Desi Land: Teen Culture, Class, and Success in Silicon Valley

by Shalini Shankar

Overview

Desi Land is Shalini Shankar's lively ethnographic account of South Asian American teen culture during the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. Shankar focuses on how South Asian Americans, or "Desis," define and manage what it means to be successful in a place brimming with the promise of technology. Between 1999 and 2001 Shankar spent many months "kickin' it" with Desi teenagers at three Silicon Valley high schools, and she has since followed their lives and stories. The diverse high-school students who populate Desi Land are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs, from South Asia and other locations; they include first- to fourth-generation immigrants whose parents' careers vary from assembly-line workers to engineers and CEOs. By analyzing how Desi teens' conceptions and realizations of success are influenced by community values, cultural practices, language use, and material culture, she offers a nuanced portrait of diasporic formations in a transforming urban region.

Whether discussing instant messaging or arranged marriages, Desi bling or the pressures of the model minority myth, Shankar foregrounds the teens' voices, perspectives, and stories. She investigates how Desi teens interact with dialogue and songs from Bollywood films as well as how they use their heritage language in ways that inform local meanings of ethnicity while they also connect to a broader South Asian diasporic consciousness. She analyzes how teens negotiate rules about dating and reconcile them with their longer-term desire to become adult members of their communities. In Desi Land Shankar not only shows how Desi teens of different socioeconomic backgrounds are differently able to succeed in Silicon Valley schools and economies but also how such variance affects meanings of race, class, and community for South Asian Americans.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780822343158
Publisher:	Duke University Press
Publication date:	10/27/2008
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	290
Product dimensions:	5.90(w) x 8.90(h) x 0.70(d)

About the Author

Shalini Shankar is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University.

Read an Excerpt

DESI LAND

teen culture, class, and success in silicon valley

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By SHALINI SHANKAR

Duke University Press

Copyright © 2008 Duke University Press
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8223-4315-8

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Chapter One

CALIFORNIA, HERE WE COME, RIGHT BACK WHERE WE STARTED FROM

Umber has an unfortunate knack of getting into trouble at school and home. She kicks it with other Desis at school, but often finds herself at the center of gossip and arguments that place her outside of the social circles of which she desperately wants to remain a part. Although she continually promises to be more mindful of her parents' rules, she ends up spending a lot of time alone in her room. Here, she has covered the back of her wall with glossy clippings of her favorite Bollywood stars and confides her secret ambition to make it onto the silver screen. Umber's family was landed gentry in Punjab but moved to Nairobi in the 1940s, where her father was born. From Nairobi they moved to Yuba City, California, in the 1970s to do farm work and stayed until 1983, when they came to San Jose. At first Umber's father worked as a farmer with his brothers in Yuba City, but then went to Chico State University and now has a job in management information systems. He loves to tell Umber and her younger brother stories from his teenage days at Yuba City High School, where he belonged to a bhangra dance troupe. On his family room wall, he proudly displays a portrait of his dance troupe in full costume from the 1970s. Although he wants a bigger house, he and his wife like this neighborhood and want to remain within walking distance of their relatives. Like many Desi families, Umber's grandparents live with them and take care of the children when they get home from school, which has helped their parents save money on child care. "You really need an education these days," her father reflected. Gesturing to his three-bedroom tract home, he remarked, "If you want a house like this, it is already over half a million. You have to work for it." Umber shrugged indifferently as she asked her parents for the fourth time if she might go to the mall with her friends.

Desi families like Umber's have helped to establish a strong Desi Community in Silicon Valley. They have created a space for themselves in residential neighborhoods, the retail landscape, public culture, and especially the high-tech industry. Over the past few decades, the surge in high-tech jobs has made Silicon Valley an attractive place for families like Umber's, who are in search of lucrative careers as well as steady, well-paying nonskilled labor positions. Of all the influences in this region, technology reigned supreme in the late 1990s. The development of the high-tech industry and its pervasive narratives of progress, innovation, and success have had an indelible impact on Desi migration to Silicon Valley. This industry has drawn thousands of people with what I call "the promise of technology," and it continues to shape the lives and aspirations of its Desi residents. From the beginning high-tech labor has been polarized into an exceedingly wealthy professional class and a struggling laboring class that has had to cope with the industry's cyclical nature. This configuration has primarily attracted upper-middle-class professional Desis in search of white-collar tech work, as well as working-class Desis who gradually became middle class and have high hopes that their children are upwardly mobile as well. Such socioeconomic differences shape neighborhoods and social life for Desis as they transform the landscape and population of this region.

Desi families flocked to Silicon Valley from South Asia and other parts of the United States, as well as other diasporic locations in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Fiji, and established supportive communities that they work hard to maintain. Large, visible Desi communities settled into neighborhoods with religious places of worship are ubiquitous in Desi Land, but were barely a possibility until the past few decades. Over the span of a century, Desis have moved up in status, from being undesirable, racially non-White immigrants to sought after residents whose ambiguous racial status skews closer to White. Changes in immigration policy, victories of the civil rights movement, the emergence of the model minority myth, and the rise of multiculturalism all contribute to these changes.

