South Asian in the Mid-South: Migrations of Literacies

By Iswari P. Pandey

In an age of global anxiety and suspicion, South Asian immigrants juggle multiple cultural and literate traditions in Mid-South America. In this study Iswari P. Pandey looks deeply into this community to track the migration of literacies, showing how different meaning-making practices are adapted and reconfigured for cross-language relations and cross-cultural understanding at sites as varied as a Hindu school, a Hindu women's reading group, Muslim men's and women's discussion groups formed soon after 9/11, and cross-cultural presentations by these immigrants to the host communities and law enforcement agencies. Through more than seventy interviews, he reveals the migratory nature of literacies and the community work required to make these practices meaningful.

Pandey addresses critical questions about language and cultural identity at a time of profound change. He examines how symbolic resources are invented and reinvented and circulated and recirculated within and across communities; the impact of English and new technologies on teaching, learning, and practicing ancestral languages; and how gender and religious identifications shape these practices. Overall, the book offers a thorough examination of the ways individuals use interpretive powers for agency within their own communities and for cross-cultural understanding in a globalizing world and what these practices mean for our understanding of that world.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press
• Release date: Nov 11, 2015
• ISBN: 9780822981022

Book preview

In Place of a Preface

Cautions, Considerations

As I compose these prefatory remarks, memorials are being held across the United States to mark the thirteenth anniversary of the September 11 (2001) attacks. In these thirteen years, much has been reported about what the day signifies, and how it has changed the United States and the rest of the world. In a response essay discussing what the events have meant for educators in the United States, Jennifer Bay observes, While we teach our students argument and vehemently defend its importance, argument fails. The events of September 11, 2001, were not arguments; they were statements. They were events; they were not arguments. For all of our conviction about arguments and the ability of arguments to accomplish understanding and mediation, they often fail to enact change. What we see all around us in contemporary culture is less the use of argument and more a pervasive enactment of the statement (2002, 694).

Bay’s assertion makes sense: when wars and vengeance determine the course of history, it is difficult to imagine the significance of arguments to develop understanding, establish common ground, and build consensus or enact change. Her observation also echoes that of many other educators concerning their responsibility in the current climate characterized by unending wars and transborder flows of information, labor, refugees, and disease. However, it is important to recognize that Bay is also speaking from a certain cultural-institutional and epistemological location. Her major concern is what the event means for those of us who are in the business of literacy learning and instruction in a primarily Greco-Roman, Anglo-American tradition. For people like Sameer, a US citizen born to South Asian parents and whose story figures prominently in this study, however, 9/11 became, in his own words, a sentence rather than a statement.¹ It was a sentence that a majority of recent immigrants, especially of Islamic faith, had to live through although they had nothing to do with the crimes of that day.² How does such a politico-cultural backdrop shape the literate lives and politics of South Asian immigrants in a post-9/11 United States? What arguments do these immigrants develop and deploy in response to such a sentence and the general condition brought about by migrations across borders, accompanied by other recent changes in global economy and information technologies? More generally, how have these immigrants responded to the rhetorical exigency created by globalization, immigration, relocation, and new communications technologies? In this book, I seek to address these questions by exploring the ways in which South Asian immigrants carried (or needed to carry), created, taught, negotiated, and used different literacies both within and across communities of different faith traditions in a Mid-Southern US city that will be known by its pseudonym, Kingsville.

Literacies are not just a set of technical skills but cultural practices ranging from reading and writing to other ways of using symbols and interacting with, and being in, the world, as recent scholarship has stressed. Scholars have studied how literacies are acquired, used, and valued in a variety of settings, and how the values of certain literacies or their practices shift over time. However, the usual approach in those studies is to look at literacy acts or practices as shaped by or characteristic of a given institutional or discursive context. As a result, the practices we study are often projected as bounded by that context, community, or setting, whether intended thus or not, even as the actual practices may defy such a codification. Sometimes such an emphasis may be the consequence of one’s desire to zero in on certain practices in a given space. Or it may be just a problem of language use, as when one characterizes a given iteration of literacy practice as local to contrast it with a version of the global. In any case, such studies may lead us to tune out how similarly identified meaning-making practices are carried out across spaces, and how literacies themselves are in motion, constantly reinvented and refigured in response to unfolding exigencies. In short, we fail to notice the migrations of literacies across spaces and contexts, or, as instances of such processes, how literate practices are re-created and recirculated in the process of relocation and socialization across spaces.³

