In the backyard of her Mexico City home, often during teatime or over games of mahjong, Monica remembers listening to stories from the countless Chinese men and women who passed through her house. Beginning in the 1960s, the Mexico City house of Jorge Cinco Sandoval and Josefina Basurto Benitez, Monica’s parents, served for decades as a stopping point for many Chinese Mexicans and newly arriving Chinese immigrants on their way to their forever homes. Jorge Cinco’s ability to speak Spanish, Cantonese, and Mandarin situated him as an unofficial ambassador of the Chinese diasporic community that arrived in Mexico: he boarded airplanes and aided with translations and initial interviews; he provided connections for paisanos looking for work or housing; and crucially, his home, and later his restaurant, served as the official gathering place for paisanos looking to feel “en familia/ with family.” Saturdays at the Cinco house or another paisano’s house were unmissable. Some of Monica’s fondest memories were spectating mahjong tournaments from dawn to dusk. While some adults played mahjong, others used the time to chismear/gossip, share recipes, or drink tea. When Monica began doing fieldwork for her master’s thesis at El Colegio de Mexico, the connections and community the father-daughter duo fostered over the years in their backyard opened doors for her. While conducting fieldwork, she remembers spending time in paisano’s houses, moving from month to month to another one, and living from the kindness of hosts. The stories and memories gathered from her interlocutors pushed her to dig into her family histories, eventually sitting down in the living room with her father and recording their conversations. Monica began writing about her family in the late 1990s. Her article “China en Mexico” was published in an anthology of Asians in the Americas (Cinco 1999). However, the stories she heard from her father Jorge had circulated ever since she can remember: “Yo crecí escuchando a mi papa su orgullo por ser chino/I grew up listening to my father’s pride for being Chinese.” She remembers that even their taxi driver would hear the sometimes-dramatized stories of his father in China, his battles for repatriation to Mexico (after being forcibly deported), and the many trials and tribulations the Cincos experienced in Mexico and China. Jorge would often tell Monica that his life was like a movie. In many ways, the story of the Cincos is movie-like, almost unbelievable. Through Monica’s writings and reflections as part of her master’s and doctoral work and a life history I conducted with her, I learned about her family’s forced expulsion to China during the 1930s—during the height of anti-Chinese persecution—and repatriation back to Mexico in 1960. Mirroring the stories of many other Chinese immigrants to Mexico, Federico Cinco, Monica’s great-grandfather, was born in China and moved to Mexico at the beginning of the twentieth century, arriving in Sinaloa and establishing a fabric store.5 Monica’s father, Jorge, was born from her

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grandfather’s marriage to a Mexican woman, Zenona Sandoval. Zenona and Federico locked eyes at a “tienda de abarrotes/general store” belonging to Zenona’s family, located in the northern Mexican state of Sinaloa.6 Zenona, a Mexican woman born in Guamúchil, Sinaloa, and Federico, a Chinese man born in the village Vei Kin Ley in the province of Guangdong, China, married in 1918 despite the objections of Zenona’s family who professed their dislike for her Chinese suitor. Their initial address in Calle Hidalgo #59 in Culiacán, Sinaloa was the first home of their six kids, three girls and three boys. Throughout the 1930s, hundreds (if not thousands) of Chinese were expelled from Mexican states indiscriminately, often kidnapped via militarized raids or dropped in the United States to be deported back to China. The looming threat of violence forced Chinese immigrants and their families to choose from a bad set of options: adhering to segregation orders, migrating to neighboring states with similar anti-Chinese policies, or moving in with relatives for protection, often erasing their presence in the country. Families safeguarded their homes in Mexico by destroying documents, photographs, and other family relics pointing to their Chinese origins or ancestry. Other Chinese dimmed their presence in cities by downsizing their businesses and living discrete lives. Families like the Cincos and Woongs left reluctantly and restarted their lives in China. Communities in China circulated information via diasporic Latinx associations and networks. In the Guadalupanos headquarters, named after the Virgin of Guadalupe, Jorge Cinco maintained his connections to Mexico by practicing Spanish, fostering community, and learning about the upcoming repatriation. At home, Zenona regularly practiced Spanish with her children, loudly sang norteño songs while cooking or cleaning, and devoutly practiced Catholicism, crafting spaces for the coexistence of different cultures and encouraging her children to long for their patria/homeland from abroad. Within spaces of subjection and rejection, Chinese became Chinese Mexicans, claiming their right to belong in both nations nurtured by their experiences in China and memories of Mexico. The history of the Cincos, meticulously archived by Monica, alongside anthropological excavations model the utility of autoethnographic approaches to understanding transpacific histories. Over 500 kilometers away from Mexico City and Monica, in Guadalajara Jalisco, Jeanett Woong remembers coming of age in crucial Chinese spaces, including Chinese restaurants and the Guadalajara Chinese Association headquarters. Jeanett and I chatted about our identities and lived experiences during our conversation. Reflecting on our family histories, we both realized the silences in our stories and the many histories to be told. Jeanett explains that she is learning something new almost every day about her family history. “Es como un rompecabezas/it is like a puzzle” she mentions. Prior to our plática, Jeanett learned two new pieces of her ongoing rompecabezas. First, Mama

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Chayito, her great-grandmother, had her Mexican citizenship before her forced deportation to China and was given a new passport before her repatriation from Hong Kong to Mexico. Second, after boarding a boat to return, Alicia received a postcard. Jeanett proudly sent me the postcard illustrating the boat her family boarded, the S.S. Rakuyo Maru. I learned about Jeanett Woong’s story because I read a biography she wrote and self-published about her grandmother, Alicia Woong, or Mamá Alicia, as Jeanett calls her. Initially, in a class assignment for her education class, Jeanett was encouraged to interview and write about someone who had been a part of the Guadalajara education system. As it turns out, an education legend lived in her own home. Her grandmother, Alicia Woong Castañeda, the daughter of a Chinese man and Mexican woman, had been a pioneer teacher and later the supervisor of entire school districts in Jalisco. Returning from a trip to China became the perfect opportunity for Jeanett and Alicia to discuss the past since their journey brought happy and painful memories. The book emerged from these conversations and learning the life history of her grandma. The story Jeanett writes about her grandmother goes beyond her attributes as a monumental teacher; her life story also tells the stories of expulsion, repatriation, and dynamism of “una china muy tapatia,” as a recent museum exhibit has called her, denoting her Chinese and Jalisciense roots and her unique positionality inhabiting both identities. The book Mi Nombre es Alicia Woong Castañeda, published in 2005, tells the story of Alicia, born on February 20, 1929, in Huatabampo Sonora, the daughter of María del Rosario Castañeda Lugo and Woong Tuj Lim, parents of Chinese origin. On a six-hour boat trip and after being rescued by a cargo ship, they arrived in China, their home for six years before returning to Mexico. Alicia was under two years old when she arrived in her parents’ homeland, a place unvisited by her. On April 22, 1937, Alicia, her mother, and two brothers departed from Hong Kong to the port of Manzanillo.7 A train conductor identified them as Chinese and dropped them off in Guadalajara, a place they had never visited. Unknown to them, Guadalajara had become a burgeoning Chinese Mexican community and a hub for newly arrived Chinese immigrants. Alicia’s aunt, Tia Carmen, had been part of this community of new migrants to the region. Carmen had recently moved from Sonora in northern Mexico to Jalisco; she and the family had been visiting the train station daily for a month, searching for her family, hearing the stories of other paisanos dropped in Guadalajara train stations. There is a heartwarming photograph in the personal archives of Jeanett Woong commemorating the reunion of Alicia’s family and aunt, signaling their permanent stay in Guadalajara and the beginning of a legacy in the city and state.

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Speaking about the journey she undertook to write the book, Jeanett mentions how what she thought would be a simple class assignment has changed her life in immense ways: Un ejercicio de la escuela y demás nunca jamás pensé como iba a impactar este librito porque de verdad que el haberlo escrito primero abrió muchísimo en panorama de quien era mi abuela, captar su trayectoria de vida, no solamente profesional si no de vida. Y todos los días créeme que sigo recuperando algo. Todos los días hay algo nuevo. Y valoró muchísimas eso. Entonces me genero un amor y crecimiento personal y de admiración y respeto por mis ancestros. (A school exercise and so on, I never ever thought how this little book was going to have an impact because the fact that I wrote it first really opened up a lot the panorama of who my grandmother was, capturing her life trajectory, not only professionally but also in her life. And every day, believe me, I continue to recover something. Every day there is something new. And I value a lot of that. So it generated in me a love and personal growth and admiration and respect for my ancestors.)8

Not only does Jeanett acknowledge the courage it took to begin the project, but the lessons she learned from her grandmother and her entire family have changed her perspective on the hardships of their journey. While speaking to me in 2023, Jeanett attributes this project of love to the illness of her father, Victor Carrillo Woong, which brought her back to Guadalajara to take care of him and cover the position he vacated as a teacher. “Por haceres del destino/ by fate,” Jeanett reunited with her family and engaged in the conversations described in the book. Curiosity and love have filled her life with anecdotes, histories, and a family encompassing at least five generations. Monica similarly talks about the teachings from her father, Jorge, and grandmother, Zenona, and how she hopes the next generation, including her kids, always remember these histories: I am very interested in my children knowing where they come from. They [her children] are going to lose their last name, right? Because they already have the Cinco because I’m their mother. . . . But I am very interested in them knowing their origin, [which] in the end is a story of resilience and it is a story of hard work, of hardworking people, of people who learned to live in adverse contexts. . . . I wanted my father to be proud that at least one of his daughters wanted to talk to him, wanted to understand why my father, for example, ate on newspapers. . . . And because for my dad when he counted, he counted in another language and he didn’t count in Spanish even though he spoke Spanish.

Employing memories of her father, including his eating habits and multilingualism, allows Monica to connect with her children, who can tell anecdotes

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from the late Jorge who tragically passed away in 2022. Her commitment to pass on stories, teach her kids Mandarin, and take trips to China articulates her experience with Chinese Mexican daughterhood, and how her father’s history remains a motivating factor in her personal life and approaches to storytelling. The parallel histories of Monica and Jeanett intersected in 2012 with the creation of a virtual community of Chinese Mexicans. Through the Facebook group “Inmigraciones Chinas a México,” which began with the discovery of a photograph by a descendant among the photo albums of his father, members engage in various ways, including sharing family immigration stories, alerting members about events or workshops, and self-archiving family documents, photographs, and migration paperwork. Crucially, the group has served as a stopping point for a community that still suffers the decimating effects of Sinophobia, including displacement and segregation. The meeting of Jeanett and Monica through this virtual community highlights its function as the locus of community formation and networks among contemporary Chinese Mexicans. The connection between Jeanett and Monica goes beyond the lessons learned from their families and the stories they write and tell; Monica and Jeanett have been the drivers of restorative justice through historical storytelling and self-archiving. The stories they have unearthed from their families as the daughters of Chinese immigrants teach us about anti-Chinese sentiment in Mexico and how Chinese Mexicans circumvented and resisted Sinophobia. A close look at the Chinese Mexican autoethnographies of Jeanett and Monica serves as a window into Chinese Mexican identity and community, situating them and other Chinese Mexican women I talk as central interlocutors, conveners, and theorists of Chinese Mexican community in present-day Mexico. The stories Monica and Jorge heard in their house over tea or mahjong and the memories passed down to Jeanett by her grandmother provide insight into painful moments of intimate talks and remembering. From my family journey, we realized the borders’ porosity and material effects. The transpacific nature of Chinese Mexican journeys opens new questions about belonging and engagement within a larger Chinese Mexican diaspora. From Alicia Woong we learn how, despite the traumatic experience of expulsion and repatriation her family lived, a first-generation Chinese Mexican daughter managed to start anew and build a monumental career that has cemented her name in the annals of the education system in Guadalajara, Jalisco. The experiences of Jeanett and Monica as the daughters of Chinese Mexican repatriates characterize their engagement with self-stories and familial talks. Their lives revolve around the entanglements of incomplete histories and a journey to unearth more. Finding their autoethnographic stories and writings at the beginning of my academic journey demonstrates parallel experiences

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as daughters of immigrants whose diaspora extends beyond the borders of Mexico. The Chinese Mexican autoethnographies centered in this essay explore what it means to be a daughter, come from a lineage of immigrants and current strategies by Chinese Mexicans to rewrite themselves into national narratives, looking to unearth and preserve their histories. From Gloria Anzaldúa and Aurora Levins Morales to Monica Cinco Basurto and Jeanett Woong, these authors model what it means to write “from within,” writing from our lived experiences to create homemade theory. NOTES 1. This is the term in academic disciplines refers to the study of Chinese Mexicans or Chinese immigrants to Mexico beginning in the twentieth century. 2. Paisano, loosely translated to countrymen, is a term widely used among Chinese Mexicans to refer to each other. For more on the historical uses of the term refer to Fredy González, Paisanos Chinos (2017). 3. The Chinese community in Mexico suffered the brunt of Sinophobic violence roughly from 1900 to 1960. The collusion of Sinophobic violence with global geopolitics in the twentieth century left entire Chinese immigrants and their families in precarious situations, forcing them to fend for themselves, straddling the borders of Chinese and Mexican citizenship. 4. Monica explained at length the extractivist dynamics between her, other Chinese Mexicans, and academics. During one of our initial talks, she explained how happy she was there was “una de nosotros” (one of us) using an anthropological lens to look at community and identity because she regularly receives requests from scholars who are not Chinese Mexicans looking for sources or leads. I explore moments of connection and affinity as byproducts of autoethnographic scholarly work. 5. Initially arriving in Mexico as laborers, Chinese migrants became successful small-business owners. Though Chinese initially prospered through their work in mines, railways, and haciendas, they quickly began establishing themselves as successful merchants, abarrote (retail) workers, and, in some cases, landowners and investors. Evelyn Hu-DeHart explains that “Chinese did not so much displace Mexicans or other foreigners as they met new demands for goods and services in a greatly expanded society,” often involving jobs in the service industry such as laundries and restaurants (1980, 276). The commerce Chinese engaged in “found an important economic and social niche” that jumpstarted their financial stability (Schiavone Camacho 2012, 25). 6. The high number of Chinese immigrant men led to the marriages between Chinese men and Mexican women. Scholar Fredy Gonzalez explains that of the 15,976 Chinese recorded by the 1930 Mexican census, only 412 were women (Gonzalez 2017, 20). Everyday interactions, the inability of immigrants to return to China to search for a spouse, and even the usefulness of representing themselves as Mexican

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led to courtships and marriages. The prevalence of mixed-race marriages provided a lens into the interconnected dynamics of race, gender, and nationalism. The protection of Mexican women was weaponized to vilify Chinese men to protect the new Mexican “race.” The position of Mexican women as carriers of the next generation made them vulnerable to acts of violence, both discursive and physical. The term “chinera,” Chinese lover, derogatory moniker given to Mexican women who married Chinese men, proliferated. Married women received the insults “race traitors,” “unpatriotic,” or “lazy” (Chao Romero 2010, 78) or were thrown rocks walking down the street, as Zenona and María del Rosario Castañeda Lugo recalled in 1930s Sinaloa. As an additional deterrent, Mexican women who married Chinese were stripped of their Mexican citizenship. 7. Their repatriation in 1937 represents one of the earliest repatriation of Chinese Mexicans recorded. This smaller lever of repatriation was done locally and through consuls in China, which allowed for the repatriation of a few Chinese Mexicans. The larger repatriation in literature happened in 1960 due to the presidential decree. 8. Interview with Jeanett Woong, March 19, 2023.

REFERENCES Anzaldúa, Gloria. 1987. Borderlands: The New Mestiza = La Frontera. San Francisco, California: Aunt Lute Books. Carrillo Magdaleno, Jeanett. 2005. Mi nombre es Alicia Woong Castañeda. Guadalajara, Jalisco, self-published. Castillo-Muñoz, Verónica. 2017. The Other California: Land, Identity and Politics on the Mexican Borderlands. Oakland, California: University of California Press. Castro Sevilla, Yareli. 2021. “Epistemologies of Sinidad: Identity, Memory, and Precarity within Two Chinese Mexican Families.” Chinese America: History & Perspectives, 51–56. ———. 2023. “Reflections on Chinese Mexican Living Archives: Genealogies of Resistance.” ReVista: Harvard Review of Latin America. Chang, Jason Oliver. 2017. Chino: Anti-Chinese Racism in Mexico, 1880–1940. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois Press. Chao Romero, Robert. 2010. The Chinese in Mexico, 1882–1940. Tucson, AZ: University of Arizona Press. Cinco Basurto, Monica. 1999. “China in Mexico: Yesterday’s Encounter and Today’s Discovery.” In Encounters: People of Asian Descent in the Americas, edited by Roshni Rustomji-Kerns. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield. ———. 2007. “De las políticas de la pertenencia a las políticas de la indiferencia: El caso de las familias chino-mexicanas, 1880–1978.” In Los Chinos de Ultramar: Díasporas, Sociabilidad e Identidades, edited by Ricardo Martínez Esquivel. Mexico City, Mexico: Palabra de Clío. ———. 2009. “La expulsión de chinos de los años treinta y la repatriación de chino mexicanos de 1960,” MA thesis, El Colegio de México.

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———. 2017. “‘A mí no me pueden volver a sacar’ Etnografía práctica desde los márgenes de la diáspora chino Mexicana.” PhD diss, Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana Iztapalapa. Fong, Jorge. 1999. “China: La Raiz negada.” In Asiáticos en la Ciudad de México. México City, Mexico: Babel. González, Fredy. 2017. Paisanos Chinos: Transpacific Politics Among Chinese Immigrants in Mexico. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. González, Juan. 2000. Harvest of Empire: a History of Latinos in America. New York: Viking. Guevarra, Rudy. 2012. Becoming Mexipino: Multiethnic Identities and Communities in San Diego. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole M. 2011. Unspeakable Violence: Remapping U.S. and Mexican National Imaginaries. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Hartman, Saidiya V. 2007. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux. Hu-DeHart, Evelyn. 1980. “Immigrants to a Developing Society: The Chinese in Northern Mexico, 1875–1932.” In The Chinese Experience in Arizona and Northern Mexico. Edited by Lawrence Fong, Heather S. Hatch, and Evelyn Hu-DeHart. 1980. Tucson, AZ: Arizona Historical Society. Kuah, Khun Eng, and Evelyn Hu-DeHart. 2006. Voluntary Organizations in the Chinese Diaspora. Hong Kong: Hong Kong University Press. Levins Morales, Aurora. 2001. “Certified Organic Intellectual.” In Telling to Live: Latina Feminist Testimonios, edited by Luz del Alba Acevedo. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Magaña, Maurice Rafael. 2020. Cartographies of Youth Resistance: Hip-Hop, Punk, and Urban Autonomy in Mexico. Oakland, CA: University of California Press. Moraga, Cherríe, and Gloria Anzaldúa. 1981. This Bridge Called My Back: Writings by Radical Women of Color. 1st ed. Watertown, MA: Persephone Press. Peña Delgado, Grace. 2012. Making the Chinese Mexican: Global Migration, Localism, and Exclusion in the U.S.-Mexico Borderlands. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Pérez, William. 2009. We Are Americans: Undocumented Students Pursuing the American Dream. Sterling, VA: Stylus. Schiavone Camacho, Julia María. 2012. Chinese Mexicans Transpacific Migration and the Search for a Homeland, 1910–1960. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press. Siu, Lok C. D. 2005. Memories of a Future Home: Diasporic Citizenship of Chinese in Panama. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Trouillot, Michel-Rolph. 1995. Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History. Boston, Massachusetts: Beacon Press.

PART II

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Chapter Three

The Daughters of Enforcement Emotion Work and Immigration Arrests, Detentions, and Removals Joanna Dreby, Daniela Ugarte Villalobos, and Myia Samuels‌‌‌

Daughters of US immigrants have been raised in an increasingly exclusionary legal environment. According to one nineteen-year-old whose parents emigrated from Mexico: I think anyone who has parents that come from another country can relate. It’s just this pressure . . . to always do your best, just because they did come from another country, they left everything that they could for you. So, you always have to be your best, there’s a lot of pressure there. But it’s also . . . this feeling of sadness just because it’s like they can’t go back . . . they have their whole life here, like it’s up to you to help them out.

