Ninth International Conference on Tourism & Leisure Studies

Abstract

South Asians are one of the fastest-growing ethnic groups in the United States, and the major influx of South Asian migration began after the Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965. The influx of South Asian immigrants raises several scholarly questions, such as what changes occur in South Asian immigrant families when they move to the United States. However, less visible in the media and scholarship are the children of these immigrants. The offspring of the post-1965 immigrants began to come of age during the late 1980s and 1990s, but the stories of these South Asian-Americans have not adequately been told and incorporated into the larger narratives of the United States. The now adult children of these immigrants represent a critical generation, determining patterns of race, ethnicity, culture, economy, and politics in the United States. A central question is what kinds of cultural identities are second-generation South Asian-Americans forging? What are their cultural values and practices in the context of South Asian American identities? To answer such questions, I examine a discursive site—celebration of holidays—in which South Asian Americans produce and consume culture. I ethnographically explore South Asian American women and how their gendered identities are negotiated in the ways in which they conceptualize “western” holidays like Thanksgiving in America. By doing so, I also interrogate the notion of “home” as part of the gendered South Asian American imagination and landscape; where is “home” and what is it in the context of cultural (re-) production within the American nation-state and transnationally?