Immigration policy and tradition dovetail in their impact on the social organization of immigrant communities, linking the material and non-material aspects of gender. I focus on Asian Indian Patels, who dominate the budget motel business in the United States. I conducted semi-structured interviews with Patel men, women, and teenagers. I stayed overnight in the motels to observe families at work. I was almost always invited to prepare and share a meal, so I observed families at home. My analysis is based on transcribed interviews with participants, fieldnotes, observations, community publications, and information from three key contacts. Most Patels enter the U.S. under family reunification rules in a chain migration. These rules do not recognize families as labor; therefore a majority of documented immigrants are exempt from labor certification. Traditions define Patel women as housewives. The nature of motel work allows women to contribute their labor full-time and still remain housewives: they are not recognized as workers. Community financing and family labor, both escapes from the market economy, allow for the economic success of Patels. When families take on subsequent links in the chain migration, they must meet the costs of migration for new immigrants, and maintain traditional gender hierarchy. When they are the last link in the chain, there is a challenge to this hierarchy. In the second generation, when they remain in the motel business, Patels maintain traditional gender hierarchy. When either partner is linked to the labor market, there is a challenge to traditional gender hierarchy. / Ph. D.

Bharati Mukherjee’s 1989 novel Jasmine and Jhumpa Lahiri’s 2003 novel The Namesake both feature immigrant protagonists, who experience name changes and identity transformations in the meeting space of Indian and American cultures. Using the theory of cultural translation to view translation as a metaphor for identity transformation, I argue that as these characters alter their identities to conform to cultural expectations, they act as both translators and translated texts. Although they struggle with the resistance of untranslatability via their inability to completely assimilate into American culture, Jasmine and Gogol ultimately gain the ability to bypass the limitations of a foreigner/native binary and enter a space of negotiation and growth.

Asian Indian Americans are a highly successful subset of Asian Americans. According to a 2012 Pew Center report, this population has the highest level of degree attainment among Asian Americans as well as the highest median income among Asian Americans ("The Rise of Asian Americans," 2012). However, there is a cloak of invisibility surrounding this population. There is little research on how second-generation Asian Indian Americans navigate the expectations of academic excellence and cultural adherence in their relationships with their first-generation parents. There is limited knowledge and understanding of this population that is burdened by family expectations, community expectations, institutional expectations, and their own self-expectations of academic excellence. The paucity of research on this population creates the invisible minority where students’ needs may be ignored based on unfounded assumptions on part of the community and the institution. This phenomenological study adds to the sparse literature on Asian Indian Americans by exploring the intergenerational relationships of Asian Indian American undergraduate students in a narrowly focused area of academic choices and academic performance. This study examined students’ perceptions of the communication between first-generation parents and second-generation children who are currently enrolled at Southern State University. Further, this study examined the stress generated by the intergenerational relationships and the coping strategies employed by the students for dealing with the aforementioned stress. Findings from this study indicate that first-generation parents stress academic excellence and enrollment in certain majors based on their own experiences as new immigrants as well as to uphold the honor and prestige of the family. While the expectations of academic excellence from parents create stress for the students, the students remain grateful to their parents for instilling such values in them. However, the findings reveal that students felt stress from the expectation of excellence from the community, family, and institution to perform well. The findings of varying levels of intergenerational issues suggest that the parent-child relationships in this population were complex and non-linear. / text

The present study examines the relationship between acculturation, parental control, and psychological adjustment among adult first and second-generation Asian Indian women who have immigrated, or whose parents have immigrated to the United States, from the Indian state of Kerala. Data from 73 participants indicate second-generation immigrants report poorer psychological adjustment than do their counterparts. Additionally, regression analyses reveal discomfort towards Kerala culture significantly predicts depressive symptoms, while high maternal control predicts self-esteem. Qualitative data were collected to provide richer understanding of immigrants' adaptation to the U.S. Implications of this research may impact mental health practitioners' ability to improve quality of life with Asian Indian women from Kerala.

My paper examines how American authors of the South Asian Diaspora (Indian-American or South Asian American) can be read 1) as simply American and 2) without regard to ethnicity. I develop this argument using American authors Jhumpa Lahiri, a first generation American of Bengali-Indian descent, and Bharati Mukherjee, an American of Bengali-Indian origin. I borrow from Deepika Bahri's materialist aesthetics in postcolonialism (in turn borrowed from members of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory) and include theoretical insights from Rey Chow, Graham Huggan, and R. Radhakrishnan regarding multiculturalism, identity politics, and diaspora studies. Huggan and Radhakrishnan's insights are especially useful because their work deals with the South Asian diaspora, in England and the United States, respectively. After setting up a theoretical framework, I critique reviews and essays that privilege hyphenated, "Indian," or "South Asian" identity, and the resultant reading paradigm that fixes these authors into an ethnic minority category. I then trace aesthetic and thematic content of short stories from both Lahiri's Interpreter of Maladies and Mukherjee's The Middleman and Other Stories to demonstrate how these stories resist this ethno-cultural pigeonholing. My analysis exposes how ethnic and multicultural identity politics supplant aesthetic criticism and transform ethno-cultural identity into an aesthetic object, even if done as a celebration of hybridity or liminality as a putatively liberating space (hyphenated identity as embodying that space). Though my purpose is not to undermine the meaningful artwork and criticism instantiated in or about the "in-between" spaces of American culture, I demonstrate that an over-emphasis on ethnicity and culture (culture "other" than the majority culture in the U.S.) in fact stifles the opening of the American literary canon. Ethnicity and culture become ways of limiting the hermeneutics available to literary criticism because they become the only ways of reading, instead of one lens through which American literature is read.