Institute for the Study of Societal Issues

In this paper, I ask how Pakistanis have been interpreting and responding to the post-9/11 construction of Muslim identities, or more broadly, how a transnational community responds when it has been marked as hostile. Looking primarily at two Pakistani community organizations in the technology region known as Silicon Valley in Northern California, I seek to answer this question with evidence from document analysis, participant observation, and in-depth interviews. I argue that the bright boundaries that exclude Pakistanis from acceptance, and which categorize them as a suspicious other, have been a catalyst for community identity construction and management. If assimilation is the decline of an ethnic distinction and its corollary cultural and social differences, then the examination of the ways by which an excluded community seeks to belong can help expose the boundaries of membership that a state erects against immigrant communities. Through such an examination, I have found that the Pakistani community in Silicon Valley has used performative tropes to contest racialized boundaries and to re-define their community (and any of its transnational endeavors or inclinations) as being within acceptable limits. Representations of themselves as “business-developers” and “secular-pluralists” show that their community is sincere about assimilating, and that any transnationalism is within the realm of assistance towards American geopolitical goals. Thus, one of the implications of my research is that a government, its media, and the public can influence an immigrant population to shape itself in ways that are friendly and amenable to (in this case) US ideologies.