While in the past, migratory policies in the United States and around the world often focused on the integration of migrants and their children, in the twenty-first century, the US government increasingly emphasizes regulation and control, making some, like this young woman’s parents, feel stuck, “like they can’t go back.” In turn, this reality has come to shape the lives of daughters as they balance gendered roles, responsibilities and feelings that arise in a setting that seeks to legally exclude their parents or other family members. In the United States, legal exclusion is both racialized and gendered. Migrants from Latin America feel the threat of deportation more than others because the Department of Homeland Security formally removes foreign-born people from Mexico, Honduras, El Salvador, and Guatemala at 53

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higher rates than other groups (Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013; Menjívar 2021; Patler 2014). Similarly, men constitute an overwhelming majority of deportees: of the 5,054,762 individuals deported from the United States between 2003 and 2020, more than 90 percent were men (TRAC n.d. See also Golash-Boza and Hondagneu-Sotelo 2013). The fallout has a series of consequences for children raised in Latino immigrant households (Cardoso et al. 2018; Enriquez 2015; Fernández-Sánchez et al. 2022; González and Vargas-Valle 2021; Lopez et al. 2018). US-citizen and migrant children, alike, exhibit mental health impacts from immigration raids, deportations or removals (Allen et al. 2015; Aranda et al. 2014; Brabeck and Sibley 2016; Golash-Boza 2019; Gulbas et al. 2016; Montes 2019). Direct threats, of an arrest or detention, or indirect threats, through anti-immigrant rhetoric that emphasizes deportability, have lasting impacts on well-being and on children and youth’s sense of belonging, including that of US citizen children (Delva et al. 2013; Dreby and Macias 2023; Rojas-Flores et al. 2017; Zayas and Gulbas 2017). Families cope with the strains caused by enforcement in gendered ways. Many men suffer from depression post-removal; they seek to father children—albeit in new ways—despite the separations and loss of employment (Andrews and Khayar-Cámara 2020; Boodram 2018; Caldwell 2019; Cardoso et al. 2016). Mothers may find themselves in charge of single-parent households after a raid or when a partner is detained or removed (Dreby 2015; González and Vargas-Valle 2021; Lopez 2019). Children of migrants often contribute much to their households, what scholars dub as “brokering activities,” acting as family mediators between their parents and diverse institutional actors in host societies (Katz 2014; Orellana 2009). Gender roles may vary depending on perceived risks in the communities where migrants settle (Estrada 2019; Valenzuela 1999). Deportations heighten children’s brokering in interactions with legal systems as they translate at appointments, attend court dates with parents or write letters of support for immigration cases (Delgado 2020a; Dreby, Silveira and Lee, 2022; Garcia Valdivia 2020). This chapter explores daughters’ emotions tied to household roles and responsibilities in a context of increased immigration surveillance and control. We analyze narratives collected from a total fifty-four young adult citizens—identified only with pseudonyms to protect their identities—all of whom were born in New York and raised in Spanish-speaking households during an era of heightened enforcement. Thirty-eight lived in families where enforcement measures had directly targeted a parent (N=26) or an extended family member (N=12), while sixteen did not feel impacts directly because parents had a permanent legal status or had naturalized. Looking at accounts of care work—or daughters’ roles and responsibilities that involve caring for others—shows three tasks to involve much emotion management: childcare,

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brokering, and their work to meet expectations that parental sacrifices through migration are worthwhile for the family’s social mobility, what Smith (2006) terms “the immigrant bargain” (see also Louie [2012]). In turn, when immigration officials directly target a family member, the scope of these care work tasks expand in ways that intensify and amplify emotions involved in these three tasks. As such, exclusionary US immigration policies alter parent-child relationships in ways that have consequences for daughters’ well-being. GENDER, MIGRATION, AND CARE WORK Through the 1990s, much of international migration scholarship posited households as at the center of migratory decisions, and assumed cooperation among, and between, family members who strategized across national boundaries (Parrillo 1991). Men most often migrated first as providers, with women presumed to perform most care work for the family, acting in supportive roles by either following men or by remaining behind in their countries of origins (Nawyn 2010; Pedraza 1991). Specific policies contributed to such patterns by prohibiting or discouraging female migration; for example, the US bracero program offered visas to male sojourners from Mexico, but not spouses, resulting in gendered patterns of separation (Dreby 2010). During the late 1990s and early 2000s, however, scholars showed that female migration patterns often buck these assumptions, documenting cases of women migrating not only with partners, but also independently of (or prior to) men (Bastia and Busse 2011; Bastia and Piper 2019; Ehrenreich and Hochschild 2004; George 2005; Herrera 2011; Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994; Nawyn 2010; Parreñas 2001). Once households are conceived as entities involving members with varying interests and needs, gender emerges as a key frame for explaining family dynamics during migration, in both sending and receiving countries, as well as across them. Gender shapes decision-making processes along with adaptation and integration practices and preferences (Castro 2022; Bastia and Busse 2011, Herrera 2011, Hondagneu-Sotelo 1994). Migration alters care work in families as it strains and stretches intimate relationships; gendered expectations evolve and can shift due to migratory experiences (Hirsch 2003; Kibria 1993; Menjívar 2000). Spouses, mothers, and fathers negotiate changing roles, expectations, and identities, as do daughters and sons (Bastia and Busse 2011; Castro 2022; Foner and Dreby 2011; Lamb and Bougher 2009). Factors like birth order and pressure for educational achievement postmigration complicate already potentially strained relations between children and parents (Espiritu 2003; Foner and Dreby 2011). Immigration policies shape these dynamics as well, as legal

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status may limit the opportunities of some household members and not others (Abrego 2016; Castañeda 2019). In receiving countries, children often expand roles as family carers when they act as language and cultural brokers in a range of institutional settings outside of families (Bauer 2016; Katz 2014; Orellana 2009). Brokering activities vary by age, abilities, legal positionalities, and family needs (Katz 2014). Older siblings, and daughters, may have more responsibilities in translating, helping with the management of the household, caring for siblings, and accessing health care (Dreby 2019; Katz 2014; Valenzuela 1999). Obligations vary, of course, due to local factors or parental occupational needs (Estrada 2019). Older siblings may more often feel the weight of legal status limitations, risks, and opportunities (Abrego 2016; Castañeda 2019). Youth who immigrated themselves, as opposed to US-born children, may relate more closely to their parents’ struggles, and thus work harder to mitigate legal limitations, by serving as what Delgado (2020b) terms “legal brokers” or in exercising what García Valdivia (2020) calls “legal power” on behalf of their parents. Those who formerly were undocumented, but now have a temporary status through DACA, may bear especially heavy burdens and experience stress in managing obligations to family members while taking advantage of new academic opportunities to increase family social mobility (Schmalzbauer and Andres 2019; Schmalzbauer 2023). Mixed emotions underlie daughters’ work contributions to their families (Bauer 2016; Chung 2016; Dorner et al. 2008; Umaña-Taylor 2003; Weisskirch 2007). Children may feel uncomfortable in translating information to parents about sensitive health care issues or about their own poor academic performance (Foner and Dreby 2011; Menjívar 2000). Some feel closer to parents due to their involvement in tasks often typically framed as adult responsibilities, but for others, brokering causes much tension (Chung 2016; Weisskirch 2007). Conflicted feelings also arise about feeling the need to protect parents from discrimination, embarrassment, and humiliation (Bauer 2016; Delgado 2020a, 2020b). And legal vulnerabilities may cause some to feel they have grown up more quickly than what they think is “normal” (Ceciliano-Navarro and Golash-Boza 2021; Dreby 2015). Given that gendered and generational divisions of care work mark family systems, we now turn to how daughters, specifically, feel about navigating environments of legal exclusion and the emotional work that comes with it.

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A STUDY OF GROWING UP UNDER THE SPECTER OF ENFORCEMENT We draw here from a larger study of interviews and focus groups with more than 110 young adults with foreign-born parents regarding the saliency of immigration policies in their lives. The study sought interviews with three different groups of young adults ages eighteen to thirty-four, all who were minors during the 2000s and 2010s, a period of heightened enforcement in New York: (a) those whose parents were directly targeted by enforcement while participants were under the age of eighteen; (b) those whose parents were not targeted, but whose extended family members were; and (c) those in communities (broadly defined) affected by immigration policies, but who did not have direct experiences in their families. It was approved by the University at Albany Institutional Review Board (IRB) and involved numerous steps to protect participants’ confidentiality given the sensitive nature of some of the topics discussed. All of those interviewed were US citizens or legal permanent residents in the United States. The study thus focused not on youths’ legal precarity, but rather on the intergenerational effects of an enforcement oriented migratory control system (for more on the study design see Dreby and Macias 2023; Dreby et al. 2022). This chapter focuses solely on accounts from fifty-four US-born daughters whose parents migrated from Spanish-speaking countries in Latin America. All grew up in urban, suburban, and rural communities across New York State or in the greater metropolitan region of New York City. Daughters had parents born in a range of countries and in some cases from across countries and regions; these included Mexico (N=24); El Salvador, Honduras, and Guatemala (N=6); Peru, Colombia, Ecuador, Paraguay, and Venezuela (N=25); and the Dominican Republic (N=12). Parents left both rural and urban communities and some grew up speaking a language native to the Americas. Quite a few daughters spent significant amounts of time in parents’ countries of origin: eight attended school abroad and seventeen spent multiple childhood summers in parents’ home communities. The range of transnational experiences and parental community of origin allows us to identify patterns in participants’ care work experiences despite possible “cultural” variations related to gendered divisions of labor in families. The study involved a research team of faculty and graduate and undergraduate students who contributed to the research in varying ways. Joanna conducted all interviews, which were unstructured in format, and asked daughters to speak about several topics including: schooling, relationships with family members, peers, and intimate partners, transnational networks and experiences, work and career pathways, identity, and well-being.

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Conversations averaged between one-and-a-half to two hours. Daniela and Myia worked as graduate assistants, recruiting participants, transcribing interviews, and analyzing transcripts for themes related to gendered divisions of labor in families. Note that we all have intimate connections to migrant households, particularly through our relationships with families and friends; our perspectives, as daughters, friends, and partners of migrants, shape our interpretation of the narratives we reviewed. We draw from the grounded theory tradition (Charmaz 2001); after identifying the range of daughters’ roles and responsibilities in families and their related care work tasks, Joanna asked subsequent participants for their reflections on care work in greater detail, including their emotions. For example, we sought to learn how daughters compared their brokering activities to others and questioned whether brokering activities varied across different types of institutional settings. In one case, a daughter shared that she helped her parents with many tasks in running their small business and had even helped to translate for friends of her parents in appointments with a lawyer, which felt normal. However, she had never translated anything related to her father’s immigration case, a distinction that seemed to explain her lack of fears of his deportability. This prompted probes with others about feelings about different realms of translating or interpreting. Although we focus on daughters, Joanna also asked sons about work contributions and gendered divisions of labor. More than half described work contributions, but a quarter reported no care work tasks. In contrast, all daughters reported at least some work contributions and the majority talked of multiple types of care work they performed. As we deepened review of daughters’ narratives, we were increasingly drawn to the concept of emotion work, defined elsewhere and in this paper as the labor people engage in to manage their displays of emotions in a specific circumstance or settings (Hochschild 1979, 2012; Ryan 2008). This is because daughters often described contradictory feelings in relation to some activities they performed in their families, but not others. They spoke of awareness of “feeling rules,” defined as understanding of how one “should” feel in certain situations (see Hochschild 1979), expressed as confusion at what they perceived to be opposing and at times bewildering emotions. And, when daughters navigated experiences of enforcement that targeted family members, emotion work increased. We turn first, then, to a description of three areas of care work activities that involved much emotion work, as reported by daughters, and then move to accounts of how these activities changed when immigration officials directly targeted parents or extended family members. Collectively, these stories show the ways emotion work arises in relation to care work tasks, and how enforcement can come to deeply shape how daughters manage feels rules in relationships in their households over time.

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CARE WORK AND EMOTION WORK Daughters supported families in many ways and perceived this work as resulting from the needs of their immigrant households, which set them apart from friends with nonmigrant parents. They worked informally to clean, do laundry, cook, and look after siblings, and many also worked formally in part-time jobs outside of the home as teenagers, typically in part-time jobs in retail or restaurants, either after school or during the summers. In retrospect, few recalled housework chores, or their jobs, to be emotionally wrought. Perhaps because it was in retrospect, daughters often spoke of jobs in middle and high school, and of learning to cook and clean as making them feel different—at times—but also as relatively beneficial over time. Yet as young adults, they shared recollections of much more complex feelings tied to three arenas of care work roles in their households: their childcare responsibilities, their brokering tasks, and the work they did to show that their parents’ migratory sacrifices were worthwhile. CHILDCARE One area that involved descriptions of complex feelings is related to care for younger siblings or cousins. Nineteen-year-old Kimberly spent her teenage years taking care of her two younger siblings, recalling, “Babysitting in high school, A LOT. Because . . . obviously my parents had to go to work, so I would babysit a lot in high school. I also learned how to cook in high school, I know a lot. . . . I know how to do laundry now. . . . All the things that need to be done on the house; I help out.” That extensive involvement in childcare evoked strong feelings of responsibility, as compared to other chores, was also expressed by Laura, twenty, when interviewed as a senior in college. At first Laura lived at home when she went to college, but in the past year she decided to move into the campus dorms so she could better focus on schoolwork, without distractions, because at home she felt too embroiled in continuing to care for her younger sister and brother. Yet still, she arranged her course schedule to be free two nights a week, so as to be able to go back home to help take care of her siblings. This type of care work drew daughters closer to their siblings, and quite a few spoke of tight bonds and feeling like they were second parents to the younger siblings or cousins they helped to raise, like one daughter who referred to her youngest brother as “my chicken nugget.” It also created tensions. One young woman shared that she was not allowed to participate in any extracurricular activities at school; as the oldest of seven, she had to go

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“straight home” after school to help with her siblings: “If I wanted to go to the park, I always had the baby—or another sibling—there with me.” As a teenager, she felt her social life was restricted due to family obligations. Similarly, a twenty-three-year-old shared that as the first-born twin, she spent a lot of time and energy watching out for her sister and said that not until recently, after her second year in college, had she begun learning to “let her sister go.” Unlike part-time work, from which they gained a paycheck, and chores often viewed as less time consuming, care for siblings or younger cousins generated a tension between the pressure of helping parents, the restrictions this work implied, and the bonds daughters developed with the siblings and cousins they cared for. Childcare might prevent daughters from participating in activities outside of school, for example, because in the words of one participant, “after school, I always had to go straight home to watch my sister.” This young woman illustrates how confusing emotions can be; she said she felt different from her friends due to the responsibility of watching her siblings but was embarrassed to tell her friends why she could not hang out. “It was just the way it was.” Such obligations amount to more than babysitting; it involves emotion work as daughters deal with the contradictions of obligations to parents and siblings, or cousins, with whom they built strong relationships, but simultaneously often felt burdened by these relationships born of this type of care work task. BROKERING A second area of care work that involves emotion management is related to brokering responsibilities. Quite a few complained that their parents relied upon them to translate and interpret because parents assumed that they, as children born and raised in the United States had stronger language skills— even when parents spoke English relatively well. Parents may assume they had greater familiarity with US culture due to educational experiences in school. As is true in the scholarship on “cultural brokers,” daughters talked about brokering across a range of domains including schools, commercial interactions and in healthcare-based settings (Orellana 2009; Valenzuela 1999). They translated and interpreted for parents with poor English skills, but also for those who spoke English well because parents felt their superior knowledge could help better navigate interactions. For example, twenty-four-year-old Jeanette’s Peruvian-born mother spoke English well and worked for a travel agency, yet still Jeanette recalled helping often in middle and high school by proofreading her mother’s emails and reports. These are not mere translations, but involved many emotional negotiations, which could be a source of frustration, ambivalence, or mixed emotions

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(Weisskirch 2007). Daughters felt especially conflicted about parents’ dependence on them, especially when the tasks they were called to assist with were related to things beyond their comprehension. Cynthia at age thirty laughed in recalling when asked about whether she ever translated, “Oh, constantly, yeah, like ridiculously.” Cynthia expressed why it was difficult, explaining, I hated it. I hated it because I felt there is some things that just don’t translate. That’s one. And two, as a child, for example, if I would call the credit card company or the utility company to ask about a charge . . . that was really hard because [I didn’t understand the supplemental charges]. How do I explain this in Spanish? . . . And at the point I was already learning more English than Spanish. So, it was already hard for me to figure [out], [and then] how I explained it back to her. So, it was a little frustrating.

Not trained as a professional translator, Cynthia did not feel equipped to handle tasks she barely understood in English, let alone interpreting back to Spanish, a language that over time she was less and less comfortable with. Berta also recalled how awkward interpretation situations could be: “I was in high school, I had to translate for her [mother], like what my teachers were saying. I had to tell her what they were saying. . . . It was kind of weird cause it was what the teachers thought about me at the same time.” Language brokering inverted generational dependence in a way that made Berta uncomfortable in having to communicate information about her own performance back to, and between, adults. Brokering also often evoked concerns that parents were being exploited or discriminated against. For example, Katia, at age twenty-four, told Joanna that the secretary at an office her father cleaned for his part-time job at night was emotionally manipulative. Katia told an elaborate story of receiving a phone call while her father was driving her to college, of putting the secretary on speaker, and of feeling she had to establish boundaries on behalf of her father, who felt uncomfortable asserting his right to the time off he had already requested. In another example, Brenda explained that her highly educated mother in a professional well-paying job had a very strong accent in English. For this reason, at times she asked Brenda to talk for her in interactions, not because she didn’t understand, but because she wanted to avoid any problems or confusions in the predominantly white neighborhood where they lived. Brenda thought this was weird but, as the oldest of four, she also commented that she feels close to her mother because of these experiences and was more connected to her Venezuelan heritage than her younger siblings. Daughters like Katia and Brenda acknowledged that despite some frustration, brokering activities also brought them closer to parents and at times also gave them advocacy skills that proved useful in work environments as adults.

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IMMIGRANT BARGAIN A third area of care work daughters expressed conflicting emotion about was around the pressure to succeed, to make their parents’ sacrifices with migration to the United States worthwhile, especially through academic achievements. This is what scholars refer to as the burden on children of immigrants to showcase the family’s level of social mobility via migration or meet their end of the “immigrant bargain” (see Feliciano and Lanuza 2016; Louie 2012; Smith 2006). Many related with detail the hardships parents endured to come to the United States or at low-wage and exploitative jobs, and how they felt they needed to make it all worthwhile through educational and career accomplishments. Julisa, at twenty, powerfully articulated this sentiment: “When you’re a second-generation child, you carry this guilt, because you feel like you owe your parents the world. . . . They came to this country for you, they sacrifice their life, they sacrifice their dreams, they sacrifice everything to give, you know, what they can . . . [so then it’s] what you feel you can do for yourself.” Kimberly concurred, explaining that she grew up with a similar message, for as long as she could remember: “They did all these things to give us opportunities and that’s why WE should go study and WE should go to college, and WE should . . . ” This pressure often motivated daughters to finish school, for example. Yet they also felt it to be a source of major anxiety. Some pointed to examples of siblings or cousins who dropped out of school as not meeting these expectations, and amplifying the pressures they felt to succeed, like Berta who explained that her older brother did not help her parents translate or do paperwork at all, because “he dropped out of school” and had gotten involved in illicit activities. Berta felt the responsibility to be the first to finish a two-year degree even though she did not like school and had vague career ideas based on her college experiences. Regardless of whether immigration officials had targeted members of daughters’ families, three arenas of care work involved much emotion work, as daughters experienced feelings that at times conflicted with what they thought they “should” feel about these tasks. Although daughters often explained such conflicts to arise out of cultural expectations from their parents’ countries of origin, they were repeated by those with parents born in different places across the continent. Reflections on childhood experiences of care work underscore the processes of emotion management involved in navigating adult dependence mixed with concerns of protecting parents from discrimination or exploitation, which often continued to shape daughters’ family relationships well into adulthood. In short, these three dimensions of care work—childcare, brokering, and the immigrant bargain—show how

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much emotion work is involved in daughters’ efforts to manage contradictory feelings that arise from these situations. And, as we now show, enforcement incidents targeting families significantly amplify the emotional work involved in each of these care work tasks. IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT AND EMOTION WORK Exploring the boundaries of daughters’ work contributions in families in which parents or other family members had been direct targets of enforcement reveals two notable patterns. First, families made different decisions about the extent to which they involved daughters. Some spoke to daughters about incidents of deportation, detention, or arrest. Others told their daughters about these experiences, but chose not to involve them in the aftermath, or selectively involved them in some tasks (like translating a letter from immigration) but not others (like attending immigration court). And other parents were more open, explicitly relying upon their daughters to navigate the aftermath of an interaction with immigration officials. Second, parents’ choices about the extent to which they informed children about enforcement did not eliminate care work, and emotion management, associated with enforcement. Only a few daughters felt shielded due to parents’ decisions to exclude them; most described increased anxiety and stress related to immigration policy precisely because they lacked sufficient information to understand the cause of stressors on their families. Overall, though, being drawn into supporting extended family members or their parents, directly, altered the emotions daughters experienced in their care work roles. For one, enforcement situations extended daughters’ childcare work beyond younger siblings or cousins to other family members, including older cousins or adults, even parents and aunts and uncles. Feelings about these involvements, and expectations of support, could be especially contradictory. For example, Tricia’s cousin moved into her family home when she was a teen; when the US government deported her uncle, her aunt spiraled into drug abuse and major instability for her younger cousin. Tricia spoke with ambivalence about the situation: “Yeah, I had to share with her . . . that was a new thing. Instead of my parents raising just my little brother, now they have to raise another person. . . . My parents took her in as an extra daughter, so we, we made sure she was, you know, going to school.” These comments belie that she found it difficult to share her parents, but also that she enjoyed helping to guide and mentor a younger cousin. Tricia, in fact, described their relationship as close due to the experience.

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In another example, Karla described shifts in family support after her uncle was detained for six months and then deported to Ecuador when she was in the second grade. Soon after, Karla’s aunt and youngest cousin also returned to Ecuador, but her older cousin stayed in New York with Karla and her mother. Though the two were already being raised together, she shared that it wasn’t until after her uncle’s deportation that she and her cousin began developing a brother-sister relationship: “I just think we got closer. . . . I don’t know how to describe it, it was just like I knew we had to be together and everything was with [him]. . . . I didn’t, ‘cause we didn’t want him to feel he was alone.” Such testimonies indicate the extent to which daughters stepped in to help support family members facing enforcement, but also that these new roles could involve high levels of emotional work. Both Karla and Tricia emphasized feeling rules related to new roles alongside losses due to separations from their uncles, especially in Karla’s case as she had previously described her uncle as a “second father.” Additionally, brokering for immigration cases was not only awkward and frustrating in figuring out how to express legal terminology properly in English and Spanish, but also involved daughters in the cases themselves. This extended daughters’ fears about possible family separations, and unresolved cases caused ongoing stress and anxiety even into adulthood (see Dreby et al. 2022). Johana, for example, said she had been to multiple lawyers’ offices with her parents, and wrote letters on behalf of her parents; she had never been separated from her father, but continued to feel the specter of his legal precarity even after she moved away to college. And Noemi—the eighteen-year-old daughter to Mexicans—explained she worried constantly about her mother’s immigration case more than other family members, prompting her to insist that her parents seek legal advice to advance the case. Coupled with experiences of stress and anxiety were contradictory feelings of accomplishment at being able to support and help with their parents’ cases. Plainclothes ICE officials arrested Nancy’s father in a raid on her family apartment when she was seventeen in an experience that she described as “so traumatizing.” Yet Nancy helped win her father’s release through connections she had in the youth group she participated in. Two years later, her father was detained and faced deportation a second time. Again, Nancy utilized her advocacy skills that had further developed during her family’s first immigration case, and once more obtained her father’s release. Nancy was able to turn this “traumatizing” and “scary” experience into a career in advocacy work, a transformation she describes as “the most beautiful thing.” Finally, daughters described enforcement experiences as converting the pressure to succeed into a pressure to protect. Even when their parents did not experience a deportation incident directly, daughters talked about needing to support and protect family members or parents fearful of deportation. Cynthia

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at age thirty, for example, talked about not feeling at risk of deportation in her immediate household, as her parents both had naturalized while she was in elementary school. However, when her boyfriend’s sister had recently been targeted for removal, it brought back her memories of how the family dealt with a “fearful aunt”—who relied upon extended family support for many things due to her lack of status—and also a “risky cousin”—who they constantly worried about since he engaged in behavior that could result in being targeted due to his undocumented status. Julisa also spoke about how much she felt the need to protect her older sister, who was undocumented, and how much the tension related to her sister’s status shaped her family dynamics. She told Joanna that she is close to her mother and sister, saying, “I can tell her everything.” And yet, “my sister’s undocumented status is like . . . it plays a large role in our lives because . . . I don’t know . . . we worry about her, she has a kid now and she’s raising him, you know, by herself. So, if something happens to her, so we would not know what to do with, you know, our nephew.” Although Julisa said she is close to her sister and wants to support her, she felt frustrated at times at how fearful her sister is and at her dependence, explaining, “she is 35 . . . she doesn’t know . . . she knows how to drive but she’s scared to drive. And so, we drive her around.” New York passed the Green Light Law, allowing undocumented people to obtain drivers’ licenses, but Julissa’s sister continued to be too fearful to drive and Julisa felt drawn into caring for a sister beyond what she felt was normal adult behavior, due to the need to protect. The pressure to protect family members can be particularly poignant and anxiety producing. As Julisa’s narrative suggests, it can also be frustrating due to resentment over dependency, even when siblings are close. In fact, quite a few participants had sought professional therapy, either while in high school or from college resources, to help handle anxiety related to their fears of deportation and to come to terms with conflicting feelings of resentment and pressure related to protecting their parents or other members of their families. THE FALLOUT OF IMMIGRATION ENFORCEMENT ON DAUGHTERS Migration changes children’s roles and responsibilities in their families in gendered ways (Estrada 2019; Valenzuela 1999). Interviews with daughters raised in New York during an era of increased migratory regulation suggest three spheres of care work to involve the negotiation of contradictory feelings: childcare, brokering, and meeting the expectations of the immigrant bargain. When enforcement measures target members of families, daughters’ emotion work in these three care work areas expands considerably. First,