This book, then, revolves around this question: how do literacies travel? How are symbolic resources invented and reinvented, circulated and recirculated, within and across communities and vast geocultural boundaries? The study primarily looks into South Asian immigrants’ (re-)creation and (re)circulation of native identified languages and cultures by attending to various contexts of those practices and demonstrates the multidimensional migrations of literacies. In so doing, this book also illustrates how the creation, sustenance, and re-presentation of native-identified languages and cultures actually constitute real work, which I will call word work to align with and articulate some of my research participants’ experience of their labor of love—their work of building and rebuilding culture and identity through literacy acts and practices. Word work here is not the same as teaching and learning vocabulary, as this phrase may sometimes indicate, nor is it limited to work with words in print or speech alone. It is rather the use of language(s), writ large, in any mode or media as well as its strategic use in a given cultural ecology or network and is closer to Toni Morrison’s use of the term (word-work) in her Nobel lecture. Word work also carries a clear rhetorical overtone: it changes according to the audience, the occasion, and the creator or enactor of that work, which is to say that it is in flux and constantly on the move.⁴ To account for the mobility of literacies, we need to understand why, under what conditions, and with whom they travel.

To stress the mobile nature of literacies, I use the trope of travel as an organizing metaphor of this book, also evident in the chapter titles. Literacies for the South Asians in this study are what these immigrants do between their points of departures and returns, literally and metaphorically. The trope is, in fact, an attempt to capture the research participants’ understanding of identity and life’s purpose—both as individuals and as a culture or community—and their reinvention of certain symbolic practices to construct their heritage. They often called such practices roots of their identity and strove to preserve that identity while fitting in in the new places they now thought of as home. To clarify, they defined cultural heritage and identity in terms of a continuous flow, sometimes even using the metaphor of a river. Their cultural practices demonstrate that such a history and identity are not a given but to be re-created and sustained through specific sets of cultural practices or word work. Moreover, most of them used the metaphor of a journey not only to describe their life as immigrants but also (and especially) to highlight the value of learning, transfer, and reinvention of their knowledge and identity in response to unfolding exigencies. It is, therefore, only by looking through an analytical framework of migration and word work that we can begin to understand their cultural practices and the use of those practices to create and sustain their identity (or route and reroute their roots) and, in the process, appreciate the migrantness of literacies.

I understand the risk that the focus on cross-border movements may entail: it can be used (or seen as an attempt) to eschew attention to location or its attendant complexities, but the migrations of bodies and literacies here are occasioned by a complex web of local-global and internal-external forces. The mobile bodies not only leave their footprints behind but also carry deep impressions of their roots that they work to (re)define and (re)enact in relation to internal and external pressures in their new homes (although these roots are in play in their putatively originary home, too). My hope here is to demonstrate how the very idea of locale in itself is in motion, as demonstrated by the work (the word work) of South Asian immigrants to contextualize and recontextualize languages and cultures presented in this study. This is one of the themes that should be consistently evident throughout the book. Therefore, without further ado, I would like to invite my readers to consider getting onboard and into some ways of making meaning along the way, for the presentation here will occasionally veer off the more or less predictable contours of academic prose.⁵ With apologies to St. Augustine, let it be a travel to the worlds mediated through a book.⁶ There is an inherent irony in this invitation. Mobile bodies carry and modify their own ways—and adopt different ways—of making meaning, as they adapt to new cultural, political, and professional contexts. Their literacies, as practices and processes, are far from settled, and this is precisely what a book may be ill-equipped to show. My hope is that paying attention to the literate lives at the interstices of cultures and nations will not only show how imagined communities are formed and transformed across vast distances of geography, history, and culture, but it will also lay bare those constructs as fluid, hybrid, and interstitial.

