Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston during the Cold War by Uzma Quraishi

Abstract

Reviewed by: Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston during the Cold War by Uzma Quraishi Son Mai Redefining the Immigrant South: Indian and Pakistani Immigration to Houston during the Cold War. By Uzma Quraishi. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2020. Pp. 336. Illustrations, appendices, notes, bibliography, index.) During the Cold War, the United States sought to promote capitalism and support non-communist governments around the world. As part of this initiative, President Dwight D. Eisenhower in 1953 established the United States Information Service (USIS) as a cultural diplomacy vehicle to encourage American democratic values to the world as well as to serve as a bulwark against Soviet influeces, particularly in fledgling postcolonial nations. One major USIS project was to promote the American higher education system as a pathway for citizens in developing countries to achieve a prosperous lifestyle and to contribute to the advancement of their home country. However, professional job opportunities in developing nations remained low throughout the Cold War era, but during the same period, the United States experienced economic growth. This resulted in many international students who studied in the United States joining the American workforce after graduation and starting new ethnic communities in many cities across the country. Redefining the American South is a culmination of Uzma Quraishi's extensive research, which focuses on the results of the USIS's international higher education initiative as it pertained to South Asia, and its contribution to an unexpected outcome—the creation and development of permanent Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani ethnic communities in the Houston, Texas, area. Quraishi provides ample context in her narrative regarding the complex political and cultural backgrounds of multiethnic, multilingual, and multireligious South Asia. From there, she effectively transitions to the United States and finally to the Houston metropolitan area. Quraishi provides readers with a richly detailed account of USIS campaigns to compel South Asian students to choose international study in the United States and focuses on those who matriculated at the University of Houston. Additionally, the author makes effective use of student organization archives and oral interviews to depict international student life in the United States during the Cold War. The Cold War era also included the civil rights movement, which ushered demographic changes into many neighborhoods as federal legislation ended racially discriminatory housing restrictions. During this same period, many of the first cohorts of South Asian international students [End Page 370] who arrived under USIS's aegis completed their studies and remained in the United States to pursue professional careers. The transitions from college life to the workforce led to migration away from student housing near Houston's Third Ward neighborhoods toward the formation of ethnic environs—primarily in the Sharpstown, Alief, and Sugar Land areas—that provided a greater sense of cultural camaraderie. As Indian, Pakistani, and later Bangladeshi groups began to form ethnic communities, Houston underwent a period of suburbanization and an exodus of Whites. Quraishi provides readers with an interesting take on the role of South Asians in Houston's suburbanization process: as a group now deemed by Whites as part of a "model minority," Bangladeshi, Indian, and Pakistani Americans actively participated in White movements away from predominantly African American and Hispanic neighborhoods. In comparing South Asian neighborhood settlement experiences in the Houston area, Quraishi emphasizes motivations similar to that of Whites as class-based, with crime rates, public school quality, and dominant youth cultures as moderating influences. Despite the book's subtitle, Quraishi's study of Indian and Pakistani immigration to Houston is not limited to the Cold War, and the migration patterns of South Asian Americans in the area continue to evolve to this day. Overall, Redefining the Immigrant South is a welcome contribution to a growing body of literature in Texas community studies. Son Mai McNeese State University Copyright © 2021 The Texas State Historical Association