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daughters’ childcare work extends to family members beyond younger siblings or cousins, involving new feeling rules. In some cases, daughters feel more responsibilities and conflicts related to the care of siblings or other family members as they are not only involved in daily care tasks, but also in planning for uncertain future outcomes. Others feel these responsibilities of care extend to older family members, like Karla’s description of looking after her older cousin after his father’s deportation and Tamara’s experiences becoming a mentor for a cousin who lived with them following a deportation. Complex emotions develop alongside these care responsibilities, as daughters struggle to manage commitments and loving relationships alongside the weight of the responsibility of being more highly involved in care arrangements. Second, when a family member is targeted for enforcement, daughters often become embroiled in “legal brokering” for parents or other family members (Delgado 2020a). They may attend court appointments or lawyer appointments with family members. Lawyers direct some children to write letters to support waivers of deportation, embroiling them even further emotionally in the case (Dreby et al. 2022). Others become involved from a distance, like one young woman who said when her undocumented aunt from Ecuador was in a traffic accident, she and her mother—both with US citizenship—went to the scene of the accident to ensure nothing escalated into a call to ICE, or another young woman who shared the story of the week she spent calling different agencies to try to locate her mother’s cousin who had been detained to figure out in which detention center he was being held. Emotions related to brokering may ebb and flow, intensifying during specific incidents or moments of a threat of deportability (see also Dreby and Macias 2023). Mariana at age twenty-five described this well, explaining how fears related to any interaction with law enforcement at times crippled her with “uncontrollable crying,” whereas at other times she assessed the immigration legal system, aware she had more knowledge and skills at navigating that system than many. And Maria laughed sharing how she easily obtained a job in college as a paralegal: “I did have the privilege of working at a law office. . . . I was like . . . I know how to do all of this already! Like actually,” as she had already helped her parents naturalize and also had aided an older brother who was detained, and eventually deported. Brokering related to enforcement involves a unique combination of fear and competency, emotions which can vary in intensity over time. Third, daughters described the pressure to succeed educationally, a common theme among children raised in immigrant households, as converting into a pressure to protect when family members faced enforcement risks. The pressure to protect involves complex feelings. Julisa, for example, felt a combination of the instinct to protect her sister but also frustration at her sister’s lack of independence. Conflicted emotions related to the responsibility

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to protect change with time, as immigration cases evolve and statuses change, although as Julisa’s account suggest, effects can linger even when opportunities open, due to the psychological toll deportability may have on some individuals. Ongoing management of these emotions may not dissipate even after risks of enforcement diminished. Migratory policy environments interface with care work responsibilities that shift when families migrate, creating circumstances that spillover onto citizens not targeted by these policies. Daughters manage emotions to adapt to new situations in their families, situations where their emotions can be at times contradictory and a source of tension. In assuming new roles, daughters manage the uncertainty of the threat of immigration enforcement and feel they need not only to make good of migratory sacrifices, but they must take a more active role to protect family members from enforcement, extend care to a wider net of family members, and their brokering activities become more wrought as they contemplate possible family separations. The pressure, anxiety, and responsibility this generates are feelings that daughters consistently process in relations with family members and institutions, such as college, well into adulthood. This study, of course, has limitations related to the generalizability and size of the sample; our unique sampling frame allows for comparison across levels of exposure to enforcement within the family but does not involve enough cases to look at how specific cultural variations based on parent’s country of origin may further shape care work. Yet by looking at the experiences of individuals from a variety of different cultural backgrounds, we suggest that the migratory experience itself helps to explain the dynamic way daughters negotiate roles and responsibilities related to care work. Policies can shift dynamics within the sphere of the family, situations that can be reversed with changes to public policy and practice that take children out of the enforcement equation. Policy approaches that are mindful of family dynamics can potentially alleviate the brokering and care work that daughters often engage in and lessen the negative impacts immigration policies have on children and their families. REFERENCES Abrego, Leisy J. 2016. “Illegality as a Source of Solidarity and Tension in Latino Families.” Journal of Latino/Latin American Studies 8, no. 1: 5–21. Allen, Brian, Erica Cisneros, and Alexandra Tellez. 2015. “The Children Left Behind: The Impact of Parental Deportation on Mental Health.” Journal of Child and Family Studies 24, no. 2: 386–92.

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Golash-Boza, Tanya, and Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. 2013. “Latino Immigrant Men and the Deportation Crisis: A Gendered Racial Removal Program.” Latino Studies 11, no. 3: 271–92. González, Jose Israel, and Eunice D. Vargas-Valle. 2021. “Family Reconfiguration of Deported Migrants on the Northern Border of Mexico.” Norteamérica, Revista Académica Del CISAN-UNAM 16, no. 1. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.22201​/cisan​.24487228e​ .2020​.1​.434 Gulbas, Lauren E., Luis Zayas, Hyunwoo Yoon, Hannah Szlyk., Sergio Aguilar-Gaxiola, and G. Natera. 2016. “Deportation Experiences and Depression among U.S. Citizen-Children with Undocumented Mexican Parents.” Child: Care, Health and Development 42. no. 2: 220–30. doi: 10.1111/cch.12307 Herrera, Gioconda. 2011. “Cuidados globalizados y desigualdad social: Reflexiones sobre la feminización de la migración andina.” Nueva Sociedad 233. ISSN: 0251–3552. Hirsch, Jennifer. 2003. A Courtship after Marriage: Sexuality and Love in Mexican Transnational Families. Berkley, CA: University of California Press. Hochschild, Arlie. 1979. “Emotion Work, Feeling Rules, and Social Structure.” American Journal of Sociology 85, no. 3: 551–75. ———. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. 1st ed. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Hondagneu-Sotelo, Pierrette. 1994. Gendered Transitions: Mexican Experiences of Immigration. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. Katz, Vikki. 2014. Kids in the Middle: How Children of Immigrants Negotiate Community Interactions for Their Families. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Kibria, Nazli. 1993. Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Lamb, Michael E., and Lori D. Bougher. 2009. “How Does Migration Affect Mothers’ and Fathers’ Roles within Their Families? Reflection on Some Recent Research.” Sex Roles 60: 611–14. Lopez, William D., Pilar Horner, John Doering-White, Jorge Delva, Laura Sanders, and Ramiro Martinez. 2018. “Raising Children amid the Threat of Deportation: Perspectives from Undocumented Latina Mothers.” Journal of Community Practice 26, no. 2: 225–35 DOI:10.1080/10705422.2018.1450318 ———. 2019. Separated: Family and Community in the Aftermath of an Immigration Raid. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press. Louie, Vivian. 2012. Keeping the Immigrant Bargain: The Costs and Rewards of Success in America. New York: Russell Sage Foundation. Menjívar, Cecilia. 2000. Fragmented Ties. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. ———. 2021. “The Racialization of ‘Illegality.’” Daedalus 150, no. 2: 91–105. Montes, Veronica. 2019. “Deportabilidad y Manifestaciones del Sufrimiento de los Inmigrantes y sus Familias.” Revista De Ciencias Sociales 46, no. 84: 5–35. https:​ //​doi​.org​/10​.21678​/apuntes​.84​.1014 Nawyn, Stephanie. 2010. “Gender and Migration: Integrating Feminist Theory into Migration Studies.” Sociology Compass 4, no. 9: 749–65.

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Orellana, Marjorie Faulstich. 2009. Translating Childhoods. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press. Parillo, Vincent N. 1991. “The Immigrant Family: Securing the American Dream.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 22, no. 2: 131–45. Parreñas, Rhacel Salazar. 2001. Servants of Globalization: Migration and Domestic Work. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Patler, Caitlyn. 2014. “Racialized Illegality: The Convergence of Race and Legal Status among Black, Latino and Asian-American Undocumented Young Adults.” Scholars and Southern Californian Immigrants in Dialogue: New Conversations in Public Sociology, 93–113. Pedraza, Silvia. 1991. “Women and Migration: The Social Consequences of Gender.” Annual Review of Sociology 17: 303–25. Rodriguez, Cassaundra. 2019. “Latino/a Citizen Children of Undocumented Parents Negotiating Illegality.” Journal of Marriage and Family 81, no. 3: 713–28. Rojas-Flores, Lisseth, Mari L. Clements, J. Hwang Koo, and Judy London. 2017. “Trauma and Psychological Distress in Latino Citizen Children Following Parental Detention and Deportation.” Psychological Trauma: Theory, Research, Practice, and Policy 9, no. 3: 352–61. Ryan, Louise. 2008. “Navigating the Emotional Terrain of Families ‘Here’ and ‘There’: Women, Migration and the Management of Emotions.” Journal of Intercultural Studies 29, no. 3: 299–313. Schmalzbauer, Leah. 2023. Meanings of Mobility: Family, Education and Immigration in the Lives of Latino Youth. New York: Russell Sage. Schmalzbauer, Leah, and Alelí Andres. 2019. “Stratified Lives: Family, Illegality and the Rise of a New Educational Elite.” Harvard Educational Review, 635–60. Smith, Robert. 2006. Mexican New York. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press. TRAC Immigration Data Tool. n.d. Syracuse University. Retrieved from https:​//​trac​ .syr​.edu​/phptools​/immigration​/remove​/ Umaña-Taylor, Adriana J. 2003. “Language Brokering as a Stressor for Immigrant Children and Their Families.” Points & Counterpoints: Controversial Relationship and Family Issues in the 21st Century: An Anthology, 157–59. Valenzuela, Abel. 1999. “Gender Roles and Settlement Activities among Children and Their Immigrant Families.” American Behavioral Scientist 42, no. 4: 720– 42. doi: 10.1177/0002764299042004009. Weisskirch, Robert S. 2007. “Feelings About Language Brokering and Family Relations among Mexican American Early Adolescents.” The Journal of Early Adolescence 27, no. 4: 545–61. Zayas, Luis. H., and Lauren E. Gulbas. 2017. “Processes of Belonging for Citizen-Children of Undocumented Mexican Immigrants.” Journal of Child and Family Studies 26, no. 9: 2463–74.

Chapter Four

Envisioning Palestine, Understanding America Daughters of Immigrants in the Fiction of Susan Muaddi Darraj Robin E. Field

On January 3, 2019, the hashtag #TweetYourThobe went viral. Hundreds of photographs appeared on Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram of Palestinian women wearing thobes, a traditional garment worn on special occasions and decorated with hand-stitched embroidery called tatreez. Weeks earlier, Rashida Tlaib, the first Palestinian American woman to win a seat in the US House of Representatives, announced that she would wear a thobe decorated with tatreez representing her family’s village in Palestine when she was sworn in (Osman 2019). Immediately Tlaib was attacked by conservative and far-right commentators who called her an anti-Semite and jihadist (Brown 2019). Palestinian American author Susan Muaddi Darraj recalls hearing this vitriol: “I was really excited when I heard that [Tlaib] was going to wear her dress at her swearing-in. And then the backlash on Twitter was immediate and fierce. People were calling [her thobe] un-American, [and made] nasty comments about it promoting Sharia law and Palestinian heritage” (Fadel 2019). Muaddi Darraj created a secret Facebook group to organize fellow Palestinian women to post photographs of themselves wearing their own thobes on January 3–5, 2019, to support Tlaib and educate others about the familial and cultural significance of this garment and its embroidery (Zraick 2019). On the day of Tlaib’s swearing-in ceremony, media outlets such as NPR and The New York Times reported on this hashtag and the accompanying photographs. In explaining her reaction to the multitude of photographs 73

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of women in thobes, Muaddi Darraj emphasizes the link between mothers and daughters: “‘It’s especially moving when you see women wearing thobes that their great-grandmothers made by hand. . . . It’s just extraordinary, and it’s a visual testament to the relationships between mothers and daughters that we have in our culture’” (Zraick 2019). #TweetYourThobe became a global celebration of thobes, Palestinian culture, and the relationships between generations of women. Muaddi Darraj’s social media campaign demonstrates the rich cultural heritage existent in the Palestinian diaspora and the Palestinian Territories that is sustained by mothers and daughters. As the seventy-fifth anniversary of al-Nakba—or “the catastrophe” as Palestinians refer to the 1948 Arab-Israeli War—brings the voices of diasporic Palestinians into greater prominence in the media worldwide, Susan Muaddi Darraj emerges as a major figure in the promulgation of the Palestinian literary and cultural heritage in the United States. Muaddi Darraj was born in 1975 and raised in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, by Palestinian immigrant parents. Like many American-born children in immigrant families, her ethnic identity is fundamental to her life. In an interview, she said, “It’s not that my Palestinian identity is central to my writing—my Palestinian identity is central to who I am, and that comes into my writing” (Institute for Middle East Understanding 2020, italics in original). Muaddi Darraj is one of the Arab American writers whom cultural critic Carol Fadda-Conrey argues “articulate[s] a rising need among Arab Americans for a transformative project of communal and individual self-representation, one that captures the complexity and heterogeneity of their communities” (2014, 2). Through multiple genres—from personal essays and edited volumes to novels and children’s books—Muaddi Darraj’s writing depicts her Palestinian identity, Arab American feminism, and pan-Arab ethnic solidarity. In particular, Muaddi Darraj represents daughters of Palestinian immigrants as fundamental to the continuation of Palestinian and Arab American identity and culture in the United States in the second generation and beyond. However, even as Muaddi Darraj’s daughter characters embrace their immigrant parents’ Palestinian culture, these characters also challenge and critique this culture when adherence to traditions harms rather than nurtures these women. Muaddi Darraj joins the ranks of renowned American writers Toni Morrison, Maxine Hong Kingston, Louise Erdrich, and Sandra Cisneros by simultaneously lovingly celebrating and fiercely critiquing her ethnic community through the creation of exquisitely written fiction for adults and children. In analyzing Muaddi Darraj’s fiction, I utilize the methodology of literary scholar Channette Romero, who argues that “Fiction by women of color since the 1980s enlists the political potential latent in novels and the belief traditions of people of color, seeking to inspire readers with visions of resistance to injustice” (2012, 2). I demonstrate how Muaddi Darraj breaks new ground by representing

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Palestinian American women—especially the daughters of immigrants—in all their diversity, while also challenging repressive cultural practices—such as intimate partner violence, slut shaming, and honor killings—that perpetrate individual and communal harm in the name of cultural traditions. Muaddi Darraj’s three books of adult fiction have received the most attention and accolades of her oeuvre. The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly (2007) features the voices of four Palestinian immigrant mothers and their American-born daughters in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. A Curious Land: Stories from Home (2015)—winner of the Grace Paley Prize in Short Fiction, an American Book Award, and an Arab American Book Award, as well as being shortlisted for a Palestine Book Award—features the residents of a fictional Palestinian village throughout the twentieth century. Behind You Is the Sea (2024) returns to the voices of Palestinian Americans in Baltimore, Maryland. While each book contains short stories, Muaddi Darraj labels her work as “mosaic novels,” for the books offer one complete narrative using multiple points of view within the Arab American community, looking at the same events and characters from different vantage points (Muaddi Darraj 2023). Most literary critics dub books of fiction like these “short story cycles,” as each story may stand alone and features the interiority of an individual character; the cumulative effect of collecting these stories together in a book links the characters’ lives across time and space. As Susan Garland Mann writes in The Short Story Cycle: “there is only one essential characteristic of the short story cycle: the stories are both self-sufficient and interrelated” (1989, 15). James Nagel, who has written extensively on the short story cycle, notes that the American short story cycle, as written by authors such as Erdrich and Cisneros, features a “community as protagonist” that explores the culture and traditions of a particular ethnic, racial, or religious group (2001, 15). Most applicable to Muaddi Darraj’s fiction is how American short story cycle narratives “involve the process of immigration, acculturation, language acquisition, assimilation, identity formation, and the complexities of formulating a sense of self that incorporates the old world and the new, the central traditions of the country of origin integrated into, or in conflict with, the values of the country of choice” (Nagel 2001, 15). In what follows, I examine stories from The Inheritance of Exile and Behind You Is the Sea to demonstrate how Muaddi Darraj’s American-born daughters navigate the mores of Palestinian culture to cultivate an identity in the United States that celebrates and critiques their immigrant mothers’ homeland. While A Curious Land also critically evaluates twentieth-century Palestinian culture, its characters residing in the West Bank village of Tel al-Hilou largely remain in Palestine rather than emigrating; therefore, in this essay, I focus upon Muaddi Darraj’s first and third mosaic novels.

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The Inheritance of Exile, Muaddi Darraj’s first novel, has many wonderful stories that explore the connections and clashes between Palestinian immigrant mothers and American-born daughters. As Marta Cariello notes, “Muaddi Darraj literally weaves the stories in The Inheritance of Exile like a mingling of the legacy that binds the two generations of women together in a common space of inhabitation and (sometimes) survival, and of the unpredictable deviations of gendered spaces, body politics and the language of borders: internal, national, interrupted, breached borders, re-written in the female word, passed on from mother to daughter” (2016, 83). By telling the stories of both the mothers and the daughters, Muaddi Darraj contrasts the Palestinian cultural practices of the immigrant mothers with the variations of confusion, frustration, and acceptance displayed by their American-born daughters. For instance, an early story in The Inheritance of Exile, “The New World,” depicts the contemporary Palestinian cultural practices of a newly married immigrant, Siham, and traces her process of acculturation during her first months in Philadelphia. Siham experiences the culture shock typical of any new immigrant when she struggles to express herself in English and attempts to barter at the Italian Market, only to be chastised by the vendors; and she cherishes certain ethnic traditions, such as the use of blue stone charms to ward off the evil eye in their apartment. Yet Muaddi Darraj also demonstrates how Siham had reconsidered her own values by marrying Nader, a Palestinian expatriate, just a month after meeting him in Jerusalem. Siham’s earlier philosophy was to know her future fiancée at least three years before getting married: “It was a risk, to marry a man who had spent so much time in America, but a lot of girls in Palestine did it. To get out of the country, to try their lives and their luck across the ocean, they married” (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 26). Siham’s faith in her husband is shaken when she learns that Nader earned his American citizenship by paying an American woman to marry him. Distraught about this omission from her husband’s past, Siham must decide how she will react to his obfuscation. Muaddi Darraj underscores the different paths available by contrasting Siham to Carla, a second-generation Italian American whose brusque and suspicious manner acts as a foil to Siham’s sweet and trusting nature. Carla never married after her fiancée cheated on her, and she encourages Siham distrust men as well. Carla sees her decision as the independence of a modern American woman, in contrast to the understanding and forgiveness encouraged by Carla’s Italian immigrant mother. Siham, an immigrant herself, aligns herself with her Palestinian values of devotion to family, rather than American independence; indeed, she even interprets Carla as “the Evil Eye itself . . . sipping tea on her sofa” (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 30). Siham recommits herself to her marriage and helps Nader pay off the debt to his first wife. Interestingly, she never

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overtly recognizes that she replicated Nader’s action herself by marrying to gain American citizenship—but readers easily make this connection. Siham’s dedication to her husband results in a daughter, Nadia, and a very happy marriage that ends too soon when Nader dies in a car accident. Muaddi Darraj demonstrates how this immigrant mother does not simply passively follow cultural mores, but actively chooses what values and traditions to embrace in the United States as she navigates her evolving identity as a Palestinian, an immigrant, a wife, and a mother to an American-born daughter. Subsequent stories featuring Siham and Nadia demonstrate the complexities inherent in immigrant and second-generation identities and relationships. As Stuart Hall notes, culture is not a fixed site of meaning that offers “common historical experiences and shared cultural codes which provide us, as ‘one people,’ with stable unchanging and continuous frames of reference and meaning” (1994, 393). Siham maintains many of the cultural beliefs she learned in Palestine, although these customs inevitably evolve in the homeland, unbeknownst to the diasporic citizen. The story “Survivor” demonstrates how Siham believes her daughter must break off her relationship with her devoted boyfriend, George, when Nadia learns she cannot have children. Siham anticipates how George’s family will react to Nadia’s infertility: “We don’t have to know them, habibti. They are an Arab family, with only one son, who have put all their savings to send him to medical school in America. Do you think they will accept for him to marry and not have children?” (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 44). Nadia accedes to her mother’s guidance to sacrifice her own happiness to support George’s filial responsibilities; for as her friend Reema observes months later, Nadia “truly believed she was somehow saving George from a lifetime of sorrow by pushing him away, by ending it” (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 185). Yet, in the story “Intervention,” Reema’s mother Huda, another Palestinian immigrant and close friend to Siham, sees the situation differently and believes George should make up his own mind. Indeed, once Reema tells George about Nadia’s infertility, his response is, “If I have Nadia, that is everything . . . there is more than one way to become a father” (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 188). For this generation of Palestinian Americans, devotion to family is still fundamental, but how families are comprised is open to new avenues. In these stories and others, Muaddi Darraj demonstrates how adherence to rigid cultural mores by immigrant mothers may prevent their American-born daughters from building rich and fulfilling lives. Instead, her daughter characters find happiness by utilizing Lisa Lowe’s theory of cultural formation, which “includes practices that are partly inherited, partly modified, as well as partly invented” (1996, 65).

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All four Palestinian American mothers and daughters in The Inheritance of Exile face challenges in navigating their cultural identities and their relationships with one another. As Steven Salaita notes: [Muaddi Darraj]does not appear content to draw a firm line between Arab and American cultures. This move is apparent in the relationship between daughters and mothers who have to compromise on some deeply held viewpoint in order to grow and coexist. Although the characters do not always succeed in creating new ground for the development of new cultures, they frequently manage to accommodate one another in ways that are both subtle and explicit. (2011, 77)

Perhaps the most fraught relationship is that of the mother, Layla, and daughter, Hanan, whose mutual feelings of confusion, frustration, and betrayal nearly extinguish their relationship entirely. In the stories “Sufficing” and “Costumes,” Layla grieves over how her young daughter does not understand her perspectives: “all I can see is Hanan’s face . . . telling me that my accent embarrasses her. . . . I’m afraid that she’ll grimace when I speak to her in Arabic. That she’ll answer, pointedly, in English. I’m afraid that I will not be enough for her” (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 103). While Layla’s American-born husband Michel appreciates his immigrant wife’s Palestinian cultural practices, their daughter, Hanan, simply sees differences that ostracize her and her family from her American peers. Hanan also does not understand her mother’s traumatic past in a refugee camp in Palestine and how Layla’s need for safety dictates their lives in the present. With the solipsism of a child, Hanan thinks: When I don’t finish my plate at dinner, she lectures me about the refugee camp again, about her life before Baba, about how she and her sisters had to walk to the next village, and knock on the doors of the convent and ask for food. ‘We would have walked to Bethlehem if we had to!’ she says, as if I have any clue where Bethlehem even is and how far it is from where she used to live. (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 109)

Because of the deprivations of her childhood, Layla fixates upon the necessities of life: food, shelter, and safety from violence and displacement. Hanan, however, is negatively impacted by her mother’s tumultuous emotions and actions to the point of declaring herself independent of her parents entirely: “I’d help myself from now on” (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 114). Rather than following the expectations set by her parents—college, living at home, no sex before marriage—Hanan forges her own path. In “The Journey Home,” Hanan gets an apartment with her fellow Palestinian American friend, Aliyah, to the consternation of their mothers, who claim that “[i]t’s just not right” for unmarried women to leave their parents’ homes (Muaddi

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Darraj 2007, 120). When Hanan marries John—whose Irish ancestry no longer is considered “ethnic,” just white (Muaddi Darraj 2007, 125)—Layla refuses to attend the wedding because Hanan is already pregnant. Due to their mutual stubbornness, the two women do not speak to each other until well after Hanan’s son, Michael, is born and her marriage to John ends. Only when Hanan’s father has a heart attack do the two reconcile. Ultimately, the importance of family transcends the cultural edicts that previously led Layla to shun her daughter and Hanan to condemn her mother for her judgmental attitudes. Significantly, Muaddi Darraj does not depict Hanan rejecting all aspects of Palestinian culture just because of the filial conflict; indeed, on a daily basis Hanan immerses herself in her parents’ customs and traditions. She supports herself by weaving baskets with traditional Middle Eastern designs, a skill her mother passed down to her; she names her son after her father, following but modifying the Arab tradition of naming the first-born son after his father; and she eats food with her hands and kisses the cheeks of elders instead of simply shaking their hands, much to the mortification of her husband. Hanan’s Palestinian cultural practices, to paraphrase Lowe, are as much modified and invented as they are inherited, therefore bringing her into conflict with her mother even as both women love each other intensely. The stories in The Inheritance of Exile demonstrate how Palestinian culture persists in the diaspora both through family connections and personal inventions. Indeed, literary critic Maurice Ebileeni lauds The Inheritance of Exile because the novel offers “the prioritization of the cultural nuances in the transnational context through localized sentiments that [is] significant in establishing a relevant framework which may help us comprehend today’s increasingly diverse Palestinian experiences across borders and an increasingly diverse readership of anglophone Palestinian literature” (2019, 639). Muaddi Darraj’s third mosaic novel, Behind You Is the Sea, also depicts a complex network of interconnected lives of Palestinian immigrants and second- and third-generation Palestinian Americans. In this book, Muaddi Darraj includes the male perspectives of brothers, fathers, and grandfathers, which sheds new light on how Palestinian American women must navigate their behaviors and identities around male family members. Additionally, Muaddi Darraj delves deeply into how American culture is not necessarily more enlightened or positive for young Palestinian American women. While she is not shy about depicting patriarchal oppression in Palestine—“The Hashtag,” for instance, features an honor killing in Tel al-Hilou—Muaddi Darraj is similarly critical of the American mores that harm all young women, including unrealistic body images, social media bullying, and slut shaming, as seen in “Cleaning Lentils.” Behind You Is the Sea highlights the variety of experiences lived by the daughters and granddaughters of Palestinian immigrants in the twenty-first century.