A note to my readers with regard to the language and style of the book may be in order here. I have no illusion that this book is for a scholarly audience with interest in literacy studies, cross-cultural communication, globalization, South Asian American studies, and transnational cultures irrespective of their disciplinary training. However, I have tried to keep the language and style in some parts here closer to what some of the study participants considered normal. That means, for example, initiating the discussion by announcing where I come from, as in chapter 1, instead of a topic sentence directly leading to my major claims and beginning each chapter with a series of quotations, primarily from the research participants. While it is not entirely unusual in standardized academic writing to begin a chapter or a book with a quotation or two to introduce the major claim, I use more than one to announce each chapter here to alert my readers to different threads that the section is going to weave together. Although this practice is not that radical either, my choice is guided by the preferred practice of some of my key research participants, who started their discussions or lectures with popular and well-regarded aphorisms while addressing the audience from their own discourse communities. Their audiences knew those proverbs well, so the speaker achieved persuasive force without having to explain or interpret the quotations. I choose a middle path here for obvious reasons by engaging them only sparsely, so I cannot claim the same degree of persuasive effect. I also provide different kinds of details pertaining to literacy in chapter 1 before joining in on the scholarly conversations about literacy and culture.⁷ Among other things, in the early part of that chapter, I try to emulate Brinda’s approach to what she sometimes casually called work with words. In one of the many productive sessions midway through the project, Brinda, a Hindu school teacher on the weekends and a physician during the week, argued that illustrative details trumped telling. In her own words, If you have the patience and the right attitude, you will get more out of illustrations than just a few short statements. I know the value of accurate and precise kinds of information. I am in the medical field, so I know its value . . . life is on the line, right, if something goes wrong? But you’ve got to understand that you should use descriptions and details . . . in their contexts. To tell the truth, that gives a truer picture of life. Short statements are incomplete and often exaggerate or mislead.

Fortunately, for me, I am in no rush to save lives. In fact, I am in the business of crafting descriptions and can even afford a little digression here and there if that helps re-create the context of meaning-making, especially if Brinda and a few others who populate this work think that such details and quieter reflections facilitate a better understanding of as amorphous a subject as literacy and culture at a time of profound change. In the interest of time and space, and owing to my own academic training, I will, however, be making short statements as well, not the kind of statements that Bay (2002) referred to metaphorically but the kind to which Brinda refers as a code for the convention of making explicit claims in academic writing. Indeed, a lot of them. It will, of course, be up to the readers to judge the completeness of those statements. After all, this is nothing but a word work.

Chapter 1

Departures and Returns

Literacy Practices across Borders

It’s by reading, writing, and teaching that we [South Asian immigrants] make sure we maintain our identity and culture . . . and also [maintain] good contact with other cultures with power. . . . We can speak to them with our own voice and identity.

—BRINDA, KINGSVILLE

I feel like I am going back to my parents’ country and culture to help my own community and country here [the United States]. Doing the discussion groups and presentations, my recent undertaking like since two years ago, [has been] very good and interesting. It is like I am going away and coming back in . . . and doing these things constantly. I am American and my community is not terror-causing. I need to do [these activities] to educate our people, police, church people, and others.

—SAMEER, KINGSVILLE

Teaching and talking about scriptures means you are doing multiple roles. You remember the stories from your grandmother, understand the books, their meaning, our history and roots . . . sometimes discuss with other people, tell stories and meanings. You are taking stories and meanings from place to place and context to context and work in the details for meaning.

—SHILPA, KINGSVILLE

Writing and power never work separately, however complex the laws, the system, or the links of their collusion may be. . . . Writing does not come to power. It is there beforehand, it partakes of and is made of it.

—JACQUES DERRIDA (1979, 50)

Jacques Derrida’s words above remind me of the strange power of the written word that I witnessed as a child growing up in the mid-hills of western Nepal.¹ As soon as I acquired the basic alphabetic literacy in vernacular Nepali, I was reading and writing letters for my neighbors, mostly women, whose husbands or sons were working in the cities of Nepal or neighboring India and, sometimes, overseas. Although I do not remember feeling particularly powerful, I certainly remember the eyes looking up to me in anticipation of having their letters penned or read aloud. The letters were theirs in that they were addressed to or posted in their names, but their meanings came to being only through somebody else like me. Writing also defined the economic, political, and religious relationships of these villagers, although not everyone could read or write. Perhaps this made reading and writing all the more important as it defined and redefined family and community relations in multiple ways. In a sense, these acts were similar to the work of Brinda, Sameer, and Shilpa (above) for community identity and cross-cultural communication in the early years of the twenty-first century. If the letters in my native village mediated individual and family desires and obligations, the work of recent South Asian immigrants in Kingsville of the US Mid-South, the primary site of the present study, re-created particular kinds of literacies to re-mediate their identities across cultural and political spaces, to form and transform their communities, and to speak to the dominant culture and its institutions in the United States. As I will show in the rest of the book, in both cases, the acts of reading and writing negotiated identity, meaning, and power, locally and beyond. The written word was a key catalyst in the complex network of relations, but it was also constantly on the move as different stakeholders sought to write themselves into the motion of evolving power dynamics.

