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South Asian Network |
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South Asian Network
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SOUTH ASIANS IN CALIFORNIA, THE HISTORICAL CONTEXT To better understand the current social, political, economic and cultural challenges/opportunities for organizing South Asians in California, a brief migratory history of this community is useful. South Asians have been coming to California since the close of the 19th century. While each group of immigrants has encountered some form of racism and discrimination in their “new home,” their responses to injustice reflect their unique experience and historic context. For example, the first South Asian immigrants consisted mostly of Sikh and Muslim males from the Indian region of Punjab, who primarily engaged in California farm labor. Having witnessed the nascent nationalist movement in India, lived in proximity to the Mexican Revolution and struggled against the indentured labor system, these pioneers were no strangers to political activism. They organized protests against legally sanctioned exclusion and discrimination, often alongside Hispanic and other Asian working class immigrants. Their achievements included forming the anti-racist, anti-colonial Ghadar Party in San Francisco in 1913, which sprouted branches among Indian laborers in plantation colonies and in India itself. Spurred by American “social engineering” policies to attract skilled labor from around the world, the second phase of South Asian immigration to California and the U.S. spanned the late 1960s to the mid 1980s. Comprised of highly skilled, educated professionals, this second group of South Asian immigrants arrived with U.S. civil rights laws already in place. Not having participated in, or even witnessed, the civil rights movement, they had no occasion to build solidarities with other people of color. Many quickly embraced the racist designation of “model minority” and experienced what Toni Morrison (1993) calls the “most enduring and efficient rite of passage into American culture: negative appraisals of the native-born black population.” Their earning capacity, class affiliations and facility with the English language facilitated their joining the white flight into suburbia. In many cases, this has meant South Asian-Americans’ isolation from, and even opposition to, movements seeking economic opportunity, social justice and human dignity. In contrast to the preceding wave of South Asian immigrants and recent dot com temporary workers, the majority of latest newcomers are not doctors and engineers, but rather political and economic refugees affected by corporate globalization and political and religious repression in their countries of origin. Throughout California, recent South Asian immigrants primarily participate in the low-wage workforce as garment workers, cab drivers, convenience store clerks, gas station attendants and other service industry occupations. Unlike their immediate predecessors, they regularly face unemployment, job discrimination, workplace exploitation, hate crimes, police brutality, lack of access to adequate health care, poverty and overt racism. Many live and work in proximity to other people of color with whom they share a marginalized existence. |