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Although the characters in Behind You Is the Sea live in the second and third decades of the twenty-first century, in contrast to those in The Inheritance of Exile, set in the late 1990s, Muaddi Darraj demonstrates how the passing of time has not changed the scathing judgment of the Arab American community against women deemed to have transgressed proper behavior. Here again in this novel, unwed pregnancy brings about negative consequences for multiple women. In “A Child of Air,” seventeen-year-old Reema finds solace in the arms of Torrey, a Puerto Rican man, when the sadness and responsibilities of her home life lead her to seek love and attention elsewhere. Reema’s immigrant mother is overwhelmed by her husband’s terminal illness and eventual death, so she numbly accepts her daughter’s unwed pregnancy because “abortion is more haram” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 89). Reema raises her child successfully, but having never married Torrey, she is judged negatively by the community, as seen by the disparaging words flung at her sister, Maysoon, years later by an Arab American woman whose house she cleans: “Your sister the waitress who got knocked up in high school?” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 114). Similarly, Reema’s classmate Amal becomes pregnant in high school, but Amal decides to terminate her pregnancy. Rather than using the first-person perspective seen in “A Child of Air,” Muaddi Darraj depicts Amal’s behavior and its repercussions through the eyes of her elder brother, Marcus Salameh, in the stories “The Ridealong” and “Escorting the Body.” Marcus reflects upon how Amal was disinherited by their father for her rebellious behavior: using stolen prescription drugs, having an abortion, moving out of her family’s house as a young unmarried woman. Their father “cut her out, like throwing her memory into a stone vault, walking away, leaving it unmarked” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 223). Eventually Amal graduates from college, marries, and births a son, all of which fulfill the expectations of the typical Palestinian immigrant parents. However, her father never reconciles with her, as he cannot condone her marriage to a Black man; indeed, he cuts off Marcus as well because his son continues to interact with Amal and her husband. Yet Muaddi Darraj complicates the villainy of Mr. Salameh in the final story, “Escorting the Body,” by having him financially support Rita, a Tel al-Hilou woman raped, tortured, and impregnated by Israeli soldiers during the First Intifada. While the villagers respect Rita—“She is the best person, with the best reputation,” according to a village elder—Rita is expected to isolate herself from her community because of her traumatic past (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 226). Indeed, she could not find work to support herself until Mr. Salameh hired her to take care of his house and the olive harvest. Marcus is bewildered by this compassion for Rita in face of his father’s unyielding expectations for Amal and himself: “The fact was this: Their father had been capable of compassion. Of defying society. Of making sure a vulnerable

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person was not thrown to the wolves. Just not with his own children” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 237). Mr. Salameh’s behavior perhaps acknowledges that Rita’s unwed pregnancy occurred against her will, while his daughter Amal chose to have premarital sex. However, his decision to support Rita despite the condemnation of the Tel al-Hilou community underscores the viability of his option to accept Amal despite the “haram” behavior of her youth, embrace her Black husband and mixed-race son, and join Marcus in creating a more openminded and inclusive model of love and community-building. The tragedy for this immigrant father is that he ends up dying alone, despite having two children longing for reconciliation. As Marcus observes, “He felt sad for Amal, and even sad for his father. It didn’t have to be this way” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 230). Because Mr. Salameh cannot imagine adjusting his paternal expectations in the United States, he loses the opportunity to enjoy life with his American-born children and grandchild. The gender violence experienced by Rita in “Escorting the Body” is only one of many such instances depicted in Behind You Is the Sea, not only in Palestine, but in the United States as well. However, Muaddi Darraj is careful to portray the variety of responses that Palestinian immigrant parents and residents of the Territories demonstrate in response to gender violence. “The Hashtag” reveals the horrific murder of a young woman in Tel al-Hilou by her male relatives in the name of “honor.” Focalized through American-born Rania, who is also Rita’s cousin, this story contrasts the reaction of Rania’s immigrant husband, Yousef, to her own immigrant parents. Yousef not only participated in the murder of his cousin—for she finds blood-spattered clothes after he returns from his trip to Palestine—but he also condones his family’s decision to murder his pregnant cousin: “She had a boyfriend, and she got herself ruined. She was trying to avoid the blame” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 84). In fact, the young woman was raped by her uncle, and the whole family—Yousef included—conspires to cover up this fact and their crime by making her death look like an accident. Rania’s immigrant parents immediately take her and her son into their home and support her divorce from Yousef; indeed, her father says to Yousef, “I don’t trust my daughter’s or my grandson’s safety with you. They will stay here” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 84). Rania’s brother Murad supports her as well, moving back to their parents’ home as additional protection and directly confronting Yousef about his role in his cousin’s murder. Rania’s Palestinian family rallies around her to ensure her physical safety and emotional well-being, even though divorce is still considered haram in their Arab American community. In contrast, the story “Worry Beads” depicts a family who finds divorce more shameful than the intimate partner violence suffered by the woman whose abusive husband divorces her. Samira does not become pregnant during her marriage to Jerome, so he beats her regularly, at one point breaking

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her arm. Her mother refuses to allow her to return home, believing Samira “too embarrassing” to have around (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 192). Samira must begin her life anew without the support of her family; and she puts herself through law school by working long hours at a diner, while her mother and sister pointedly exclude her from family gatherings. Once she earns a substantial salary as a lawyer, her mother and sister expect her to pay for family expenses but remain quietly in the background because of her “shame,” much like how Rita is expected to behave in Tel al-Hilou after she was raped. Samira’s sister ignores Jerome’s physical abuse and defends him about the divorce, saying, “honestly, you should have offered to leave. A man has a right to want children” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 198). Samira assumed she could not have children until, at age forty, she discovers she is pregnant by her new white American boyfriend, Logan. After Samira reveals this news, her mother slaps her for transgressing cultural edicts about marriage before pregnancy; here again, traditional notions of shame about female extramarital sex prevent Samira’s mother from celebrating her daughter’s joy about her impending motherhood. Samira’s father, whom she calls Baba, also appears to follow his wife’s beliefs about the wrongness of divorce, unwed pregnancy, and dating outside of the Palestinian American community, despite his deep love for his daughter. Yet once Baba suffers from dementia and loses any filters of propriety, he reveals his true feelings about past events. Thinking Samira is her mother, he reacts furiously when recalling how Mama said Samira could not return home after the divorce, calling his wife a bitch; and he physically attacks Mama after she slaps Samira about the pregnancy announcement. Samira finds some solace in the proof of her father’s affection, realizing that he wanted her to be part of their family life all along. However, Baba’s acts of violence during his moments of delusion beg the question of whether he beat his wife throughout their marriage, as in the present he strikes Samira when he mistakes her for Mama. While Baba is furious about Jerome’s violence toward his daughter, he does not demonstrate himself to be without these same tendencies. Behind You Is the Sea also presents an evolution in Muaddi Darraj’s depiction of interethnic relationships. Samira makes an appearance in “The Hashtag” after having Logan’s baby and moving in with him, but not marrying him; and she is happy, confident, and inspiring to Rania. Unlike Hanan in The Inheritance of Exile, who cannot maintain her marriage with her white American husband because of his ethnic microaggressions, the women in Behind You Is the Sea form happy, satisfying relationships with men from other ethnic backgrounds (the white Logan for Samira, the Puerto Rican Torrey for Rania, the Black Jahron for Amal). These interethnic romances demonstrate the opportunities for happiness available to Palestinian American women beyond their community’s traditions and strictures. Logan,

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for instance, respects Samira’s autonomy to the point of rejecting her first sexual invitation because she was tipsy; this respect contrasts with Samira’s ex-husband, who aggressively demands sex without considering her needs or pleasure. While the immigrant parents believe that their American-born daughters should marry within the Palestinian American community, these women are equally fulfilled by relationships with men from other ethnic backgrounds. Yet Muaddi Darraj does not reductively portray life in the United States as an entirely positive and more nurturing culture for Palestinian American women. The story “Cleaning Lentils” depicts three generations: the Palestinian immigrant grandparents who live in a simple rowhouse in a working-class Baltimore neighborhood; their daughter, Dalia, who marries for money to live in a wealthy suburb; and their granddaughters Hiba and Mina, who are taught that thinness equates self-worth. The earlier story “Behind You Is the Sea” demonstrates how Dalia is obsessed with her family’s social status but neglects her children’s emotional needs and ethical development. In “Cleaning Lentils,” the perspective of third-generation granddaughter Hiba demonstrates how growing up wealthy does not lead to happiness and self-confidence. As a college freshman, Hiba attempts suicide after nude photos of her are posted on social media by the young man she thought was her boyfriend. The story reveals Hiba’s damaged psyche after years of her mother and sister telling her that her curvy body is unlovable. When her grandmother cooks for her—her way of showing love to her granddaughter—Hiba only imagines how the food will affect her body: The whole world conspired to make her fat. That’s what it had to be. All that damned food sticking to her ass, piling up on all the layers of fat. And when she thought of her big ass, her gigantic ass atop legs that had no calves, her ass below a fat chested torso, it made her even more disgusted. God and the ancestors liked to prank her—they’d sent all the curves to the wrong place. (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 135–36)

Hiba becomes anorexic in her desire to attain the thinness she believes would make her lovable; meanwhile, her mother critiques her portions at meals, calculating how much exercise would be needed to burn off the calories. When Hiba is hospitalized for being underweight, her sister Mina advises her to tell her doctors she will eat again but to “make it believable,” thus underscoring how Mina believes that disordered eating is necessary and acceptable (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 155). Mina is a “less plastic” version of their mother, who “assessed each one of them before they left the house, making sure their hair was stylish, their makeup right, their handbags and shoes Prada or nothing” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 155, 150). The American consumerism embraced

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by Hiba’s parents clearly does not benefit the health and happiness of their daughters, or their son, whose stealing and drug addiction sends him to rehab. While staying with her grandparents during her own recovery, Hiba wonders how her callous mother could have been raised by these loving, humble elders. At the end of the story, Hiba marvels over the simple dish of lentils that her grandparents choose to cook and eat. Her grandmother explains how this dish reminds them of their traumatic past and everything they have to be grateful for now, saying: “We lived during three wars. Lentils kept us from starving. Your Seedo and I—we love eating them. It reminds us of those days . . . it’s good to remember. So you can look at your life now and say alhamdulilah” (Muaddi Darraj 2024, 160). Here Muaddi Darraj emphasizes how the Palestinian immigrant generation may demonstrate values much more nurturing and loving than the second generation whose choices physically and psychologically harm their children. Susan Muaddi Darraj is an integral writer and cultural critic in the United States and beyond whose work celebrates the multiplicity of experiences lived within the Palestinian diaspora and the Arab American community more generally. As literary critics Wael Salam and Othman Abualadas so astutely note, Muaddi Darraj “pictures the gap between the white dominant culture and other multiethnic cultures, a rift caused by class, economy, and homogenous assimilation. She thus offers cross-diasporic and interethnic positionalities that help her characters achieve solidarity with their community and with other ethnic groups” (2020, 61). Her depictions of the American-born daughters and granddaughters of Palestinian immigrants demonstrates the breadth of life experiences in the diaspora: from the wealthy to the impoverished, from high school dropouts to advanced degree holders, lawyers and businesswomen to writers and homemakers. Salam and Abualadas note that “subsequent generations [of diasporic Palestinian citizens] unsettle the binary categorization of Arab versus American by challenging and/or extending their ancestral cultural practices and traditional values” (2020, 52). As Muaddi Darraj’s daughter characters navigate their lives in the United States, they embrace the cultural mores from Palestine that bring happiness and fulfillment, modify others to suit their American lifestyles, and critique practices that stultify their personal growth or provoke tangible harm. In addition to publishing award-winning fiction for adults, Muaddi Darraj has recently expanded her oeuvre by writing a series of four children’s books entitled Farah Rocks, which offer realistic, compelling representations of Arab culture for children. She counters the negative stereotypes about Arabs and Arab Americans in popular media (such as the racism in the Aladdin films, which she tackles in Behind You Is the Sea’s story “Gyroscopes”) and in Arabic literature in translation (such as the distortion of Scheherazade by Western translators into “an erotic, shallow, sex-crazed body behind a veil”

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[Muaddi Darraj 2004, 2]). Muaddi Darraj has also written new versions of the traditional stories in The Thousand and One Nights as the head writer for a children’s podcast on Spotify entitled The Arabian Nights (Muaddi Darraj 2022a); and she penned a reimagined feminist fairy tale for the Girls Tales podcast entitled “Nureen and the Lemon Grove” (Muaddi Darraj 2022b). In her writing and cultural work, Susan Muaddi Darraj offers rich and inclusive representations of being Palestinian and American where women—and especially daughters—step into the spotlight. REFERENCES Brown, Michael F. 2019. “Top Israel Supporter Launches Bigoted Attacks on Rashida Tlaib.” The Electric Intifada, January 7, 2019. https:​//​electronicintifada​.net​/blogs​/ michael​-f​-brown​/top​-israel​-supporter​-launches​-bigoted​-attacks​-rashida​-tlaib. Cariello, Marta. 2016. “Female Genealogies of Place: Nation, City and Refugee Camps in Susan Muaddi Darraj’s The Inheritance of Exile.” RiCOGNIZIONIO: Revista di Lingue, Letterature e Culture Moderne 5, no. 1 (2016): 73–85. Ebileeni, Maurice. 2019. “Breaking the Script: The Generational Conjuncture in the Anglophone Palestinian Novel.” Journal of Postcolonial Writing 55, no. 5: 628–41. Fadda-Conrey, Carol. 2014. Contemporary Arab-American Literature: Transnational Reconfigurations of Citizenship and Belonging. New York: New York University Press. Fadel, Leila. 2019. “Viral Hashtag Celebrates Palestinian-American Representation.” NPR, January 6, 2019. https:​//​www​.npr​.org​/2019​/01​/06​/682607997​/viral​-hashtag​ -celebrates​-palestinian​-american​-representation. Hall, Stuart. 1994. “Cultural Identity and Difference.” In Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, eds. Patrick Williams and Laura Christian, 392–403. New York: Columbia University Press. Institute for Middle East Understanding. 2020. “Susan Muaddi Darraj: Fiction Writer and Creator of #TweetYourThobe.” January 15, 2020. https:​//​imeu​.org​/ article​/susan​-muaddi​-darraj​#:​​~:​text​=Susan​%20Muaddi​%20Darraj​%3A​%20Fiction​ %20Writer​%20and​%20Creator​%20of​%20​%23TweetYourThobe​,​-January​%2015​ %2C​%202020​&text​=Born​%20in​%20Philadelphia​%20to​%20Palestinian​,lot​%20of​ %20herself​%20through​%20reading. Lowe, Lisa. 1996. Immigrant Acts: On Asian American Cultural Politics. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Mann, Susan Garland. 1989. The Short Story Cycle: A Genre Companion and Reference Guide. Greenwood, NY: Greenwood Press. Muaddi Darraj, Susan. 2024. Behind You Is the Sea. New York: HarperVia Books. ———. 2023. (keynote lecture, Visiting Writers Series at King’s College, Wilkes-Barre, PA, April 13, 2023). ———. 2022a. “Spotify Original: Arabian Nights.” Susan Muaddi Darraj. Last modified 2022. https:​//​susanmdbooks​.com​/spotify​-original​-arabian​-nights​/.

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———. 2022b. “Girl Tales: Nureen and the Lemon Grove.” Susan Muaddi Darraj. Last modified 2022. https:​//​susanmdbooks​.com​/girl​-tales​-nureen​-and​-the​-lemon​ -grove​/. ———. 2021a. Farah Rocks New Beginnings. North Mankato, MN: Capstone Books. ———. 2021b. Farah Rocks Florida. North Mankato, MN: Capstone Books. ———. 2020a. Farah Rocks Fifth Grade. North Mankato, MN: Capstone Books. ———. 2020b. Farah Rocks Summer Break. North Mankato, MN: Capstone Books. ———. 2015. A Curious Land: Stories from Home. Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. ———. 2007. The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly. Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press. ———. 2004. Scheherazade’s Legacy: Arab and Arab American Women on Writing. Westport, CT: Praeger Publishers. ———and Waïl Hassan. 2012. Approaches to Teaching the Works of Naguib Mahfouz. New York: Modern Language Association of America. Nagel, James. 2001. The Contemporary American Short-Story Cycle: The Ethnic Resonance of Genre. Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana State University Press. Osman, Nadda. 2019. “#TweetYourThobe: Hundreds Share Photos in Support of Rashida Tlaib.” Middle East Eye, January 4, 2019. https:​//​www​.middleeasteye​.net​/ news​/tweetyourthobe​-hundreds​-share​-photos​-support​-rashida​-tlaib. Romero, Channette. 2012. Activism and the American Novel: Religion and Resistance in Fiction by Women of Color. Charlottesville, VA: University of Virginia Press. Salaita, Steven. 2011. Modern Arab American Fiction: A Reader’s Guide. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press. Salam, Wael, and Othman Abualadas. 2020. “Cultural Authenticity versus Hyphenated Identities: Transnational Modes of Belonging and Citizenship in The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly.” CEA Critic 82, no. 1 (March): 52–68. Zraick, Karen. 2019. “As Rashida Tlaib Is Sworn In, Palestinian-Americans Respond with #TweetYourThobe.” The New York Times, January 3, 2019. https:​//​www​ .nytimes​.com​/2019​/01​/03​/us​/politics​/rashida​-tlaib​-palestinian​-thobe​.html.

PART III

All the Feels Emotions and Racialization

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Chapter Five

Emotional Kinscripting Managing Gender, Emotions, and Kinship among Children of Korean and Chinese Immigrant Families Angie Y. Chung and Xuemei Cao

Emotion work is a key process that underlies the experiences of immigrant families at all stages of migration.1 Even when people physically leave their home countries, their emotive ties to individuals, families, and communities in their sending nation continue to shape their settlement decisions, child-rearing practices, political loyalties, social mobility, and general sense of belonging over the life course (Svašek 2010). Depending on the migration context, a wide range of emotions from nostalgia to trauma can evoke certain behaviors that some may perceive as “irrational” or “unproductive” but may help individuals adjust to the social and psychological challenges of migration (Chung 2016). Contrary to the general scholarly treatment of contemporary American children as passive dependents, studies show that children of migrants—especially daughters—may be forced to take on adult roles, emotions, and experiences throughout the migration process because of diverse family structures and unstable school and neighborhood environments (Chung 2016; Portes and Rumbaut 2014). What remains unclear is how daughters of immigrants may draw on “reimagined” family and kinship networks to help them navigate the emotional challenges of premature adulthood and gendered expectations. Compared to immigrants of the early twentieth century, there is immense heterogeneity in experiences among contemporary Asian immigrant families but heightened global competition and persistent inequality in American neighborhoods have also created more challenging conditions for today’s 89

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less privileged immigrant children (Portes and Rumbaut 2014). Among other things, children of immigrants may live in households where both parents work long hours and extended family members are scattered across borders (Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco 2001). Children in families with fewer resources or support systems are vulnerable to a host of emotional and social problems as a result of limited adult supervision, the absence of positive role models and mentors, conflicting home and school pressures, and cultural differences in communication (Qin 2006). Some immigrant children also start out living in impoverished urban neighborhoods with other poor families, under-resourced schools, and high rates of crime and juvenile delinquency (Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco 2001). These problems are often exacerbated by the demands of a global economy that have worsened the living conditions of working migrant families and separated families across borders (Kofman 2022; Parreñas 2005). Scholars have suggested that the presence of an institutionally complete ethnic community can help mitigate some of the damaging effects of poverty and social isolation (Zhou 2008), but not all children of immigrants have access to such communities, nor do they provide the full range of emotional stability that children require. Although much has been written on the emotional vacuum created by parent-child conflict in immigrant families (Chung 2016; Qin 2006; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco 2001), few studies have reflected on the way children of immigrants make sense of their unwritten family histories and channel their everyday stresses despite the physical and emotional absence of their parents. Daughters of immigrants tend to take on the brunt of homemaking and caregiving responsibilities either under their mother’s supervision or in their absence because of gendered expectations about care, labor, and future motherhood—all of which carry over into adulthood (Espiritu 2008; Spitzer et al. 2003). Flexible caregiving arrangements involving extended kin can ameliorate some of the emotional burdens and time constraints that immigrant daughters face, depending on class, birth order, and sibling dynamics. When available, intergenerational interpreters and mediators including older siblings, cousins, grandparents, and other extended kin can help Asian Americans communicate across language and cultural barriers, gain perspective on their family histories, and navigate the bumpy emotional terrain of parent-child relationships. Drawing on sixty-one in-depth interviews with Korean, mainland Chinese, and Taiwanese American adults (ages twenty-five to thirty-eight) in the New York–New Jersey metropolitan area, this chapter takes a deeper look at how the American-born children, especially daughters of Korean and Chinese immigrant families, selectively imagine and draw emotional strength from kinship networks and narratives to cope with the gendered expectations and emotional burdens that accompany migration and adaptation. The

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researcher collected these in-person interviews between 2004 and 2012 so the social context for race and ethnicity has changed substantially with the COVID-19 pandemic, generational transition, and K-wave mania which have produced new norms of family, gender, and race; however, the general idea of how emotive kinship can provide emotional sustenance for children with fewer social support systems can be applied to other groups, time periods, and spatial contexts. In this chapter, we define kinship relations in a broader sense based not only on blood, marriage, and adoption, but also on imagined family-like kinship systems of friends and neighbors termed “fictive kin”—defined as any friend or neighbor “who provide[s] care like family and . . . are given the labor of kin with its attendant affection, rights, and obligations” (Karner 1998, 70). We argue that to make sense of intergenerational discord, Korean and Chinese American daughters reconstruct their parents’ unsaid histories through the imagined narratives of gender, birth order, and kinship systems. As opposed to simply rejecting or isolating themselves from family members because of intergenerational tensions, these participants strategically compartmentalize and channel their emotions around flexible networks of siblings, kin, and fictive kin throughout the life cycle. We reflect on how the socio-structural context for recreated kinship networks have different ramifications for the strength and stability of emotional support systems of immigrant daughters who are often expected to take on the more emotionally and labor-intensive aspects of caregiving. KINSCRIPTING PRACTICES AMONG IMMIGRANT AND MINORITY HOUSEHOLDS Despite diversity in household structures, family studies outside of the immigration scholarship mainly view American family systems through the lens of marriage and nuclear families, rather than seeing them embedded in kin networks within the community (Gerstel 2011). However, working-class, minority, and immigrant families have long relied on extended kin for care work because of depressed wages and challenging socioeconomic conditions that strain their limited time and resources (Cross et al. 2018; Taylor et al. 2022). In response to migratory disruptions, recent immigrants are not only more likely to reside with extended families, fictive kin, and non-kin friends as a survival strategy but also to pressure nonmigrants who remain in home societies to adopt extended family arrangements that span across borders (Dreby 2010; Van Hook and Glick 2007). Today, co-residence with outside kin is still more common among minority, immigrant, and low-income families than native-born White Americans.