In addition to reading and writing letters that often circulated transnationally, I witnessed a more complex, and apparently intransigent, life of the written word in my native village. In those days, villagers came to my father, only one of a few adults in the region familiar with legalese, when they were carrying out a transaction, such as the sale or purchase of land, a home, or even cattle. He wrote their first rajinama (literally, document of consent and similar to a title deed) for land purchase and tamasuk (literally, transaction or agreement) to record monetary transactions. A tamasuk almost always followed real estate deals and, occasionally, cattle purchases, and in it the borrower or buyer promised to pay a sum of money within a given period of time, with interest. When the deal involved land of a high value, these people would also go to the mukhiya and jimmuwal (government-designated local tax contractors) and then the district land registration office. But those agents charged hefty fees and were often known to be unscrupulous. The villagers, therefore, had reasons to come to people like my father, often to have the extra security of a document before going to these officials and the government registration office when necessary for tax purposes. The nearest land registration office was at the district headquarters, Tamghas (Gulmi), which was almost a day’s walk from my village of Wami. The prospect of missing a couple of days’ work for these subsistence farmers was only exceeded by their repulsion with the often corrupt and overbearing government officials. Therefore, people went to them only when the transaction involved relatively valuable properties like their homes or paddy fields. My father, himself a farmer and a teacher at a locally run school for some time, did not charge any fees but accepted small presents of fruits and vegetables, and occasionally money, when given. I watched in awe when the people involved stamped their thumbs, printed with a mixture of mustard oil and soot, several places on the rice-paper documents.

Writing sealed the fate of these villagers in more than one way. I saw some till the farms of others to pay off loans—or simply pay off the ever-accumulating interest on the principal—that their parents or grandparents had supposedly borrowed. These small farmers and peasants often resigned themselves to their luck, saying that it was all written for them. Their understanding of writing was generally twofold. For the more fatalistic, it indicated a preordained fact. Others understood it as scripted, and often questionable, even characterizing it as word play or word work, although it was hard to mount any consequential challenge because the debt was recorded in writing! They worked for a few days of crunch time (ranging from a couple of days to a week or even weeks) during planting and harvesting seasons at the sahu’s (lender’s). In some parts of western Nepal, similar papers and practices developed into a form of bonded labor that was still in use by the end of the twentieth century.² The shopkeepers at the local marketplace also kept record books, since they often sold on credit, and buyers paid when they had extra grain, cattle, or animal products (such as milk and purified butter) to sell or had a family member send remittances from the cities or foreign countries. It was in absence of either of these options that they would pay the credit by working on the sahu’s farm.³ The function of writing in my village demonstrated in clear terms how power and writing functioned together and, as would become clear later, challenged that power as well.

The wicked power of paper was driven home to me once again in 2003, when I met Jay in Kingsville, USA. Jay had applied to the Immigration and Naturalization Services (INS) to adjust his status to that of a lawful permanent resident. He had been working as a sushi/grill chef at a Japanese restaurant in the city for about two years. The business owner had sponsored his application, and it was filed through an immigration attorney’s office. To prove to the authorities that Jay really had the skill and experience to fill a skilled laborer quota, he needed to produce a certificate of experience from previous employers outside the United States. Jay had worked in a restaurant of a four star hotel in Nepal before relocating to the United States, but his certificate stated only that he was a chef of Japanese cuisines and did not mention the specifics. His attorney now forwarded him the letter from the US Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) with his own, asking: "Can we get another letter? I realize we already submitted the letter from [name] Resort Hotel.⁴ We need to submit it soon, so could you get one from the same place with details of your work and experience? INS has asked for evidence that shows two years of training or relevant experience." Although the INS became the USCIS in 2003, assuming a more expanded role, the attorney still used the older name, INS, in his letter and included the correspondence from the USCIS, which could not have been blunter:

Pursuant to Title 8, Federal Regulations, . . . we are notifying you of our intent to deny this application. . . . This letter refers to the I-140 application (Immigration Petition for Alien Worker), filed on. . . . The Service is notifying you of our intent to deny this application for the following reason(s).—

Initial evidence states: (A) General. Any requirements of training or experience for skilled workers, professionals, or other workers must be supported by letters from trainers or employers, giving the name, address, and title of the trainer or employer, and a description of the training received or the experience of the alien.

