AAPI Nexus: Policy, Practice and Community

Framed within the segmented assimilation perspective, this paper examines community construction by middle-class, professional Tamilimmigrant women in Atlanta, Georgia. It argues that community building is a fundamentally gendered settlement activity predominantly performed by Tamil women. Using gendered labor, they construct a dynamic community across the settlement process, encompassing formal and informal, ethnic and non-ethnic components and sites, to take the form of wives’ support and women’s networks, cross-cultural friendships, ethnic spaces and fictive kinship. With the emergent bonding and bridging social capital, they chart their segmented incorporation as model minorities who are ethnic. In the process however, gender, race/ethnic and class hierarchies are often reinforced. In this article, I discuss community1 construction by middle-class, professional Tamil2 immigrant women in Atlanta, Georgia. Framed by the segmented assimilation perspective on immigrant incorporation, this article asks three questions: (1) what are the forms of community constructed by Tamil women, (2) how is community building gendered, and (3) how does the constructed community facilitate their incorporation into America? By focusing on middle-class Tamil immigrants, this article advances the scholarship in several ways: (1) by theorizing community formation among South Asians it nuances our understanding of the ethnic landscape of Asians in the United States that has predominantly focused on East Asians; (2) by conferring visibility on a little-studied Indian regional group, it challenges the dominant imaginary of a homogenized Indian diaspora in the United States as being predominantly North Indian (Gujarati/Punjabi); and in so doing (3) is attentive to the interactions and reconstitutions of stratifications of class, caste, and gender in shaping the Tamil experience in the United States.3 I argue that community building among professional Tamils is predominantly performed by Tamil women. They construct a dynamic community that takes the form of wives’ support and women’s networks, cross-cultural friendships, ethnic spaces, and fictive kinship. Although the emergent bonding and bridging social capital facilitates their segmented incorporation as model minorities who are ethnic, the process also reinscribes gender, race/ethnic, class and caste hierarchies.