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For example, Kreider and Ellis (2011) estimate that only about 10 percent of non-Hispanic White children, as compared to 25 percent of Black, 24 percent of Hispanic, and 20 percent of Asian children lived in extended family households. Using nationally representative longitudinal data, Cross (2018) finds that 57 percent of Black children have ever lived in an extended family during their entire childhood, compared to 35 percent of Hispanic children and 20 percent of White children. Whether rooted in blood, marriage, adoption, or other socially constructed relations, kinship systems when available can provide various forms of support such as transportation, financial assistance, household chores and caregiving support, especially for immigrant and minority families that lack sufficient economic resources and social support systems (Ebaugh and Curry 2000; Spitzer et al. 2003). Middle-class families can subcontract care work to paid caregivers (Lan 2002), but economically disadvantaged families often draw on extended kin to raise young children, provide intensive care for older parents, or support family members experiencing unemployment, illness, and economic hardship (Gerstel 2011). The gendered nature of household labor and caregiving can be negotiated and plays out differently for different migrants (Hofman 2022; Moon 2003), but in many migrant families, the responsibilities tend to fall more heavily on the shoulders of girls and women because of traditional roles and expectations (Perry-Jenkins and Gerstel 2020; Spitzer et al. 2003). As dual wage-earning and single-female headed households proliferate and the average workday expands in postindustrial nations, such strenuous conditions are pushing more households to adapt to more flexible notions of family and kin (Van Hook and Glick 2007). In an environment of limited resources, immigrant and minority households will adopt nontraditional familial arrangements to maximize and diversify their available assets, channel caregiving duties, and cope with the pressures of everyday survival (Kibria 1993; Van Hook and Glick 2007). Stack and Burton (1993) first proposed the concept of “kinscripting” to explain how poor Black families in inner-city neighborhoods cope with poverty, racism, single parenthood, and work-family balance by delegating home responsibilities to a loose and flexible multigenerational cooperative of extended kin, friends, and neighbors. In migrant families, these extended kin networks also extend to foreign-born nannies to family and fictive kin who watch their children back home (Hochschild 2012; Moon 2003; Parreñas, 2005). This approach challenges the contemporary idealized image of middle-class White families, in which parents concentrate their time and resources around the emotional needs of children by means of open and nonhierarchical modes of communication (Chung 2016).

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FEELING RULES AT THE CROSSROADS OF CULTURE AND INEQUALITY Sociological approaches to emotion have noted the significance of not only observing the outward display of emotions but understanding the way these feelings are conditioned by broader cultural values and social norms. Hochschild (2012) points out that emotions are complicated systems that can trigger contradiction and dissonance among what individuals feel, what they want to feel, and what emotions they are allowed to express in different social contexts. Individuals manage these conflicting emotions by negotiating different “feeling rules” that serve as a general guide for interpreting and expressing these feelings in interaction with others (Hochschild 2012; Turner 2009). This internal sense-making process is what Hochschild (2012) calls “emotion work,” the conscious or nonconscious acts of changing the quality or degree of one’s feeling or emotion to secure a sense of stability, and in the case of immigrants, the sanctity of their cultural traditions and worldviews. To make sense of their emotions, individuals must reconcile their values and desires with broader group and institutional norms that regulate what emotional responses are considered appropriate for different situations (Turner 2009). It is thus no surprise that these gaps, tensions, and constraints are felt more deeply by individuals who are subject to different feeling rules because of their marginal class, race, gender, sexuality, age, and social positionality (Wingfield 2010)—and, in the case of families, the daughters of immigrants. Americans subscribe to different gendered feeling rules that highlight the emotional fragility and innocence of women as compared to the physical virility and strength of men; this binary impacts everything from occupational pathways to family upbringing (Hochschild 2012). Moreover, different gendered expectations about emotions and caregiving play out differently for all children, depending on not only gender but also, family structure and sibling dynamics (Chung 2016). As future mothers and carriers of culture, daughters of Asian immigrants are subject to more stringent rules and supervision over their sexuality and moral values (Espiritu 2008). In the case of immigrant and minority families, the process of navigating feeling rules is further complicated by the embeddedness of different family members in two different sociocultural contexts rooted in the ancestral homeland and the host society. Research on Korean and Chinese immigrant families (Qin 2006; Wang 2013) reveals that foreign-born Asian parents operate under different “logics of care” from those of White American families—the former notion of care built on reproductive work and the latter on emotionally nurturing relationships. In general, children learn emotional rules by socializing with American peers, interacting with nonimmigrant adults, and

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internalizing racialized and gendered stereotypes in the media; in contrast, the feeling rules of immigrant parents are rooted in a nostalgic interpretation of a homeland culture and traditional social hierarchies that do not reflect immigrant realities (Qin 2006; Toro-Morn and Alicea 2003). There are also cultural differences that may shape the ways individual actors manage self that are relevant when studying Korean and Chinese immigrant parents. Goffman (1959) states that people manage their public image and selectively exhibit certain behaviors to others in rational and calculated ways—a “dramaturgical” behavior he calls the “presentation of self.” In East Asian countries like China and South Korea, the practice of saving face, or “maintaining one’s dignity and reputation by hiding and avoiding humiliating or embarrassing situations” (Chung 2016, 15), can serve critical functions in the maintenance of honor, self-integrity, and cultural traditions while also navigating the social and economic struggles that come with migration. This form of emotion work serves as an important emotional defense mechanism for immigrants struggling to reconcile the contradictions that emerge between the pressures of family values and gendered expectations, between class privilege and racial marginalization, and between immigrant parents’ American Dream and their individual life goals (Chung 2016). Members of immigrant families also devise different emotional strategies to adapt to the challenging conditions of migration, separation, and assimilation. When restrictive immigration policies and economic situations prolong the separation of family members across borders, parents compensate for difficult emotional separations by sending money and gifts to their children as a sign of their affection; however, they often find it difficult to maintain both intimacy and disciplining authority depending on the gender of the parents and children (Dreby 2010; Parreñas 2005) and the families’ class background (Sun 2014). For transnationally split families, emotions are often mediated by people outside the nuclear families, such as overseas relatives and homecare workers. Immigrant parents may recruit these fictive kin to fulfill the cultural norm of filial piety or help their children preserve their ethnic identity and cultural traditions (Lan 2002; Sun 2014). FINDINGS Patchworking Gender and Family Narratives Most grown children of immigrants we interviewed expressed feeling an emotional void because they lacked a clear understanding of their parents’ past and migration history to the United States. Unless they made deliberate and sustained efforts to learn about Asian histories and cultures,

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second-generation Korean and Chinese Americans only had a vague picture of their family histories and the homeland within which their parents’ lives took shape. Lacking this shared family memory often hindered their ability to contextualize how their family members express and manage emotions at home. Tensions and rifts in parent-child relationships were common traits among immigrant families where language barriers, cultural differences, and the struggles of day-to-day survival often heighten intergenerational conflict and disrupt family communication channels (Kibria 1993; Suarez-Orozco and Suarez-Orozco 2001). However, the different modes of emotion and communication in East Asian immigrant families are racialized and marginalized in the United States, which further strains parent-child relations. Western cultures like the United States favor a more verbal-based communication style through linear, logical, and direct dialogues between equally situated individuals, whereas East Asian cultures employ a more nonverbal, intuitive, relational, and contextual way of communication, in which people rely more on cues like body languages, silences, inactions, personal background, and status to understand one’s feelings and thoughts (Hall 1990). Previous studies find that when conveying love for their children, Asian parents may not say “I love you” verbally, but they take care of the physical and material needs of the children, and use subtle “gestures, facial expressions, intonations, and the volume of speech” (Ishii-Kuntz 2000, 280) to show love and resolve conflicts. The different ways of emotion management, along with immigrant parents’ focus on family survival over emotional communication, often make it necessary for second-generation children to piece together and reimagine narratives of family histories they collect to make sense of their feelings and fill the emotional void. When language barriers, absentee parents, or other emotionally complicated situations interfered with direct verbal communication, many participants found ways to “infer” or “assemble” the fragments of values, stories, and emotional messages of their caregivers. Lily is a twenty-five-year-old Chinese American educator at a public middle school in New York City, who was raised in a working-class family in Chinatown. Her father, with whom she had the closest relationship, passed away when she was ten years old, so her mother supported the family as a postal worker and had little time to parent her and her older brother. Although her mother learned English over time, Lily said she did not have good relations with her because her mother was overburdened and highly critical of her; Lily instead relied on her brother for “brotherly advice” and her grandfather who did not speak much English but somehow managed to communicate with her around her limited Chinese vocabulary and expressive gestures.

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Yet despite these barriers, Lily said she picked up on clues by observing their migration hardships, and absorbed their expectations on family, education, and life in general: They never were like study, study, study. It wouldn’t seem to anyone they actually cared about my education. It was just like they would say it to you once and that would just be the feeling throughout your life. Interviewer: So how did you know that education was important? I mean it was one of the last things my father said to me. And then I also saw my mother struggle with English and through that, I inferred that English is important and knowing it and speaking it well was important and that was only done through school. My grandfather was a merchant marine and he was this great man but here, not speaking English, he had to work in a restaurant, you know. And I think it was very demeaning for him, cause you know he was supposed to be our family provider and here in a world where he didn’t have the qualifications like you weren’t anything.

This method of patchworking narratives and experiences is sometimes informed and contextualized by other educational resources, such as popular media, books, classes, volunteering, and artwork that help them to unravel the mysteries of their parents’ migration journey and premigration lives. The gendered positionality of their mothers within the larger extended family lays the foundations for sympathy and affection among daughters in our study. For example, Esther commiserated with her mother, who shouldered the weight of caregiving responsibilities for her paternal grandfather even though her father was the youngest son in the family. She argues, “It’s really unfair to my mom because she was treated so badly by [my paternal relatives] when she first became a part of their family. Sometimes my mom is like, ‘You know, I’m definitely going to heaven because I’m taking care of your father’s father.’” Although daughters can better empathize with gendered experiences, other male and nonbinary siblings may imagine some of the gendered burdens that their female kin endure by assembling snippets of narratives conveyed through family, extended kin, popular media, and personal experiences. One example comes from the rich and lively narratives of Logan, a twenty-five-year-old Chinese American office worker and aspiring filmmaker, who reconstructed his mothers’ marriage and immigration story through the language of gender and birth order interwoven with references to the movie, The Joy Luck Club: [My mother] was actually treated very badly by the other wives [in my dad’s family], because she was the wife of the youngest son. And it was very Joy Luck Club. You know the one where he has a whole bunch of concubines [and] all the wives were in competition with each other. It was kind of like all the wives of the sons were constantly politicking each other, and a lot of passive-aggressive

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things that the other women would do to her in the family and obviously she became the target because she was the only one that produced a son. So when we were in Hong Kong, we would every Sunday get together [with] the whole family. And at these places, she would constantly be undermined because they saw her as some kind of poor girl, even though she was so much more beautiful than the other wives. My mom would constantly say, “he [your father] is awful because he would never protect me if other people start picking on me” and that influenced a lot about my opinions about my dad.

Although Logan empathizes with his mother over his father, it was tragically his mother who ended up throwing him out of the house when she discovered that he was gay. These heartfelt narratives came across as a type of emotion work in which Logan tried to imagine and connect emotionally with his mother’s hardships as a woman through other means. Birth order can also potentially temper some of the unequal effects of gender in both directions. Katherine, the oldest daughter in the oldest son’s bloodline, claimed that she received special treatment and attention from her extended kin because of her position as the first son’s oldest child. Conversely, when parents occupied a lower status within the extended family hierarchy because of their gender and birth order, their children also reported receiving less attention or negative treatment from relatives, even though they themselves were sons. For example, Peter, a twenty-six-year-old Chinese American graphic designer, suspected that he did not have strong ties with his mother’s family because he was the youngest son of the daughter from that side of the family. In contrast, Winnie, a twenty-five-year-old Chinese American daughter of a seamstress and butcher, explained how her personality and worldview had been shaped by her lower status as the youngest daughter of the youngest son. She states, “When I was younger, I tried to equal the battleground. I was really outspoken and had a lot of attitude, and I think that comes from being the youngest and from being the youngest of the son. I feel like I gotta fight for them to see me in a different way. Like I’m not the baby, and I’m not just another little girl.” The fact that family history was often conveyed via extended kin also formatively shaped the lens through which the daughters understood and reproduced their family past. For instance, second-generation Korean and Chinese American daughters were conscious of how tumultuous family tensions that did not directly involve them could nevertheless dramatically shape their relationship with their parents and extended family members. This was the case for Winnie, whose grandmother married her grandfather, unaware of his first marriage and offspring so that she unwittingly became a stepmother to Winnie’s mother. Reconstructing this complicated family history allowed

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Winnie to make sense of some of the conflictual emotions she felt herself toward her own parents: [My grandmother] didn’t know that my grandfather was previously married and had a child, so she took that out on my mom, even though my mom reached out to her as a mother. When I was younger, [my grandmother] loved me, because she wanted a little girl. She would make me dresses, and she would take me everywhere with her but as I got older, she started to resent me because I spent every weekend with my grandfather [and] he’d always give me money. I was sitting in the dining room and she came out and said, “You’re always coming to my house and you never ask me for permission.” That just came out of nowhere and I didn’t know what to say. . . . And very recently, my sister opened up to me about how resentful she felt towards my grandfather. And I tried really hard to defend him because he’s my grandfather and we just have a special relationship. But she was like, you know, he wasn’t as good as you think he is, because he allowed her to treat mommy that way. You have this guilt factor, maybe that’s why he doted on me so much, because he’s trying to do for me what he couldn’t do for my mother?

For Winnie, her grandparents provided valuable emotional support, but her feelings of fondness and warmth toward them were also complicated by underlying disappointment and resentment because of her mother’s marginalizing experiences. In the end, it made her wonder if her grandfather’s feelings toward her were a proxy for complicated feelings for her mother. Thus, by imagining and positioning themselves within the web of extended kinship relations and unsaid family histories, daughters of immigrants can make sense of emotional and intergenerational gaps in their relationship with their parents and other family caregivers. Using their own gender, birth order and family experiences as a framework of reference, these participants rationalize how their parents’ own histories may have complicated their relationships with their daughters and also why their parents communicate with their children the way they do. THE ELASTICITY OF EMOTIONAL SUPPORT NETWORKS Few of the participants we interviewed had the time, resources, or opportunity to explore their family histories because of the general absence of role models, stereotyping in mainstream film and media, limited access to multicultural courses, and social or spatial distance from ethnic communities during their formative childhood years. This was true for most Asian

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Americans regardless of gender, although it may play out in both racial and gendered ways. In response, some integrated kinship support into their bicultural lives and selectively shared their emotions through a process of emotional compartmentalization—a form of emotion work that enables children in structurally unstable families to draw on an elastic network of people and adapt depending on the person, situation, or life stage. As cultural brokers, older siblings are likely to develop closer relations with their parents and extended family with greater language and cultural familiarity, and these mediating responsibilities often start as early as childhood (Katz 2014). Our participants report turning to older siblings or cousins to make sense of, emotionally relate to, and mediate communications with their immigrant parents. However, daughters of immigrants in particular were more in tune with emotional dynamics within the family, because of gendered expectations and caregiving obligations. Because of her mother’s mental illness and her father’s long work hours as a Chinese food distributor, Mary explains how her sister, who is twelve years older than she is, played an almost maternal role in her life by not only acting as her caregiver but also providing emotional sustenance and family mediation: I don’t really have a strong communication with my mom or my dad largely because of our language barrier, even though I still live under the same roof with them. Because of my mom’s situation, we didn’t go on many family trips so my sister would always take me along with her so that greatly influenced me when it came to raising me. She also cooked for the family. My sister was the mediator or the translator in a way because she had a closer bond with my father and my mother. She knows more Chinese. She always went to my PTA meetings, ‘cause she would be the translator. So she was always my best friend-slash-my mother.

Among our sample, siblings are indeed one of the most crucial sources of support, especially for younger children. What is most interesting is that even though the roles and responsibilities they assumed may play out in gendered or intersectional ways, both male and female siblings can often assume the role of caregiver for other siblings and cousins if needed and that birth order is a better predictor in this sense. However, not all participants had older siblings or in some cases, could not depend on them because they were struggling with mental health issues, addictions, parental rebellion, or other challenges so that participants had to seek other avenues of support within the extended kin network. Sunny is a twenty-seven-year-old Korean American lawyer who was raised in an unstable working-class household with a troubled family history involving divorce, addiction, and alleged abuse. Her family background

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made her vulnerable to all kinds of emotional issues: her mother struggled with a gambling addiction, refusing to let her contact her father whom her mom claimed was abusive. Sunny tried to maintain a relationship with her short-term stepfather who divorced and later remarried. Despite all this, she stood out among our participants because she was able to forge and sustain an extensive, continuous, and resilient network of support throughout her life, composed of various members of her extended family. Growing up, Sunny’s grandparents offered her a sanctuary in Canada while her mother recovered from the first divorce. She describes: (My grandfather) told me about his life and all the things he’s done. He’s a very smart man [and] very ambitious. I really admire everything he’s done with his life. My grandmother is nurturing to the extent that she can be. She cooks for me, and she’ll tell me stories about the family. Then there are my mother’s two younger sisters, who are like older sisters to me. They talk to me about boys and marriage and what I need to look forward to when I have children. They’re the ones I called when I went out with any boyfriends. That’s kind of funny, I don’t really talk to my own parents about that. And there’s my uncle, who is the academic in the family. And so I remember going to him when I had questions about school in general. Yeah I have a lot of extended family members that I rely on.

Sunny was able to draw on a patchworked family history and turn to different extended kin whenever she struggled, which boosted her confidence and sense of ethnic pride. Moreover, because she was the third oldest child among her twelve cousins and siblings, her grandfather constantly encouraged her to be a role model for all the younger peers in the extended family, thus helping to produce and reproduce new networks of support among the extended kin. She states, “When I visit, [my grandfather will] just sit me down and talk to me . . . about family, about the things I need to worry about. There’s this understanding in the family that the responsibility of all younger cousins below me is on me. So my grandfather was talking about how it’s very important that I’m involved in their lives.” At the same time, when emotions are compartmentalized outside the nuclear family, these ties can be less stable and transient in nature because of the cultural tensions, physical distances, and intrafamilial conflicts created by migration, along with the separations and transitions that occur throughout the life cycle. Older siblings can move on to college, cousins, uncles, and aunts may move, or grandparents may pass away; in some cases, conflicts among family members can lead to alienation and separation, as was the case among quite a few of the participants’ families. When not backed by parental presence or supervision, these disruptions created considerable anxiety and emotional vacuums. For example, although most of our participants

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were raised within the structure of a nuclear family, it was not rare to find families that had extended kin, especially grandparents, to take care of their children on occasion. Kathy, a thirty-one-year-old lawyer and oldest daughter of three, had a very close relationship with her maternal grandmother, who provided care and offered her and her siblings an emotionally safe space that ameliorated some of the pain of witnessing her parents’ constant arguments and fights at home. However, she lost that support when her grandmother passed away. Nor do all children of immigrants have strong or positive relationships with their extended kin. Previous studies have found that co-residence with extended family members, as well as other problems associated with overcrowding, immigration stressors, and lack of privacy and comfort, can heighten tensions and conflict among kin (Dreby 2010; Parreñas 2005). In fact, studies show that for those who suffer from psychological distress, kin support tends to aggravate depressive symptoms (Gellis 2003). After her mother passed away when she was an infant, Justine, a single twenty-seven-year-old Chinese American investment banker, lived under the care of multiple, rotating caregivers initially among extended family members in Malaysia until she moved to a small, isolated town in Iowa where family friends took over. On the face sheet we distributed before the interview, her response to the question “who raised you?” was “hard to answer this one, lots of people along the way.” When asked who her role model was at the interview, she immediately replied her stepmother, who was a “hero” who took care of the family financially and emotionally, but said that they did not always have a positive relationship and that any chance for one was overshadowed by the dominating presence of her self-consumed and temperamental father. Among her many caregivers, she mentioned a grandmother who took care of her at one point but noted that major intrafamilial conflicts distanced her and ruined any chance of a stable relationship. Although largely independent, she mentioned how she created an elastic family safety net among family friends in the area to help her navigate the turmoil of childhood: It was like we had a set of family friends that lived in the same town for three years. And then you know, we left or they left. It was just like a rotation of people. And like we had some family friends that I was more comfortable talking to and I think that I went to them for advice more so than my parents and that was kind of just how it was. If I ever had a problem, I would talk to family friends and then they would mediate between me and my parents. . . . I’m closer to my friends than I am to my family. I put a lot more effort into maintaining [those friendships] than with my actual family, because nothing ever changes you know. It’s not like I would ever share what goes on in my daily life with my parents. They just wouldn’t want to know and they wouldn’t care.

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The narrative by Justine underscores some of the contradictions and tensions of elastic kinship systems. Previous studies suggest that older adults develop elastic ties to accommodate their “needs for autonomy and connection” and allow the “closeness with distance and the freedom to pull back” from social relations (Torres 2019, 237). The development of elastic ties among older adults demonstrates the difficulties of replacing lost strong ties; the same holds true when immigrant children seek an alternative source of support outside their immediate families. Although compartmentalization allows Justine to find support from the ever-changing network, it is this very resilience that diminishes the chances of sociopsychological and structural stability in her life. When emotions are compartmentalized, it is particularly important that Asian American daughters have diverse and flexible emotional support systems so that if one line of support falters, there is another one they have in place. FICTIVE KIN: EXTENDING EMOTIONAL SAFETY NETS Reliance on extended family households alone can be temporary or unstable arrangements because they are often forged as a response to the immediate economic, social, or caregiving needs of different family members (Cross 2018). As a result, children must learn to adjust to new household rearrangements when those needs are satisfied or change abruptly—for example, when a parent has to increase work hours, a grandparent passes away, or a paid nanny quits the job. In adapting to the exigencies of life cycle changes, immigration, and economic survival, it is not uncommon to find children expanding their emotional safety net or creating alternative networks of fictive kin. As in the case of Justine, those participants who did not have the benefit of older siblings or loving grandparents and relatives also turned to friends, neighbors, and significant others as an important source of emotional companionship outside their family. For example, a twenty-five-year-old aspiring actress, Esther, told stories of her German neighbors who babysat her for most of her childhood until she was ten while her parents worked long hours. She spent so much time with this large three-generation family with six children that she even affectionately referred to the parents as “mommy” and “pop-pop” while addressing her parents as mother and father in Korean. However, she eventually became bothered by the fact that people thought she was adopted, among other tensions that arose from this unusual household arrangement. The case of Lisa, the youngest daughter of nine children in a blended Chinese family, shows how the complete absence of stable caregivers can push children to develop unhealthy relationships with “fictive” kin. Lisa,

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a twenty-six-year-old Chinese American marketing self-entrepreneur, was raised in a very wealthy household raised mostly by exploited coethnic domestic workers and had a very troubled childhood characterized by extreme neglect, isolation, and both physical and emotional abuse by her father, stepmother, and stepbrother. Suffering from severe depression and a drug addiction, Lisa said she spent a large portion of her youth sleeping on couches at her friends’ or parent’s friend’s houses and eventually left her home at the age of thirteen. One father tried to help her get support from welfare services, but she said as an undocumented immigrant, they did not do much to help her. Eventually she hastily married someone before she turned seventeen and after her divorce, relied on a string of male partners including everyone from fellow addicts to her high school friend’s divorced father. As a result, men have figured more largely in terms of her emotional needs: I don’t know what the true meaning of how you would categorize friends. Because I guess not having like a family family, when I have a friend and they’re usually male, I completely incorporate them into my life. Like they’re lodged in. Like it’s a codependency issue too. I want to make sure that they have money, they’re not hungry. I’ll just do a lot of things that these people could do for themselves and it’s not my job to take care of them. Most people might say that like it’s a very female or motherly thing to do.

