While the study on South Asian immigration has only relatively recently become an area of focus, there is a sizeable amount of work done on the experience of South Asian immigrants specifically. One of the foundational texts of South Asain immigration studies is Joan Jensen’s Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America, which is a broad study of how and why South Asians came to North America in the ‘first wave’ of immigration from 1890-1930. Jensen also focuses on how immigrant’s experiences are shaped by the laws and the interplay of the Canadian U.S. border.[1] Another foundational researcher is Vivek Bald, whose works, “Hands Across the Water: Indian Sailors, Peddlers, and Radicals in the U.S., 1890–1965” and “Selling the East in the American South,” analyze the fragmented history of Bengali Muslim peddlers and their transnational migration patterns alongside the ways in which they networked and settles along the East Coast.[2] Nyan Shah’s work, Stranger Intimacy Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West, discusses how South Asian immigrants created community and family in the United States and the ways in which sexuality, race, and sex politics affected those communities. In tandem, Shah discusses how the politics of land ownership and naturalization have affected those communities and their experiences.[3] Karen Leonard’s work, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans, analyzes the relationship, community, and movement of Punjabi Sikh men and Mexican women in the Imperial Valley, California. She focuses on how their movements and globalization reframed Southwest state borders.[4] All of these historians, alongside others, provide a background on which other research can be built and discoveries into the experiences of South Asian immigrants can be understood and contextualized.
[1] Joan M. Jensen, Passage from India: Asian Indian Immigrants in North America, New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998
[2] Bald, Vivek. “Hands Across the Water: Indian Sailors, Peddlers, and Radicals in the U.S., 1890–1965.” Ph.D. diss, 2009. and Bald, Vivek. “Selling the East in the American South.” In Asian Americans in Dixie, edited by Khyati Y. Joshi and Jigna Desai, 33-47. Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
[3] Shah, Nayan. Stranger Intimacy Contesting Race, Sexuality, and the Law in the North American West. American Crossroads; 31. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2011.
[4] Leonard, Karen. Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992.