In the early years of the Cold War, the United States mounted expansive
public diplomacy programs in the Global South, including initiatives
with the recently partitioned states of India and Pakistan. U.S.
operations in these two countries became the second- and fourth-largest
in the world, creating migration links that resulted in the emergence of
American universities, such as the University of Houston, as immigration
hubs for the highly selective, student-led South Asian migration stream
starting in the 1950s. By the late twentieth century, Houston's South
Asian community had become one of the most prosperous in the
metropolitan area and one of the largest in the country.
Mining archives and using new oral histories, Uzma Quraishi traces this
pioneering community from its midcentury roots to the early twenty-first
century, arguing that South Asian immigrants appealed to class
conformity and endorsed the model minority myth to navigate the
complexities of a shifting Sunbelt South. By examining Indian and
Pakistani immigration to a major city transitioning out of Jim Crow,
Quraishi reframes our understanding of twentieth-century migration, the
changing character of the South, and the tangled politics of race,
class, and ethnicity in the United States.