Among her unhealthy relationships, some of her partners sold her drugs or psychologically fed her thirteen-year-long alcohol and drug addiction until she went clean the year before our interview. Notably, not all the participants in the study felt compelled to seek emotional support outside their immediate families, depending on their class situations growing up, the overall emotional and structural stability of their immediate family, and their mother’s ability to take on extra caregiving duties. For example, children whose parents, usually mothers, were better able to stretch their work and family caregiving responsibilities were more likely to keep their emotional support systems closer to their immediate family members. The same goes for families who could afford to keep at least one parent or at least an extended kin at home. Conversely, daughters whose parents were overcommitted in work time and had little access to extended kin or coethnic support were more likely to cast their emotional nets more widely to peers, neighbors, paid caregivers, and significant others. In this way, both social inequality and social structure play a significant role in shaping the substance and contours of their fictive kin systems. Although fictive kin can become vital sources of support, emotional dependency on nonfamily networks can entail greater risk and instability because they tend to be weaker and fluctuate over the life cycle. These relationships

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also rarely help to bridge the generation gap and have the potential to turn into something more problematic if emotions are entrusted to the wrong person. For example, heavy emotional reliance on romantic partners can lead to psychological codependency, abuse, or trauma if they fall apart. As in the case of Lisa, some interviewees also found themselves vulnerable to the temptations of drugs, crime, and abuse as a result of their psychological codependency on delinquent peers and romantic partners. Like traditional families, fictive kinship systems are also organized around unequal relationship structures that can limit or negatively impact immigrant children—as best demonstrated by employed family caregivers. Because of the many hours or years they spend with their employers’ children, less seasoned domestic caregivers often develop a deep affective bond for the children under their care—sometimes as a projection of their longing and affection for children left behind in the homeland (Hondagneu-Sotelo and Avila 1997). In a similar fashion, a few participants in the study considered their former housekeepers and nannies as their main caregivers during their parents’ absence but the degree of emotional attachment seemed to vary considerably. Lisa, for example, recalled trying to turn to one of the many housekeepers and nannies she was left with but said that they lived in such fear of her controlling father and were so financially and legally dependent on her parents for their visa sponsorship that they did little to support her. Others said they had fond relationships with their paid caregivers who raised them when they were younger but their term with their family was often too temporary to develop into a lasting bond. At the same time, our findings suggest that if ethnic communities can provide stable support, for example in the form of mentors and role models, then the risks of expanding emotional safety nets can be considerably minimized. Zhou (2008) find that ethnic supplementary school systems comprised of tutoring schools, recreational spaces, and afterschool programs in places like Los Angeles have provided a significant institutional infrastructure for Korean and Chinese ethnic communities; they help immigrant families by translating and conveying knowledge and resources on school systems for coethnics, building self-esteem and a sense of belonging through the preservation of ethnic identity and cultural traditions, and also providing affordable educational resources and role models for the children of working-class parents. Nonprofit organizations such as youth and family centers, cultural organizations, and political advocacy groups also fill the social and emotional needs by giving young Asian Americans an institutionally complete and resource-rich ethnic communities with the tools for educational mobility and political empowerment (Chung 2016). In a few cases, ethnic organizations had a transformative effect on the lives of at-risk Asian Americans. Lisa, a thirty-year-old Chinese American

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freelance graphic designer, struggled with self-esteem and isolation growing up as one of the few Asian Americans in her school, leading her to eventually drop out of high school. She shared how working with Asian American organizations eventually turned things around for her: I felt like growing up I didn’t quite fit in anywhere. . . . I was actually the only Asian in that school, so that kind of put a little bit of a weird pressure on me, being stereotyped and having to defend myself in terms of everybody calling me names and stuff like that. And then while freelancing, I came across this guy who wanted to start an online magazine for Asian Americans and that was how I came across the Committee of 100. I started volunteering just to help them out and then after a while I realized that it’s actually a good program for kids, because it’s a place where kids get to learn music for free. It’s an Asian American organization so I saw a lot of the kids in there who were going through the same processes that I was going through, so it was interesting to be able to mentor these kids and to give them some insight. I feel a lot more comfortable in my skin now than I ever have. I also feel like the past experiences have given me a lot of strength to be able to speak out and speak my mind, because growing up, we were told, don’t cause any trouble, don’t bring attention to things even if you know it’s right or wrong.

Lisa is now actively involved in Asian American nonprofit organizations. Another Korean American participant, Suzanne, came from a working-class Korean immigrant family of six squeezed into a one-bedroom in Queens and worked since she was a child at her family business in a poor, Black neighborhood of Brooklyn. Because her parents worked long hours, she and her siblings raised themselves as latchkey children and her childhood memories included constant worries about money and abuse from her father. She credits her eventual ability to overcome her background disadvantages and move onto a specialized high school and then college to a Korean American female youth counselor whom she met at an afterschool program at the Flushing YWCA in Queens. This mentor shared internship opportunities, pushed her to apply for college, workshops, and scholarships, and advised her as she struggled to adapt to new schools. Inspired by this relationship, Suzanne now speaks at workshops targeting young girls on topics such as self-esteem, dating, and college prep. NEGOTIATING EMOTIONS Our research finds that immigrant families often utilize different emotional strategies, actions, and logics to navigate the many structural challenges of immigration even as early as childhood. These approaches are shaped by

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gender norms, household structure, and class constraints. In this study, we see how extended and fictive kin can provide a sense of identity, belonging, and history to Asian American daughters of immigrants, especially when there are few ethnic institutions, educational opportunities, role models or positive public representations of Asian Americans to follow. Within this context, we propose that an important type of emotional adaptation strategy is emotional kinscripting—a type of emotion work in which immigrant family members imagine and invoke both real and imagined kinship networks to compensate for emotional dislocations created by the exigencies of both immigration and racial inequality. Korean and Chinese Americans selectively negotiate, reimagine, and rely on a loose, flexible network of extended kin and kin-like caregivers for emotional and psychological support when their parents are not emotionally available. The narratives of participants in this research highlight three defining ways in which Asian American daughters engage in emotion work: by patchworking reimagined narratives collected through extended kin; by compartmentalizing their emotional needs along different, elastic networks of kin; and by expanding their kinship networks—both real and imagined. Meanwhile, because these relationships are born in adaptation to the exigencies of poverty, family instability, discrimination, and insufficient institutional support, they entail great emotional uncertainty, gaps, and even unhealthy or traumatic outcomes, depending on whom they turn to. In the end, when children have to reach out to extended kin or fictive kin, the ties may be relatively more unstable because of the evolving nature of those ties (e.g., with significant others), changes in the life cycle (e.g., passing of grandparents or siblings who move out of the homes), and the transient nature of paid caregiving. On the other hand, our findings substantiate the current scholarship that underscores the occasional mediating role of ethnic institutions in providing a sense of history, structure, and guidance for otherwise weak emotional safety nets. There are a few limitations for this research: first, our aim was to analyze how the current worldview and decisions of participants were shaped by their emotional processing of childhood events, so the recollection must be analyzed as selective, distorted, and retrospective accounts that do not necessarily reflect actual events. Second, major changes in the racial and immigration context of the United States as well as the gender and family dynamics of sending societies since the time of this study may shape the family experiences of future cohorts of immigrant children in different ways. The use of maximum variation sampling allowed us to include some hard-to-reach populations such as LGBTQ, married with children, and working-class Asian Americans, but a wider sample of participants from these groups would have captured more nuances and different patterns of emotion work performed by each group.

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In the end, extended kin have the potential to offer children of immigrants one of the few stable ways of crossing cultural barriers, learning about family history, and carrying on the family legacy when their parents are busy working and their local schools and community fail to provide such mediation and support. We argue that through emotional kinscripting, immigrants can nurture a parent-child relationship organized around a resilient, communal, and sacrificial framework of love—one that is difficult to articulate in terms of the western binary approach to love and emotion. How much American-born children can grasp depends on their ability to recognize cultural differences in conveying love, find ways to communicate in a common language, and seek mediation from outside family members, coethnic and female mentors, and institutions. NOTE 1. We used pseudonyms for all the participants in this research study.

REFERENCES Chung, A. Y. 2016. Saving Face: The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth. Rutgers University Press. Cross, C. J. 2018. “Extended Family Households among Children in the United States: Differences by Race/Ethnicity and Socio-Economic Status.” Population Studies 72, no. 2: 235–51. Cross, C. J., Nguyen, A. W., Chatters, L. M., and Taylor, R. J. 2018. “Instrumental Social Support Exchanges in African American Extended Families.” Journal of Family Issues 39, no. 13: 3535–63. Dreby, J. 2010. Divided by Borders: Mexican Migrants and Their Children. University of California Press. Ebaugh, H. R., and Curry, M. 2000. “Fictive Kin as Social Capital in New Immigrant Communities.” Sociological Perspectives 43, no. 2: 189–209. Espiritu, Y.L. 2008. Asian American Women and Men: Labor, Laws, and Love. Rowman and Littlefield. Gellis, Z. D. 2003. “Kin and Nonkin Social Supports in a Community Sample of Vietnamese Immigrants.” Social Work 48, no. 2: 248–58. https:​//​doi​.org​/10​.1093​ /sw​/48​.2​.248 Gerstel, N. 2011. “Rethinking Families and Community: The Color, Class, and Centrality of Extended Kin Ties.” Sociological Forum 26, no. 1: 1–20. Glaser, B. G., and Strauss, A. L. 1967. The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine. Goffman, E. 1959. The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Doubleday.

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Hall, E. T. 1990. Hidden Differences Doing Business with the Japanese. Anchor. Hochschild, A.R. 2012. The Managed Heart: Commercialization of Human Feeling. UC Berkeley. Hondagneu-Sotelo, P., nd Avila, E. 1997. “‘I’m Here, but I’m There’: The Meanings of Latina Transnational Motherhood.” Gender & Society 11, no. 5: 548–71. Ishii-Kuntz, M. 2000. “Diversity within Asian American Families.” In D.H. Demo, K.R. Allen, and M.A. Fine (Eds.), Handbook of Family Diversity (274–92). Oxford University Press. Karner, T. X. 1998. “Professional Caring: Homecare Workers as Fictive Kin.” Journal of Aging Studies 12, no. 1: 69–82. Katz, V. S. 2014. Kids in the Middle: How Children of Immigrants Negotiate Community Interactions for Their Families. Rutgers University Press. Kofman, E., and Raghuram, P. 2022. “Gender and Migration.” In Scholten, P. (ed), Introduction to Migration Studies. IMISCOE Research Series. Springer, Cham. Kibria, N. 1993. Family Tightrope: The Changing Lives of Vietnamese Americans. Princeton University Press. Kreider, R. M., and Ellis, R. 2011. Living Arrangements of Children: 2009. (Current Population Reports, 70–126). United States Census Bureau. Lan, P.-C. 2002. “Subcontracting Filial Piety Elder Care in Ethnic Chinese Immigrant Families in California.” Journal of Family Issues 23, no. 7: 812–35. Lofland, J., Snow, D., Anderson, L., and Lofland, L. 2006. Analyzing Social Setting: A Guide to Qualitative Observation and Analysis. Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co. Parreñas, R. S. 2005. Children of Global Migration: Transnational Families and Gendered Woes. Palo Alto: Stanford University Press. Perry-Jenkins, M., and Gerstel, N. 2020. “Work and Family in the Second Decade of the 21st Century.” Journal of Marriage and Family 82, no. 1: 420–53. Portes, Alejandro, and Ruben Rumbaut. 2014. Immigrant America: A Portrait. Berkeley: University of California Press. Pyke, K. 2000. “The Normal American Family” as an Interpretive Structure of Family Life among Grown Children of Korean and Vietnamese Immigrants. Journal of Marriage and Family 62, no. 1: 240–55. Qin, D. B. 2006. “‘Our Child Doesn’t Talk to Us Anymore’: Alienation in Immigrant Chinese Families.” Anthropology & Education Quarterly 37, no. 2: 162–79. Spitzer, D., Neufeld, A., Harrison, M., Hughes K., and Stewart, M. 2003. “Caregiving in Transnational Context: ‘My Wings Have Been Cut; Where Can I Fly?’” Gender and Society 17, no. 2: 267–86. Stack, C. B., and Burton, L. M. 1993. “Kinscripts.” Journal of Comparative Family Studies 24, no. 2: 157–70. Suarez-Orozco, C., and Suarez-Orozco, M. M. 2001. Children of Immigration. The Developing Child Series. Harvard University Press. Sun, K. C.-Y. 2014. “Transnational Kinscription: A Case of Parachute Kids in the USA and Their Parents in Taiwan.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 40, no. 9: 1431–49.

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Svašek, M. 2010. “On the Move: Emotions and Human Mobility.” Journal of Ethnic and Migration Studies 36, no. 6: 865–80. Taylor, R. J., Skipper, A. D., Cross, C. J., Taylor, H. O., and Chatters, L. M. 2022. “Racial/Ethnic Variation in Family Support: African Americans, Black Caribbeans, and Non-Latino Whites.” Journal of Marriage and Family 84, no. 4: 1002–23. Toro-Morn, M.I., And Marixsa A. 2003. “Gendered Geographies of Home: Mapping Second- and Third-Generation Puerto Ricans’ Sense of Home.” Gender and U.S. Immigration, edited by Pierrette Hondagneu-Sotelo. Berkeley: University of California Press. Chapter 10. Torres, S. 2019. “On Elastic Ties: Distance and Intimacy in Social Relationships.” Sociological Science 6: 235–63. Turner, J. H. 2009. “The Sociology of Emotions: Basic Theoretical Arguments.” Emotion Review 1, no. 4:, 340–54. Van Hook, J., and Glick, J. E. 2007. “Immigration and Living Arrangements: Moving beyond Economic Need versus Acculturation.” Demography 44, no. 2: 225–49. Wang, L. K. 2013. “Unequal Logics of Care: Gender, Globalization, and Volunteer Work of Expatriate Wives in China.” Gender & Society 27, no. 4: 538–60. Wingfield, A. H. 2010. “Are Some Emotions Marked ‘Whites Only’? Racialized Feeling Rules in Professional Workplaces.” Social Problems 57, no. 2: 251–68. Zhou, M. 2008. “The Ethnic System of Supplementary Education: Nonprofit and For-Profit Institutions in Los Angeles’ Chinese Immigrant Community.” In M. Shinn & H. Yoshikawa (Eds.), Toward Positive Youth Development: Transforming Schools and Community Programs (229–54). Oxford University Press.

Chapter Six

Young Love Model Minorities, Gender, and Sexuality in Contemporary South Asian YA Novels Nalini Iyer‌‌‌

In recent years, there has been an explosion of young adult (YA) novels written by South Asian American writers.1 Publishers of YA literature note the increasing numbers of manuscripts that they are receiving from a diverse pool of authors (Kirsch 2023). This phenomenon reflects both the desire of the publishing industry to diversify its author lists and the growing demand among young readers for books that represent cultural diversity in American society. As Shannon Maughan from Publishers Weekly notes, audiences are looking for mirrors and windows—mirrors that reflect their lives and experiences and windows that open them up to experiences and worlds beyond their own. YA literature, Maughan writes, is an important tool in building empathy in adolescent readers aged thirteen through seventeen (2019, 30). This growth in South Asian American YA novels speaks to the ways in which the community’s presence and economic and political power are gaining visibility. US Census Bureau data show that the South Asian population in the United States has grown from 2.2 million in 2000 to 4.9 million in 2015 (2023, ix). This growth in population has created a strong market for YA fiction featuring South Asian protagonists especially among second-generation South Asian Americans. South Asians are now being mainstreamed in the United States,2 and the election of Kamala Harris as vice president highlights this visibility as her South Asian heritage has been noted in the media and is celebrated by Indians and Indian Americans, sometimes to the exclusion of her Black heritage. Although there is numerical increase in South Asian 111

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American YA fiction, the majority of realist YA fiction by South Asian American authors featuring South Asian American characters focuses on middle- and upper-class immigrants who are racialized as model minority. These works largely promulgate the model minority identity while occasionally questioning its impact on the community and especially adolescents. South Asian youth, like other Asian American youth, have a conflicted understanding of themselves as racialized subjects formed by changing immigration laws, postcolonial politics, and everyday racism. As Lee et al. have noted in their essay, in the educational context, Asian American youth find themselves homogenized as one large category and struggle to navigate the model minority and eternal foreigner ideas of race that prevail in the community and in mainstream America. Sunaina Maira has examined South Asian Muslim youth’s racialization post-9/11 to understand what cultural citizenship means to this group. Rupam Saran has conducted an ethnographic study of South Asian American youth and their contradictory experiences (empowering at times and limiting at others) with the model minority identity. What these studies show is that understanding racialization is complex for young folks.3 I would argue that YA fiction offers a rich terrain of storytelling that draws youth into empathy and understanding of their personal struggles through fiction. However, these studies of racialization and Asian American youth have paid limited attention to questions of gender. For the daughters of South Asian Americans, YA fiction is a means of grappling with their racialization and with gendered expectations both at home and in the larger community— these daughters seek representation of their lives in the YA fiction they read. In this essay, I explore how South Asian American YA novelists create female characters in response to the desire for representation and the curiosity of non–South Asian Americans who want a window to this world. Many of these writers respond to the prevalent model minority representation and often use gender and sexuality of their female characters to underscore the heterogeneity of the community. Sometimes their plotlines also challenge the community’s repression/marginalization of queer youth.4 However, most of these novels belong to the romance genre. Although these narratives question the model minority expectations within the community as well as in how the community is perceived by others, the narratives ultimately endorse model minority identities. While there are numerous studies of Asian Americans and model minority racialization, the discussion of the experiences of the daughters of Asian Americans is somewhat limited.5 This essay seeks to redress some of this oversight by exploring model minority representation in South Asian American YA fiction with specific attention to the depiction of daughters. I begin by discussing the idea of the model minority. Then I examine the work of four South Asian American YA novelists: Sandhya Menon (primarily the novels in the Dimple and Rishi universe), Sabina Khan’s (The

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Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali), Syed Masood’s (More Than Just a Pretty Face) and Sabaa Tahir’s (All My Rage) to explore how these authors deal with representation, particularly of daughters and in relation to young men/ boys, within and beyond the South Asian community. I propose that three of these South Asian Americans continue to present their characters as model minorities who are successful, educated, and ultimately nonthreatening to mainstream society. Masood embraces the model minority identity to push against Islamophobia; Menon and Khan use a smorgasbord of intersectional identities to point to the heterogeneity of the community and to address its marginalization of queer youth. However, Sabaa Tahir dismantles the model minority identity in her novel. The paper argues that in these novels (except Tahir’s), the portrayal of the daughters of immigrants is often problematic because of the narrative strategies by which their agency is reinscribed to fit a neoliberal immigrant ideal, to promote a naïve multiculturalism, and to underscore assimilation. In discussing Tahir’s work, I explore how she forges a different path in terms of representation and racialization. THE MODEL MINORITY In many ways, YA South Asian American fiction struggles with what Vijay Prashad has noted is the double consciousness (term he borrows from DuBois) of race in the community. As Prashad has argued in The Karma of Brown Folk, South Asians were presented as the solution to the race problem while being aware that they were looking at themselves through a white supremacist lens. As Prashad notes in a recent interview in The Juggernaut, “The fate of brown folk was to deny your real history and accept the white supremacist history and live by it” (2020, n.p.). Many scholars have explored the history of model minority racialization in the Asian American community. Ellen Wu traces the emergence of the model minority in the Cold War era when Asian Americans were seeking citizenship. She notes that “Self-representations of Japanese and Chinese American masculinity, femininity, and sexuality, purposefully conforming to the norms of the white middle class, were crucial to the reconstruction of aliens ineligible to citizenship into admirable—albeit colored—Americans” (Wu 2013, 5). She continues in a similar vein to Vijay Prashad to add that in the era of the Civil Rights movement, Asian Americans like “Japanese and Chinese in the United States were catapulted to a new status as model minorities—living examples of advancement in spite of the persistent color line and because of their racial (often coded as cultural) differences” (2013, 6). Rosemary M. George has noted that first-generation South Asian immigrants, especially those that arrived after 1965, do not see

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themselves as racialized people. She emphasizes that these immigrants do not reject a specific racial identity but racialization itself. At the same time, these post-independence immigrants also carry over a hierarchic worldview shaped by British colonialism. I would further add that since the 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act drew professional and educated South Asian immigrants, their meritocratic views6 aligned well with the myth of individual success and assimilation. erin Khue Ninh, in Passing for Perfect: College Imposters and Other Model Minorities, argues that model minority is not an aspiration to whiteness but an identity. She writes, “I define the model minority as an identity: a set of convictions and aspirations, regardless of present socioeconomic status or future attainability” (2021, 5). She also notes regardless of immigrant histories and settlement patterns, second-generation immigrants converge upon a similarly understood success frame. Such a success frame is prevalent among South Asians, both Muslim and Hindu, who did not experience the same colonial oppression with the United States as the Philippines or Vietnam, but who nevertheless converge upon a similar understanding of success. The model minority identity is a form of racialization embraced by South Asian immigrants and their children as a positive identity and which allows them to deny race and racism in their lives and to emphasize class and culture as the source of their success. Ninh’s definition of model minority identity offers us a lens with which to understand the struggles of the South Asian American characters in many YA novels. It is neither their current socioeconomic status nor an aspiration to whiteness alone but also how South Asians are perceived and how they perceive themselves in relation to one another that shapes this model minority identity. Furthermore, as Tahseen Shams has noted in a recent article, precarity is inherent in the model minority identity for many South Asian Muslims post-9/11 and in the Trump era. Shams writes that many South Asian Muslims feel that regardless of their educational attainment or economic success, the prevalence of Islamophobia threatens their well-being. 9/11 led to the racialization of Muslims through their religious identities. As Mustapha Bayoumi writes, following the terrorist attacks of September 11th, Arabs and Muslims have again been repeatedly forced to undergo state scrutiny and official state definition simply because of their group membership and not because of their individual qualifications. Reminiscent of the earlier racial prerequisite cases, today’s post-September 11th state policies also teeter uncomfortably on race, religion, and contemporary politics, and the result has been mass exclusions and deportations of Arab and Muslim men from the United States in a strategy that, I argue, can properly be described as deliberate and racist. (2006, 270)

