| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.4 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Namasté America: Indian Immigrants in an American Metropolis. By Padma Rangaswamy. (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2000. xviii, 366 pp. Cloth, $65.00, ISBN 0-271-01980-8. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-271-01981-6.)

The 'new immigration' to the United States is now old enough that many ethnic groups around the country have produced social scientists with unique access to their own communities. Padma Rangaswamy is the latest Indian American to chronicle the emergence of this prosperous, conservative ethnic group, heavily concentrated in Illinois, California, Texas, and the New York metropolitan area. 1

Rangaswamy's focus is on the Indians in Chicago and its suburbs, the latest phase of a global Indian diaspora some 170 years old. Her major emphasis is on the most recent past, describing how Chicago's Indian population has constructed an ethnic community and an ethnic identity since the mid-1960s. By the late 1990s, Indian-born Chicagoans were beginning to pass that community into the hands of an American-born or -raised second generation. Rangaswamy's work lacks the postmodern flair and critical edge of such recent analyses as Sunaina Maira and Rajini Srikanth's edited collection Contours of the Heart (1996), Lavinia Dhingra Shankar and Rajini Srikanth's collection A Part, yet Apart (1998), Vijay Prashad's The Karma of Brown Folk (2000), and Sunaina Maira's Desis in the House (2002); the compensation is the completeness and specificity with which the institutional parameters of the Chicago Indian population are described. . . .

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