Jay understood that the USCIS needed a letter detailing his training or experience. What baffled him was that a copy of the same paper had secured him labor certification, in his own words, from the same government. While the USCIS and the Department of Labor that issues labor certification are different agencies of the same government, Jay believed that the evidence acceptable to one should satisfy the other as well. But his anxiety had other more serious causes. The hotel where he had worked had closed down since he left for the United States. The Nepalese economy, generally supported by a strong tourism industry, was badly hit on account of an ongoing conflict, which intensified in the aftermath of the royal massacre of 2001. Jay had a hard choice to make. He needed either to forge a new certificate from the hotel that was now nonexistent or to give up his job and pursuit of a green card (lawful permanent resident status) in the United States.

Jay’s case highlighted for me not only the materiality of paper and its power over him but also its lie.⁵ Written words dictated the lives of people. It made little difference whether it was the mukhiyas of my native village or the immigration officials of a powerful nation who controlled the meaning and scope of those words. The lie of the law was, however, also countered by Jay’s existence, at least the one his records showed it to be. Interestingly, his paper-made existence mocked the authoritative strictures in ways that subversive narratives and protest literature in my native village resisted the power structure entrenched through the written word. Jay’s important papers were made up, as he would tell me nonchalantly, including his citizenship and passport from Nepal. Along with thousands of other ethnic Nepali-speaking Bhutanese, he was evicted from Bhutan in the early 1990s. Unlike other exiles who lived in the temporary refugee camps of eastern Nepal, he and his parents had contact with their distant relatives in Nepal, who helped Jay and his father find work at a restaurant. The same relation also helped Jay secure a Nepalese citizenship paper before leaving for the United States on a Nepalese passport. Now in the United States, he needed to have at least one more paper made if he wanted to keep his hope of a green card alive. With input from his attorney, Jay prepared a draft, describing his responsibilities as a chef in detail and tracked down his former supervisor, who still had the stationery of the now nonoperational restaurant. A new experience letter arrived within a few days to satisfy the legal requirements for the time being.

I mention Jay’s case and incidents from my village not simply to suggest that power and writing have come to be inextricably tied together. While that is the case, it is important to note that power does not always flow unidirectionally or from a single source but is also constantly contested, (re)appropriated, and (re)negotiated through the strategic use of word work or other, similar resources. These examples indicated how individuals wrote themselves into the dynamics of being.

If there was one lesson in these incidents, it was that literacy was a resource open to manifold uses with real, material consequences. Control of the written word in my native village often coincided with similar control over other things, such as landholding and social status. Possession of literacy did not guarantee but either corresponded with or facilitated the process of acquiring those possessions. It was also a crucial marker in a complex network of caste, class, race, and gender. The mukhiyas and jim-muwals were Kshetriya, the caste of the kings and warriors; most other literate individuals were Brahmins. And men were the ones who had the wherewithal to read and write, although not all men could. Class and family lineage played a big part among these men. Only a few women, across caste and class lines, could read or write. Still, when these power relations were challenged, it was through the strategic use of the word—oral or written. As I grew up, I also witnessed tamasuk chyatne events organized to tear up or burn old tamasuks, symbolizing freedom from often dubious debt and bondage, and effective circulation of protest literature opposing (absolute) monarchy and the feudal structure of the Nepalese economy and society. The activists engaged in these kinds of transformative politics were either teachers in the sparse government schools or full-time political activists, some of whom had even abandoned their college careers to protest bourgeois education and embraced the politics of resistance full-time. In any case, symbolic resources were mobilized both to perpetuate and to challenge the established mores and values.

The acts of writing or ripping up papers displayed the battle over what those artifacts signified. For example, if having a written record of debt allowed the creditor much power over the other party, shredding such papers terminated that relationship. Papers