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South Asians in general have also experienced increased surveillance post-9/11 and South Asian Muslims have experienced what Bayoumi refers to in the preceding quotation regarding racialization through religion. Thus, the writers under discussion in this essay expose the struggles of young South Asians with their racialization as model minorities and the simultaneous precarity for those who are Muslim. Not only do these young people seek to understand themselves in relation to other ethnic groups, but they also struggle with expectations within the community that is often expressed in their narratives as generational differences. This essay closely examines how model minority identity is forged and challenged in the YA narratives under discussion and how the burden of creating and maintaining the community’s values often falls on the female characters. Sandhya Menon and the Celebration of Model Minority Identities Sandhya Menon published When Dimple Met Rishi to much fanfare and acclaim in 2017. The novel featured two Indo-American teenagers from wealthy Silicon Valley immigrant families whose parents try to arrange their marriage. Dimple resists but meets Rishi in a summer coding camp and falls in love, and they enter a long engagement while each pursues their education and path toward continued social mobility and economic success. The success of this novel led Menon to continue to build additional narratives in this universe including There’s Something about Sweetie (2019) and Ten Things I Hate about Pinky (2020) and two Kindle novellas As Kismet Would Have It (2019) and Love at First Fight (2020). The Dimpleverse novels continue Dimple and Rishi’s story as a backdrop to the romances of Rishi’s younger brother, Ashish, with Sweetie Nair, and the romance of their friend Samir with Pinky. The two novellas function as a follow-up to the Dimple–Rishi romance focusing on Dimple’s questioning of marriage as an institution (As Kismet Would Have It) and Samir and Pinky’s budding attraction, a prequel to Ten Things I Hate about Pinky. Not only are these narratives celebratory of heteronormativity, but they also reinforce class, religion, and caste as factors that make for a good marriage. As is typical of YA novels, the plot explores themes central to adolescent life—peer group tensions, family conflict, romance, college aspirations, identity, and sexuality. Counter to the data that shows the average age of marriage for Indians in India as 22.8 and for Americans as 27.9,7 this focus on high schoolers committing to matrimony in their teens across these novels (and in the South Asian YA universe) is unrealistic. I contend that Menon fetishizes the practice of arranged marriage as both an exotic one in an immigrant community for the non–South Asian reader and as a mark of culture that needs preserving for the South Asian

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reader. At the same time, these narratives rework conditions of endogamy in the immigrant community. Whereas the parents of these characters might have married in India along caste, region, linguistic, and religious lines, their children, born and raised in the United States, define endogamy as marrying another South Asian American/Indian American. According to Menon’s fictional world, in the United States, the Hindus marry other Hindus, and they are willing to abandon ties of language and caste which remain important factors in India. So Ashish Patel, a Gujarati Hindu, can marry Sweetie Nair, a Malayalee Hindu. Neither of their families takes issue with the language difference and the novel universe embraces caste-blindness as a mark of a socially progressive/Westernized community (an equivalent of American color-blind racism). Yet caste is present in the choices the couple make such as going to a temple during one of their dates even if neither acknowledges caste, and it is a major contributing factor to their parents’ access to education and economic advancement.8 When Dimple Met Rishi was adapted to a television series on Netflix called Mismatched (2020) in which the romance between the two was easily relocated to an Indian tech university and where migration to the United States is featured as a pathway to greater sexual freedom and economic well-being for the female character who is dating a visiting diasporic South Asian, Rishi. The transnational neo-orientalist world9 of Menon lends itself well to YA fiction where the element of fairy-tale romances is a strong selling point. Its slick cosmopolitanism allows for television adaptation without too many changes to the core story line. Diversifying the YA universe in this adaptation is simply adding a touch of color to spice up the universe. The narrative squarely fits the chick lit genre made popular by television shows like Sex and the City and the novels of Kavita Daswani, Moni Mohsin, and Sonia Singh among others in which feminism means consumerism, cosmopolitanism, and sexual freedom. Chick lit feminism has been dismissed by feminist literary scholars, but Pamela Butler and Jigna Desai argue that popular postcolonial fiction cannot be dismissed for its imbricated location within capitalism and neoliberalism. We refuse such a binary which requires that we toss women-of-color diasporic and transnational feminist chick lit on the heap of global capitalism’s obsolete commodities. We suggest instead that popular postcolonial feminine fictions offer further opportunities to consider postcoloniality, race, and global capitalism at their points of engagement with feminine subjectivities. (2019)

Menon’s novels can be read within the framework suggested by Butler and Desai as offering up an alternative chick lit feminism. Menon’s novels locate the adolescent women’s burgeoning feminism as critiques of whiteness in

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American society and patriarchy in Indian society while also reinforcing the upwardly mobile, somewhat liberal, and high achieving person (especially woman) as the desirable immigrant model for adolescent female readers. In the two novels that follow When Dimple Met Rishi, Menon takes on some feminist issues. In There’s Something about Sweetie, the issue is body image as the protagonist Sweetie is constantly reminded by her somewhat toxic mother of her weight while she feeds the girl sweets to show her love. Although she is a talented athlete, Sweetie internalizes her mother’s fatphobia and sees herself as undesirable. She does not believe that Ashish is attracted to her and proves her independence by challenging him to a race, thus establishing that men and women can be equally fit and competitive in sports. Ashish and Sweetie fall in love and he asserts that he finds her sexually attractive—a message that counters Sweetie’s mother’s body shaming. Charming as this narrative might be and, like all romance novels, it delivers a feel-good message for the reader, its feminism is the neoliberal kind. Menon critiques a pervasive problem in the South Asian community: the obsession with body size. Her body positivity message and her plucky female protagonist are inspiring and will, no doubt, impact young female readers of all persuasions. The problem in this novel and its predecessor is that it romanticizes arranged marriages by reworking endogamy in a South Asian American immigrant context and allowing young folks to date under strict parental oversight. More importantly, under all the flowers and candlelight romance is the message that South Asians marry only within the community. Men like Ashish might fall for white girls, but ultimately, they must follow the desires of their parents and become obedient sons. So even as Sweetie is celebrated for resisting her mother, the ultimate message is that of obedience to the parents and adherence to community expectations and values. This novel gives a nod to homosexuality as a counterpoint to the heteronormative plotline, but the gay couple are non–South Asians. In Menon’s world, queer South Asians do not exist except as minor characters. For example, in Ten Things I Hate about Pinky, the protagonist’s cousin is bisexual, but the narrative does not develop the character’s queerness significantly. Like Jane Austen’s novels, Menon adheres to the South Asian version of marriage balancing passion and prudence, but unlike Austen, Menon is writing for a twenty-first century audience in a racialized America. Her South Asian Americans must fit into white normative society while also preserving South Asian values. Eventually, it seems that Menon’s novels underscore for adolescent readers that South Asians are just like other Americans, just a bit more exceptional.10 In a standalone novel From Twinkle, with Love (2018), Menon presents a female protagonist, Twinkle Mehra, who is working-class and goes to a school with many wealthy students. Her best friend is Maddie, a Japanese American girl, who aspires to medical school at Johns Hopkins and a cool,

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tattooed Japanese American boyfriend. Although the economic divide between Maddie and Twinkle is vast, their aspirations coalesce when it comes to career success and romance with a cool, rich boy. Twinkle aspires to be a filmmaker and the novel revolves around her film production, her crush on twin brothers, Neil and Sahil Roy, who are part Indian American, and conflict among teen girls. Menon addresses the economic divides in the Indian American community—Twinkle’s parents work long hours, cannot afford a cell phone for her or a car, and are unable to travel back to India to see their family until Twinkle wins an all-expenses paid scholarship to attend a film festival in Mumbai. Twinkle is a good example of what erin Khue Ninh defines as the model minority—the identity is framed by aspirations regardless of socioeconomic status. Twinkle might be working-class, but her dreams are of model minority success. As with the Dimpleverse novels, the book ends with a fulfillment of romance and career ambitions and the promise of a lifelong relationship. Twinkle can have it all—a film career; a South Asian boyfriend who is loving, rich, and supportive; best friends who share her model minority aspirations; and happy parents. Menon’s South Asian American characters are Hindu—their names, their social networks, their everyday practices are Hindu—but religion is not named, and Hinduism is presented as normative South Asian American culture. There are no Muslim, Sikh, or Indian Christians in her novelistic universe. Temple visits, poojas at home, and esoteric practices for divining the universe are touches of Hindu culture that Menon presents as Indian. In the face of such cultural normativity, Muslim South Asian writers of YA fiction have to combat not just Islamophobia in the contemporary United States but also Hindu-centrism within South Asian American communities.11 Islamophobia is alive and well in the South Asian American community,12 and the two writers discussed below develop their narratives to establish Muslim South Asians as desirable immigrants. Syed Masood’s debut YA novel, More Than Just a Pretty Face (2020), is a teen romance with Pakistani American protagonists. Masood addresses Muslim masculinity and in doing so explores the differential treatments and expectations of sons and daughters within the community. In this novel, he challenges the model minority idea prevalent in the community. Set in San Francisco, the novel’s focus is Danyal Jilani, a nineteen-year-old senior at an elite prep school. His parents are middle-class Pakistanis who stretch their family finances to give their son an education they believe will set him on the path to success, which they define as a high paying, professional career as a doctor or lawyer. Danyal, however, is a disappointment to them as he cares more about romance and girls and less about science or math, and he is the class clown with no Ivy League aspirations like his high school peers. He does have one passion—he can cook. Cooking is considered a domestic

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skill and not a professional one, and the kitchen in a South Asian home is the domain of women.13 Danyal, however, wants his passion to become his profession. He is an apprentice at a French restaurant and his Pakistani dishes are legendary in his community. Still, his parents refuse to support his culinary ambitions and are convinced that his future is doomed unless he makes an advantageous marriage. Thus, they begin networking in the community for a suitable bride. Danyal, however, is desperately in love with his best friend’s twin sister, Kawal. Kawal likes Danyal and is resisting her parents’ desires to arrange a marriage for her to a cardiologist, and she tries to make Danyal over into her parents’ vision of an ideal son-in-law by pushing him to fit their ambitions academically. Danyal’s parents introduce him to Bisma Akram, an attractive and modestly well-off college freshman at UC Berkeley on track to get a degree in microbiology. On their first arranged coffee date, Bisma confesses that she had been indiscreet in the past and had hooked up with a white boy at a party. That incident had been caught on camera and the video was all over the internet. Although her parents managed to suppress the viral video, the stories follow Bisma who is deemed flawed and problematic because she is no longer a virgin. Predictably, Bisma and Danyal build a meaningful relationship, she helps him win an academic competition in his school and he discovers that Kawal is shallow, and that Bisma is his ideal life partner. Masood’s novel critiques and dismantles the model minority aspirations of its characters who are first-generation immigrants from Pakistan. Through Danyal, he underscores that Pakistani men can have passions and career interests that go beyond the standard expectations of their community. However, in the novel daughters of Pakistani immigrants are expected to conform to familial expectations of marriage and motherhood. Even if a woman is being educated on par with the men in the community (Kawal and Bisma are both educated), their ultimate goal is marriage and motherhood and not a career. Danyal’s excellent cooking skills overturn gender roles in the community— he does work that is considered feminine. At the same time, the woman he chooses, Bisma, is passionate about microbiology and can build a career in that field. Masood hints at a potential overturning of gender roles in Danyal and Bisma’s future home where the woman may be the primary wage earner and the man might function as the domesticated spouse. Through Bisma’s life story, Masood also questions the community’s policing of their daughters’ sexuality and bodies. Women are criticized if they engage in premarital sex and considered diminished in the marriage market if they are not virgins. Whereas premarital sex among high school students is commonplace in mainstream American culture, South Asian communities of all religious persuasions police their children’s sexuality and promote compulsory heteronormativity, virginity, and monogamy. The predominant value in the South

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Asian American community is that marriage is the only acceptable means to fulfilling one’s sexual desires in terms of the community’s norms. Masood’s novel brings diversity to the YA world—Pakistani Muslim teens and their lives take center stage, and the novel shows the characters to be “normal” American teens with their romantic dramas and academic struggles. His Muslim protagonists are heterogenous—the class clown, the diva, the nerd, the religious seeker, the gamer—but they inhabit an elite, private-school world. As with Sandhya Menon’s novels, the arranged marriage theme dominates, and the teens conveniently fall in love with those their parents choose. Both Menon and Masood seek to find a midpoint between South Asian and American values. Ultimately, they also suggest that we are all better off if we marry within the community where the couple shares religion and caste backgrounds, and that teen marriages are ideal ways to control daughters’ sexuality. While both Menon and Masood set their novels in the Bay area, their worlds are both insular—Pakistani Muslims in Masood’s novel and Indian Hindus in Menon’s demonstrating that the term South Asian American is inadequate in many ways as it does little to unpack the political tensions and ethnic enclaves within the community. Although Masood’s novel contributes to diversifying YA fiction in general and offers young readers a sense of everyday Muslim life that combats Islamophobia, his plot line remains heteronormative. The primary emphasis in this narrative is to present Pakistani American Muslims as desirable citizens. As noted earlier in this chapter, Ellen Wu argues that the model minority idea emerged in the Cold War era to present Chinese and Japanese Americans as desirable citizens. In the post-9/11 era where Muslims are portrayed as suspicious and potential threats to mainstream American society, there remains a sense of precarity in the Muslim community despite social and economic achievements as noted by Tahseen Shams. Thus, Masood’s narrative emerges from that precarity and presents Pakistani Americans as distinctive yet desirable citizens. His adolescents adhere to Pakistani values but in every other regard—their concerns over careers, academic success, romance, and peer pressure are similar to those of their non-Pakistani peers in American society. The teens navigate both worlds and the affluence of the community as depicted demonstrates that these immigrants contribute significantly to the American economy thus making them desirable rather than threatening. Sabina Khan also contends with a similar precarity as Masood. In her novel, The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali (2019) she has young love as the central plot theme but with a twist—Rukhsana the protagonist is gay and in love with Ariana, a white classmate, but her Bangladeshi immigrant parents are incredibly homophobic, and she is afraid of the consequences of coming out to them. Luckily for her, a full ride scholarship awaits her to CalTech where Ariana will also study, and they hope to live happily ever after once

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they are away from Seattle and Rukhsana’s family. The only family member who knows about her relationship with Ariana is her brother, Aamir. Rukhsana struggles to explain her familial challenges to Ariana whose parents are liberal and supportive but also view Rukhsana through an Islamophobic lens. Although Rukhsana’s parents reluctantly agree to let her attend CalTech and proudly defy the Bangladeshi community’s stereotypical fears that an overeducated girl has fewer marriage prospects, their discovery of Rukhsana’s sexuality shatters them. Predictably, they trick her into going to Bangladesh to visit an ill grandmother, and they are planning to marry her off to the first Bangladeshi man they can find. The novel then explores Bangladesh as both a home for Rukhsana as a practicing Muslim with some supportive relatives, notably her cousin and her grandmother. Rukhsana’s parents discover her plot to escape the arranged marriage and lock her up. They subject her to violence at the hands of a dubious religious man who promises to drive her djinns out. Help arrives in the form of a prospective US-based fiancé who is also gay and knows that Rukhsana is too, and they plot to have a lavender marriage,14 return to the United States, and pursue their own lives. Rukhsana is encouraged in her pursuit of true love by her grandmother who had been trapped in an abusive marriage where her husband had also sexually abused his own daughter, Rukhsana’s mother. The novel challenges Islamophobia and pushes against the dominant plot lines in South Asian American YA fiction. The characters in this novel are middle class (unlike Masood or Menon’s novels) but have similar model minority aspirations. In centering an interracial lesbian romance, Khan offers us a multidimensional view of homophobia and compulsory heteronormativity in Bangladesh through a range of situations including changing values amongst the youth, surprising support amongst some older people, and familial and cultural violence. As can be expected in a YA novel, Rukhsana does return to the United States, reconciles with Ariana, grieves for her murdered fiancé, miraculously rescues her scholarship at CalTech, and forgives her parents. While this novel offers the reader the experiences of a queer Muslim teenager in an interracial relationship, it also portrays Muslims as violent and regressive in their familial relationships. What saves Rukhsana is her model minority role as a scientific genius with a full ride scholarship that frees her from her family’s control. One wonders what would happen to a working-class, queer Bangladeshi girl who can barely manage tuition at a community college. Would she be condemned to compulsory heteronormativity or death? Masood, Khan, and Menon create female characters who are scientifically inclined and who compete academically with male students in a demanding field. This emphasis on young women scientists is welcome but whether the women are straight or queer, Hindu or Muslim, they are still expected to

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conform to notions of marriage/domestic partnership in their teens. Ruksana Ali’s parents finally accept her love, Ariana, in their lives and apologize to the young women for their homophobic behavior. Ruksana’s mother tells Ariana that she is now another daughter in their home, and they welcome her. The remaking of the heteronormative family to accept the interracial lesbian couple is a radical step in a South Asian American YA novel. The conventions of the genre require this neat conclusion to the plot line, but the genre of YA realist romance is unable to imagine anything but a homonormative (modified heteronormative) family that is upwardly mobile15; Ali satirizes this nominally when Ruksana’s mother discusses parenting and sperm donors with her daughter. Although Ruksana tells her mother that it’s too soon for her to think about children, the novel’s ending suggests that heteropatriarchy and model minority aspirations will continue. QUESTIONING THE MODEL MINORITY IDENTITY Sabaa Tahir’s All My Rage (2022) reframes the model minority narrative. All My Rage is a realist teen novel that tells the story of two young Pakistani Americans, Salahuddin and Noor, in Juniper, California. His parents run a motel and she is an orphan being raised by an uncle who runs a liquor store. The novelistic universe here consists of working-class Pakistani immigrants who grapple with economic survival and lost dreams of education and economic stability. Salahuddin’s mother, Misbah, has kidney disease for which she cannot afford treatment because of the costs of medical insurance. Her death underscores the economic precarity of many South Asian immigrants who are made invisible when the community is viewed as a model minority. Salahuddin struggles with his mother’s illness and his father’s alcoholism. He also has PTSD from a childhood sexual abuse experience. Noor’s parents die in an earthquake in Quetta and she is the sole survivor. Her uncle, Riaz, adopts her and takes up the liquor store business because he needs the money to raise the child. Frustrated by his caregiving obligations to Noor, he rejects all things Pakistani—culture, food, and religion. Salahuddin’s mother is the person who transmits Pakistani culture to Noor whom she treats like a daughter. The loss of Riaz’s dreams of education and economic advancement lead him to violence toward both his niece and his wife, Brooke. This world of dilapidated motels and seedy liquor stores is far removed from the glitzy world of mansions, expensive cars, and private schools that Menon and Masood write about. Noor and Salahuddin find solace in each other and their relationship blossoms into a romance. She has musical talents and Salahuddin loves to write, but neither of them can easily access a college education, the pathway to

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model minority success, because of their familial situations and the economic barriers they face. Noor does, at the end of the novel, go to UCLA but unlike the protagonists of Menon, Masood, or Khan’s novels, that is not an option she could take for granted. They go to an underfunded public school where drugs are endemic and Islamophobia and violence are rampant. These teens find each other as two wounded and traumatized children who understand one another, and their emotions complicate the friendship. When Misbah dies, Noor and Salahuddin’s life takes an even more difficult turn. Both lose the woman who had been the anchor in their life and begin making poor decisions. When they find themselves in trouble with the law, the local imam and his wife step in to help them, and as is conventional in YA fiction, their narrative has a romantic and hopeful ending. Tahir’s narrative foregrounds invisible South Asians who live in small towns, have precarious economic lives, and who experience cultural trauma and structural racism. Misbah dies because the health care system in the United States is broken; Riaz is violent because he feels trapped by his obligations and his patriarchal upbringing normalizes violence against women. Salahuddin is incarcerated on a drug charge and is different from the successful and ambitious YA male protagonist. Unlike Menon, Masood, and Khan who emphasize individual achievement, a meritocratic universe that supports model minority identities, Tahir focuses on socioeconomic and cultural structures that hamper individuals. American society and its infrastructure— schools, health care, the legal system—do not support Muslim immigrants, and the teens rely on family and community to help them through. For Noor and Salahuddin, it is the imam and his wife who provide guidance and support. Through Noor’s relationship with both Misbah and the imam’s wife, Tahir shows a mother-daughter relationship that is outside of biological kinship. Although the ending offers hope that Salahuddin and Noor will find happiness together, that is not the narrative’s emphasis. One is in jail and the other in college and they are both still finding themselves through their art, through new relationships, and each is also coping with grief and loss. CONCLUSION South Asian American YA fiction is a genre worth examining because of its popularity and its role in shaping the racialization of the community both in larger American society as well as within the community itself. Although these narratives are driven by the expectations of the genre, the emphasis on model minority racialization raises questions about how inclusive these novels are. Although the fictional worlds created in these novels offer occasional

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challenges to model minority racialization, the need to include narrative lines that dismantle that dominant racialization (like Tahir’s) persists. All of these novels center the experiences of the daughters of South Asian immigrants. Although the model minority expectation shapes the second generation and becomes a restrictive identity to accept, the experiences of the daughters are particularly challenging. Whereas Menon’s young female protagonists seem to be treated equally with the young men in the community, that parity is superficial as these women continue to bear the burden of gendered expectations centered on marriage and motherhood. Regardless of their academic success and career potential, Dimple, Sweetie, and Twinkle are still expected to be obedient daughters who conform to social expectations of their community. In Masood and Ali’s narratives, the daughters not only experience precarity stemming from their religious identity, but they are also made vulnerable when they explore their sexual desires. Academic success only offers a modest mitigation of the sexual policing they endure. Sabaa Tahir shatters the model minority depictions of South Asian communities to emphasize working-class Muslim lives influenced by multiple traumas. In her narrative, both young men and women are vulnerable to violence and abuse, but it is Noor who succeeds in overcoming her hardships while Salahuddin still has a tougher path to follow at the end of the novel. Thus, while realist YA narratives created by South Asian authors might be compelled to adhere to genre expectations, it offers its readers, both South Asian and non–South Asian a mirror and a window to the lives of the youth, especially daughters, in the community. NOTES 1. I thank Sahil Bathija, Seattle University student, who was my research assistant in spring 2023 and whose research contributed significantly to the development of this work from a conference presentation to a book chapter. 2. The popularity of shows such as Never Have I Ever and Indian Matchmaking on Netflix and the proliferation of South Asian businesses focused on food, clothing, and décor speak to a fascination with South Asian culture (a new orientalism, if you will) in upper-middle-class America with disposable income and speaks to the mainstreaming of South Asians and their culture. 3. See Stacey J. Lee, Eujin Park, and Jia-Hui Stephanie Wong, “Racialization, Schooling, and Becoming American: Asian American Experiences,” Educational Studies 53, no. 5: 492–510; Sunaina Maira, 2017, “The Intimate and the Imperial: South Asian Muslim Immigrant Youth After 9/11,” Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, and the Global. Edited by Sunaina Maira, Elizabeth Soep, and George Lipsitz (64–84). University of Pennsylvania Press.

