Racial Calculations: Indian and Pakistani Immigrants in Houston, 1960–1980

Abstract

Abstract Highly educated Indian and Pakistani immigrants arrived in boomtown Houston in the 1960s and 1970s, readily securing employment as engineers or other white-collar professionals. At the same time, they faced racism in housing, the workplace, university campuses, and restaurants. Asians were “conditionally included”—that is, accepted for their economic value but often, socially outcast. The racial calculations made by Indian and Pakistani immigrants in a rapidly internationalizing city were fraught with contradictions. They sought places and spaces where they felt tolerated, even if not completely welcomed into the fold. At the same time, they wielded their class status and ethnicity as tools by which they could both distance themselves from other racialized minorities and attempt to bypass their own racialization altogether. The experiences of immigrants of color reveals the racial architecture–-that is, those norms that upheld the structure of white privilege–-of a changing American South.