Practicing Citizenship in a New City of Immigration: An Ethnographic Comparison of Asian Indians and Vietnamese

Supplemental Award: $6,000, June 2007

Asian Indians and Vietnamese arrived in large numbers to the Dallas-Fort Worth area in the 1990s, when the regional economy was booming and jobs were sprouting up in high technology industries. While both these groups are viewed as Asian-American, they are remarkably different. Asian Indians—largely economic migrants who arrive with student visas or work permits—are well educated and highly skilled. Vietnamese, on the other hand, arrived as refugees and are more likely to be poor, less educated, and dependent on state aid. Nevertheless, these two groups seem to challenge the commonly accepted precepts of immigrant political incorporation and civic life. The less educated Vietnamese naturalize at a higher rate than Asian Indians, but exercise their voting rights less. Both have high numbers of children who succeed scholastically, but neither group shows much parental involvement in schools.

With funding from the Foundation, anthropologists Caroline Brettell and Deborah Reed-Danahy will examine these seeming paradoxes and study the process by which these newcomers become active in American political life. Interested in the informal mechanisms by which new immigrants become civically engaged, they will conduct an ethnographical examination of families, schools, workplaces, places of worship, voluntary associations, and other contexts in which immigrants acquire civic knowledge. They will identify patterns in local, national, and transnational political activity and attempt to document and explain observed differences and similarities between the groups, paying close attention to the importance of gender and generation.