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4. For a substantive discussion of the experiences of queer South Asians, see Shweta M. Adur and Bandana Purkayastha “(Re)Telling Traditions: The Language of Social Identity among Queer South Asians in the United States,” South Asian Diaspora 9, no. 1: 1–16. 5. For a good discussion of model minorities and the representation of daughters, please see erin Khue Ninh’s Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature, NYU Press, 2011. 6. For a discussion of South Asian American meritocracy, see Susan Koshy, “Category Crisis: South Asian Americans and Questions of Race and Ethnicity,” Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Studies 7, no. 3 (1998): 285–320. 7. See https:​//​timesofindia​.indiatimes​.com​/life​-style​/relationships​/from​-21​-to​-33​ -years​-how​-average​-marriage​-age​-varies​-across​-countries​/photostory​/61559402​.cms 8. For a discussion of kinship networks and migration, see Amy Bhatt and Nalini Iyer, Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest, University of Washington P, 2013. For a discussion of caste and migration networks, see Suraj Yengde “From India to the United States, Societies That Hang on to Caste Lie to Themselves,” The Wire, 7 April 2021. https:​//​thewire​.in​/caste​/isabel​-wilkerson​-caste​ -colour​-oppression 9. I use this term to mean orientalist ideology that is embraced by the formerly colonized who were the objects of orientalist discourse themselves. 10. An earlier version of these arguments about Menon’s novels have appeared in my reviews of these novels at The International Examiner. 11. For a discussion of diaspora Hinduism, see Pratick Mallick, “Diaspora Hinduism and Hindutva: a Historiography of Modern Indian Politics,”Beyond the Death of God: Religion in Twenty-First Century International Politics, Eds. Simone Raudino and Patricia Sohn (305–13). University of Michigan Press, 2022. 12. See https:​//​religionnews​.com​/2022​/10​/06​/indias​-hindu​-nationalism​-is​ -exporting​-its​-islamophobia 13. See Lisa Lau, “Emotional and Domestic Territories: The Positionality of Women as Reflected in the Landscape of the Home in Contemporary South Asian Women’s Writings,” Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 4 (2006): 1097–116. 14. A marriage of convenience intended to hide the couple’s queerness. 15. For a rich discussion of homonormativity, see Gayatri Gopinath’s Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures, Duke UP, 2005; and Jasbir Puar Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times, Duke UP, 2017.

REFERENCES Aryal, Khem K. 2023. “Introduction.” South to South: Writing South Asia in the American South. Huntsville, TX: The UP of SHSU, ix–xv. Bayoumi, Mustapha. 2006. “Racing Religion.” The New Centennial Review 6, no. 2: 267–93. Bhatt, Amy, and Nalini Iyer. 2013. Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest. University of Washington P.

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Butler, Pamela, and Jigna Desai. 2019. “Prologue: A Second Read: Further Reflections on Women-of-Color Chick Lit.” Theorizing Ethnicity and Nationality in the Chick Lit Genre. Ed. Erin Hunt, Routledge, 25–38. George, Rosemary Marangoly. 1997. “From Expatriate Aristocrat to Immigrant Nobody: South Asian Racial Strategies in the Southern Californian Context.” Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies 6 no. 1: 31–60. Gopinath, Gayatri. 2005. Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures. Duke UP. Khan, Sabina. 2019. The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali. Scholastic Books. Kirsch, Claire. 2023. “Diversity Is on the Rise in Children’s Literature.” publishersweekly.com. Koshy, Susan. 1998. “Category Crisis: South Asian Americans and Questions of Race and Ethnicity.” Diaspora: Journal of Transnational Studies 7, no. 3: 285–320. Lau, Lisa. 2006. “Emotional and Domestic Territories: The Positionality of Women as Reflected in the Landscape of the Home in Contemporary South Asian Women’s Writings.” Modern Asian Studies 40, no. 4: 1097–116. Lee, Stacey J., Eujin Park, and Jia-Hui Stephanie Wong. 2004. “Racialization, Schooling, and Becoming American: Asian American Experiences.” Educational Studies 53, no. 5: 492–510. Maira, Sunaina. 2017. “The Intimate and the Imperial: South Asian Muslim Immigrant Youth after 9/11.” Youthscapes: The Popular, the National, and the Global. Edited by Sunaina Maira, Elizabeth Soep, and George Lipsitz (64–84). University of Pennsylvania Press. Mallick, Pratick. 2002. “Diaspora Hinduism and Hindutva: a Historiography of Modern Indian Politics.” Beyond the Death of God: Religion in Twenty-First Century International Politics. Edited by Simone Raudino and Patricia Sohn (305–13). University of Michigan Press. Maughan, Shannon. 2019. “YA Widens Its Lens.” Publishers Weekly 266, no. 42: 30. Menon, Sandhya. 2017. When Dimple Met Rishi. Simon and Shuster. ———. 2019. There’s Something about Sweetie. Simon and Shuster. ———. 2020. Ten Things I Hate about Pinky. Simon and Shuster. ———. 2019. As Kismet Would Have It. Kindle edition, Simon and Shuster. ———. 2020. Love at First Fight. Kindle Edition, Simon and Shuster. Ninh, erin Khue. 2011. Ingratitude: The Debt-Bound Daughter in Asian American Literature. NYU Press. ———. 2021. Passing for Perfect: College Imposters and Other Model Minorities. Temple UP. Prashad, Vijay. 2001. The Karma of Brown Folk. University of Minnesota P. ———. 2020. “Revisiting the Model Minority Myth, 20 Years Later.” The Juggernaut. Puar, Jasbir. 2017. Terrorist Assemblages: Homonationalism in Queer Times. Duke UP. Tahir, Sabaa. 2022. All My Rage. Penguin. Saran, Rupam. 2016. Navigating Model Minority Stereotypes: Asian Indian Youth in the South Asian Diaspora. Routledge.

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Shams, Tahseen. 2020. “Successful Yet Precarious: South Asian Muslim Americans, Islamophobia, and the Model Minority Myth.” Sociological Perspectives 63, no. 4: 653–69. Wu, Ellen. 2013. The Color of Success: Asian Americans and the Origins of the Model Minority. Princeton UP.

Index

#TweetYourThobe, 73 Abualadas, Othman, 84 afterlife of migration, 1 All My Rage (Tahir), 122–23 Alli, Sarah, 28, 29, 30 al-Nakba war, 74 Alvarez, Julia, 9 anti-Chinese campaigns in Mexico, 37, 39, 42, 43, 46, 47n3 Anzaldúa, Gloria, 47 Asian Americans: emotional kinscripting, 106; feeling rules, navigation of, 93; heterogeneity in experiences of, 89–90; intergenerational discord, 91, 95; patchworking narratives, 94–98, 99 Asia-Pacific Triangle, 4 autoethnographic projects, importance of, 39 Bachu, Shabana, 28–30 Bahadur, Gauitra, 25 Basurto Benitez, Josephina, 42 Bayoumi, Mustapha, 114, 115 Behind You Is the Sea (Darraj), 75, 79–84 birth order and gender positionality, 97, 99

The Black Atlantic, 23 Body Counts (Espiritu), 12 Bracero Program, 4, 55 Brah, Avtar, 10 brokering activities as care work, 60–61, 64, 66. See also intermediary role of immigrant children care work of daughters: brokering activities, 60–61, 64, 66; childcare, 59–60, 63, 65–66; immigrant bargain, 61–62, 66; overview of, 55–56, 58–59, 90. See also intermediary role of immigrant children Cariello, Marta, 76 Carrillo Woong, Victor, 45 Carmen, Tia, 44 Castañeda Lugo, María del Rosario, 44, 48n6 childcare as care work, 59–60 “China en Mexico” (Cinco), 42 chinera, 48n6 Chinese American. See Asian Americans Chinese Mexicans: anti-Chinese campaigns, 37, 39, 42, 43, 46; economic success of, 47n5; endogamy practice, 47–48n6; history of, 37–38, 41–42, 43; migration to 129

130

Index

US, 40; repatriation of, 42–43, 44, 46, 48n7; silent histories, 38, 41, 43; storytelling gatherings, 39; women storytellers, 37 Cinco, Federico, 42–43 Cinco Basurto, Monica, 38, 41–42, 47, 47n4 Cinco Sandoval, Jorge, 41, 42, 43, 45, 46 colonial discourse on Indo-Afro Caribbean relationship, 24, 33 cultural differences in communication style, 95 cultural differences in managing self, 94 cultural formation, 77, 79 “Cultural Identity and Diaspora” (Hall), 23 culture, concept of, 21 culture, role in Indo-Afro Caribbean racial segregation, 24 culture clash narrative, 10 A Curious Land: Stories from Home (Darraj), 75 Darraj, Susan Muaddi: on daughters of immigrants, 74–75; ethnic identity, 74; fictional literary works, 12, 75, 84–85; social media thobe campaign, 73–74 Daswani, Kavita, 116 daughters of immigrants: definition of, 2; emotion work of daughters, 102; emotional and/or physical labour, 13, 54–55, 58; emotional compartmentalization, 99, 100; extended kinship relations, 98; familial expectations on, 2–3, 40, 54; feeling rules, navigation of, 93; gendered roles and expectations, 90, 92, 94–98; intermediary role of, 7, 54; kinscripting, 92; lived experiences of, 1–2; multidisciplinary approach to study of, 10–11; policing of sexuality/bodies, 12, 119–20, 124;

representation in YA fiction, 112; reproductive role of, 2, 11–12; role of silence in lives of, 12–13. See also second generation immigrants Daughters of Immigrants Symposium, 1 Deebrah, Miranda, 28, 29, 30, 31 Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), 56 Deonarain, Lissa, 24, 27–28 Department of Homeland Security, 53 deportation, threat of, 53–54, 64–65, 66 diaspora and identity, 23 diasporic consciousness, 22, 23, 26, 29 double consciousness, 113 double diaspora, 25–26, 29–30 Double Diaspora: A Portrait of Indo-Caribbeans in New York (Deonarain), 24 double migration of Indo-Caribbean, 28 dougla, 25 Ebileeni, Maurice, 79 emotion management. See daughters of immigrants, emotion work of daughters emotion negotiation, 105–6 emotion work: brokering activities, 66; care work, 62; cultural differences in managing self, 94; definition of, 58, 89, 93; feelings rules, 58–59, 93–94; immigration enforcement, 63–65; kinscripting, 106; mental stress of, 67. See also intermediary role of immigrant children emotional compartmentalization, 99, 102 emotional kinscripting, 106, 107 emotional safety nets, 102–5 endogamy, practice of, 47–48n6, 116, 117 enforcement intergenerational effect, study of, 57, 67 enforcement of immigration policies, 63–65, 67 Espiritu, Yen Le, 12

Index

Everybody Was Kung Fu Fighting: AfroAsian Connections and the Myth of Cultural Purity (Prashad), 23 extended kinship relations, 98, 99–102, 106, 107 Fadda-Conrey, Carol, 74 familial expectations on daughters, 2–3, 40, 54. See also reproductive role of daughters Farah Rocks (Darraj), 84 feeling rules, 93–94 fictive kin, 91, 102–5, 106 force ripe, 31 Gambito, Christine, 9 gendered legacy of Indo-Caribbean identity, 32–33 gendered positionality, 96–97 gendered roles and expectations, 55, 65, 90, 124 George, Rosemary M., 113 Gilroy, Paul, 23 Glissant, Edouard, 23 Green Light Law, 65 Guadalajara Chinese Association, 43 Guidotti-Hernández, Nicole, 39 Gupta, Monisha Das, 31 Guyana, 24, 27–28, 30–31 Hagedorn, Jessica, 9 Hall, Stuart, 23, 27, 77 Harris, Kamala, 111 Hosein, Gabrielle, 26 Hu-DeHart, Evelyn, 47n5 immigrant bargain as care work, 61–62, 66 immigrant visa quota system, 3 immigrants, treatment of, 6–7 immigration: Bracero Program, 4; enforcement and emotion work, 63–65; history and legal context, 3–4; patterns of, 4; policies, 4, 8;

131

quota system, 3; social science context, 6 Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE), 64 Immigration and Nationality Act (1952), 4, 114 Immigration Reform Act (1965), 4 Indian Americans. See South Asian Americans Indo-Afro Caribbean racial antagonisms, 23–24, 33, 34 Indo-Afro Caribbean relationship, colonial discourse on, 33 Indo-Caribbean Alliance, 27 Indo-Caribbean identity: characterization of, 21, 23; as a diasporic consciousness, 23, 29, 30; double diaspora dynamics, 26, 27; double migration, 28; formation of, 29; and gendered norms, 31; historical context, 22; language ties, 31; as a process, 23, 28; race and gender dynamics, 24–25, 32–33; racial categorization in US, 26–27, 28; role of racial politics in formation of, 25; stigma, effects of, 29; ties to South Asia, 32 Indo-Guyanese identity, 30 The Inheritance of Exile: Stories from South Philly (Darraj), 75, 76–79 intergenerational discord, 91, 95 intermediary role of immigrant children: brokering activities, 7, 54, 60–61, 66; care work and emotion work, 58; childcare, 59–60, 63, 65–66; immigrant bargain, 61–62, 66; overview of, 56 The Intimacies of Four Continents (Lowe), 23 Islamophobia, 114–15, 118, 120, 121 Jahajee Sisters, 22, 27–28, 33–34 The Karma of Brown Folk (Prashad), 113

132

Index

Khan, Aisha, 21, 22, 29, 33 Khan, Sabina, 112–13, 120 kinscripting, 91–92, 106 kinship relations, definition of, 91 As Kismet Would Have It (Menon), 115 Korean American. See Asian Americans Lahiri, Jhumpa, 9 language and Indo-Caribbean identity, 31 legal exclusion in US. See deportation, threat of Levins Morales, Aurora, 39, 47 literary role in criticizing culture, 74 Little Guyana (New York), 27 The Love and Lies of Rukhsana Ali (Khan), 120 Love at First Fight (Menon), 115 Lowe, Lisa, 23, 77 Ma, Ling, 9 Macklin, Audrey, 5 Mahadeo, Susan, 28 Maira, Sunaina, 112 Mamá Alicia, 37, 43–44 Mamá Chayito, 43–44 Mann, Susan Garland, 75 Masood, Syed, 113, 118–20, 124 Material and Immaterial Bodies: Diaspora Studies and the Problem of Culture, Identity, and Race (Khan), 21 Maughan, Shannon, 111 Menon, Sandhya, 112, 115–18, 120 Mi Nombre es Alicia Woong Castañeda, 37, 44 migration: of Africans, 4; of Asians, 4; deportation, threat of, 53–54; deportation statistics, 54; gendered roles and expectations, 55, 65; history of, 3–4; intimate and family relations, impact on, 55; of Latin Americans, 4; policies and legal status dynamics, 55; reforms, 4, 55;

role in shaping social relations, 12; technology, impact of, 6 Min, Pyong Gap, 27 Misir, Nadia, 22, 24, 30, 31, 32, 33 mixed-race marriages. See endogamy, practice of model minority identity: aspirations framing of, 118, 119; in Civil Rights era, 113; definition of, 114; emergence of, 113; portrayal in YA characters, 112, 113, 120; racialization emphasis, 114, 123–24; role in shaping second generation, 124 Mohabir, Rajiv, 24 Mohsin, Moni, 116 More Than Just a Pretty Face (Masood), 118 National Origins Act (1924), 3 Ninh, erin Khue, 12, 114, 118 Niranjana, Tejaswini, 24 nonprofit ethnic organizations as safety nets, 104–5 Omi, Michael, 25, 26 orientalist ideology, 125n9 Outar, Lisa, 26 paisano, 39, 41–42, 44, 47n2 Palestinian American identity, 74: and consumerism, 83; cultural beliefs, clash of, 77, 78; cultural formation, 84; family, devotion to, 77, 81; and gender violence, 81, 82; interethnic relationships, 82–83; mother daughter relationships, 76, 78; navigating male relationships, 79; persistence of Palestinian culture, 79, 80; unwed pregnancy shame, 80, 82 Parsard, Kaneesha, 21 Passing for Perfect: College Imposters and Other Model Minorities (Ninh), 114

Index

patchworking gender and family narratives, 94–98 patterns of immigration, 4 Prashad, Vijay, 21, 23, 113 Puar, Jasbir, 22 Pulido, Laura, 25 Puri, Shalini, 25 racial formations, 25 racial projects, 25, 26 reproductive role of daughters, 2, 11–12: propagation of racially pure offspring, 25 Richmond Hill (New York), 27–31 Rodney, Dr. Walter, 34 Romero, Channette, 74 Salam, Wale, 84 Sandoval, Zenona, 43, 45 Saran, Rupam, 112 second generation immigrants: burden of guilt, 62; control, struggle for, 12; cultural production, 9; emergence of, 5; heterogeneity in experiences of, 89; intermediary role, 7, 54, 55–56; literary context, 8–10; model minority identity, 124; relationships, navigation of, 7; social media platforms, use of, 9; upward mobility of, 7, 61–62. See also daughters of immigrants Selasi, Taiye, 9 Shams, Tahseen, 114, 120 The Short Story Cycle (Mann), 75 silence, role in immigrant narratives, 94–95 Singh, Lilly, 9 Singh, Sonia, 116 sinophobic violence. See anti-Chinese campaigns in Mexico social reproduction, concept of, 7–8

133

South Asian Americans: cultural representation, 124n2; endogamy practice, 116; Islamophobia, prevalence of, 114–15, 118, 120; model minority identity, 112; policing daughters’ sexuality/bodies, 12, 119–20; population growth, 111; success frame, prevalence of, 114. See also young adult (YA) fiction storytelling gatherings in Chinese Mexican community, 39 strategic essentialism, 26 Tahir, Sabaa, 113, 122, 123 Tan, Amy, 9 Ten Things I Hate about Pinky (Menon), 115, 117 There’s Something about Sweetie (Menon), 115, 117 thobes, cultural significance of, 74 Tlaib, Rashida, 73 transmission of cultural knowledge, 13 Trinidad, 24 From Twinkle, with Love (Menon), 117 undocumented status of migrants, 4, 40, 64–65 University at Albany Institutional Review Board (IRB), 57 US Census Bureau, 27, 34n1 US Census categorization of IndoCaribbean, 26–27 When Dimple Met Rishi (Menon), 115–17 Winant, Howard, 25, 26 Woong, Tuj Lim, 44 Woong Castañeda, Jeanett, 37, 38, 43–47 Working People’s Alliance, 33–34 Wu, Ellen, 113, 120

134

young adult (YA) fiction: arranged marriages plot, 115; on body image, 117; caste-blindness, embracing of, 116; chick lit feminism, 116; double consciousness, struggle with, 113; generational differences narrative, 115; growth of, 111; Hindu culture representation, 118;

Index

homosexuality plot lines, 117, 121–22; Islamophobia plot lines, 121; model minority identity, focus on, 112; on Muslim masculinity, 118; neoliberal feminism, 116–17; policing of sexuality/bodies plot line, 12, 119–20, 124; role in racializing South Asian community, 123

About the Contributors

Catherine Bryan is a social anthropologist and associate professor at Dalhousie University’s School of Social Work, cross-appointed to Gender and Women’s Studies. Informed by feminist political economy and the anthropology of work, she specializes in migration studies, with a focus on families, transnational livelihood, and social reproduction. Her research also elaborates and contextualizes the experiences and labor of migrant workers in contingent and precarious labor markets, including rural tourism, agricultural, and seafood processing. She has published in the Journal for the Anthropology of North America, Studies in Political Economy, and the Journal of Immigrant & Refugee Studies. Xuemei Cao is an assistant professor of sociology at Bentley University. Her research interests include aging and health, migration and race, family, gender, social networks, and qualitative research methods. She has published in Sociology Compass, Social Science & Medicine, American Behavioral Scientist, and Innovation in Aging. Yareli Castro Sevilla is a PhD candidate in American studies with a secondary field in Latinx studies. Working at the intersection of Latinx studies, Latin American studies, and Asian studies, her dissertation details the practices Chinese Mexicans use to configure, negotiate, and characterize their Chinese Mexican roots in present-day Mexico. As a formerly undocumented immigrant and a descendant of Sinaloense Chinese Mexicans, immigration is an integral part of her story and a guiding factor for her scholarship and approaches to research. Having come from a lineage of migrants, she is passionate about storytelling and interdisciplinary approaches to studying diaspora and migration. Angie Y. Chung is professor of sociology at the University at Albany, a 2021–2022 US Fulbright Scholar, and former visiting professor at Yonsei and Korea University. She is author of Saving Face: The Emotional Costs of the Asian Immigrant Family Myth and Legacies of Struggle: Conflict and 135

136

About the Contributors

Cooperation in Korean American Politics. She is currently writing a book manuscript titled Immigrant Growth Machines: Urban Growth Politics in Koreatown and Monterey Park based on research funded by the National Science Foundation. She has published in numerous journals on race/ ethnicity, immigration, gender and family, ethnic politics, international education, and media. Joanna Dreby is professor of sociology at the University at Albany, and an affiliate of the Latin Americans and Caribbean & US Latino Studies Department. She is author of the award-winning books Divided by Borders (UC Press, 2010) and Everyday Illegal (UC Press, 2015) and more than thirty articles and book chapters on topics related to childcare, transnational families, gender and generational relations, work-family balance, and immigration enforcement. Joanna received Fulbright awards for fieldwork in Mexico (2004–2005), Costa Rica (2017), and Spain (2024); she uses qualitative and comparative research designs to explore changing family dynamics under conditions of increased globalization. Robin E. Field is the Manus Cooney Distinguished Service Professor at King’s College in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania. She is the author of Writing the Survivor: The Rape Novel in Late Twentieth-Century American Fiction and co-editor of #MeToo and Modernism,  Critical Perspectives on Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni: Feminism and Diaspora, and Transforming Diaspora: Communities beyond National Boundaries. She is managing editor of South Asian Review. Nalini Iyer is professor of English at Seattle University. She teaches courses in postcolonial South Asian and African writing, diaspora studies, and transnational feminisms. Her books include the following: Other Tongues: Rethinking the Language Debates in India (2009); Roots and Reflections: South Asians in the Pacific Northwest (2013); and Revisiting India’s Partition: New Essays in Memory, Culture, and Politics (2016). She is co-editor of the forthcoming Teaching Anglophone South Asian Diasporic Literature (MLA). She has also published articles in ARIEL, South Asian Review, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. She is the chief editor of South Asian Review. Asha Jeffers is an assistant professor of English and gender and women’s studies at Dalhousie University where she specializes in diasporic literatures and cultures, literatures of migration, postcolonialism, gender and sexuality in contemporary literature, and critical race studies. She was the organizer of the Belong Fellowship-funded Daughters of Immigrants online symposium held

About the Contributors

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in May 2021. Her scholarly writing appears in The Journal of Commonwealth Literature, South Asian Review, Feminist Encounters, Critical Perspectives on David Chariandy, and Critical Insights: The Immigrant Experience. Myia Samuels is a third-year sociology PhD student at the University at Albany, State University of New York. She received her bachelor of arts in political science from Virginia Commonwealth University in 2021. Myia is interested in immigration and enforcement, gender, and mixed-status couples and families. Tarika Sankar is a critical scholar of the Indo-Caribbean diaspora, race and ethnic studies, feminist studies, and digital humanities. She earned a PhD in English at the University of Miami and graduate concentrations in digital humanities and Caribbean studies. Her dissertation project, titled “Beyond the Culture Concept: Indo-Caribbean Identity as Diasporic Consciousness,” received a Mellon/ACLS Dissertation Completion Fellowship. Her collaborative and individual research has been published in the Journal of Indentureship and Its Legacies and the Middle Atlantic Review of Latin American Studies. She is currently the digital humanities librarian at Brown University. Daniela Ugarte Villalobos is a PhD student in sociology at the University of Toronto. Her research focuses on how migration shapes gender and care relationships inside families that migrate in the Latin American region. Currently, she is a research assistant at the Center for Global Social Policy at the University of Toronto. She had a Fulbright graduate fellowship from 2019–2021 at SUNY at Albany, where she received her master’s in sociology.