Yet all is not sunny in California. The title of this chapter, which fans of televised teenage drama may recognize as lyrics from The OC show opening, emphasizes that while Silicon Valley is indeed more diverse than predominantly White, wealthy California communities such as those in Orange County, it is nonetheless plagued by discrimination against race, class, and gender. Although many Desis have prospered in ways that early Punjabi settlers could not have imagined, dynamics of inequality still exist among Desis and become increasingly apparent during times of social and economic diculty. During these times especially, community support is paramount.

Desi communities generate ideas of success and create intergenerational connections. These social formations set the stage for Desi teen culture and shape how teens relate to their family, school, and California. As is true for other immigrant groups in this region, notions of Desi success, progress, and mobility are community-specific and locally defined (Freeman 1989). In Silicon Valley in the 1990s, high tech held great promise for quick wealth without traditional educational qualifications. With stories of teenage millionaires circulating, Desi teens looked to high tech with great hopes. Such aspirations are addressed intergenerationally as adults in Desi communities try to help youth achieve their goals. How communities create ideas of success and how success can be achieved vary according to class. Both middle- and upper-middle-class Desis, however, turned toward the high-tech industry with their aspirations of achieving the Amrikan Dream.

THE RISE OF SILICON VALLEY HIGH TECH

The high-tech industry has brought about myriad changes in the population, landscape, and narratives of progress. Silicon Valley burgeoned from what, as recently as the 1950s, were agricultural lands into a major player in the global economy. Silicon Valley begins about thirty-five miles south of San Francisco and encompasses fifteen hundred square miles extending through San Jose (S. Cohen and Fields 2000). Santa Clara is the heart of Silicon Valley, and the wider boundaries encompass Palo Alto to the north and San Jose to the south. Santa Clara County was instrumental in the Gold Rush in the 1850s because it was home to one of the first mining corporations and the largest quicksilver (mercury) mine, an element essential to extracting gold and silver from raw ore (Pellow and Park 2002: 34-35). Once a bountiful stretch of agricultural land, the urban sprawl now known as Silicon Valley once went by a collection of other names, including "The Valley of Heart's Delight" and the "The Prune Capital of America" (Khanna 1997: 67).

The birth of Silicon Valley is generally traced to the establishment of Shockley Superconductor in 1956, though some mark 1939-the year William Hewlett and David Packard formed their partnership-as its true start (Kenney 2000). "Silicon" refers to silicon dioxide, the material used to make semiconductor chips through an elaborate and expensive process. "Valley" refers to flat Santa Clara County, which is flanked by the Diablo Mountain Range on the east and the Santa Cruz mountain range on the west (Khanna 1997). Silicon was used by William Shockley and two others to invent the transistor at Bell Laboratories in New York in 1947. Silicon soon began to replace germanium, and the transistor industry took root in Santa Clara when a former employee of Shockley left to form his own enterprise (G. Matthews 2003). Silicon Valley was thus named in 1971, when the journalist Don Hoefler wrote a three-part series on the history of the semiconductor industry for Electronic News (Khanna 1997: 67). Other Silicon Valley articles appeared in the early 1970s in Fortune magazine, and by 1975 the place had become a location in the public imagination (Kenney 2000).

The high-tech industry flourished in this California landscape (C.-M. Lee et al. 2000). Land was aordable and builders faced few initial bureaucratic constraints; moreover, parcels of undeveloped land were ideal for business parks and campuses (Li and Park 2006). During the 1950s and 1960s, Stanford University played a key role in high-tech innovation, as start-ups and companies gravitated toward the semirural land around the campus (Saxenian 1985). From its early days, Silicon Valley has been a production hub in what Manuel Castells (1985: 25) has termed the "Warfare State," a term used to refer to the growth of military-related production and the corresponding development of certain urban regions in the United States. Electronics production for military use, such as microwave tubes for aerospace and satellite use, flourished in this region shortly after World War II in companies such as Lockheed-Martin and computer companies such as Sun Microsystems (Leslie 2000). Silicon Valley has also been a leader in television, radio, and other electronic innovation (Sturgeon 2000). A handful of other industries have also established themselves in this area. For example, in 1955, the Ford Motor Company opened a plant in Milpitas, a town sandwiched between San Jose and Fremont, and remained active until the 1980s.

In recent decades, Silicon Valley has seen several cycles of rapid growth and decline. The 1970s were eventful venture capital years. Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak produced the first microcomputer in a garage and in 1976 launched Apple Computers (Castells 1996). By the mid-1980s, over 70 percent of residents worked in high tech and a significant portion of the remaining 30 percent worked in service or support, a trend I saw during my research a decade and a half later. The 1980s began with major successes, but the late 1980s saw a downturn in the stock market. Though the region then went through a decline, this was reportedly due to external forces rather than a lack of entrepreneurial enthusiasm. The next decade continued the 1980s slump but picked up by the mid-1990s, a time when the stock market was more receptive to initial public offerings (IPOS; Kenney and Florida 2000: 19). Such ebbs and flows, perhaps most dramatically in the bubble of the late 1990s and its subsequent burst in 2000, suggest that the high-tech industry is cyclical in its growth but persists despite setbacks.

High-Tech Globalization and Flexibility Flexibility of capital and labor imbue Silicon Valley with its global character. The rapid development of this region coincided with, as well as contributed to, the restructuring of capitalism that occurred in the late twentieth century (Castells 1996; see also Harvey 1990; Jameson 1991; Lash and Urry 1987). Like the postwar growth of other regions of the United States, such as Route 128 in Massachusetts, Silicon Valley has played a pivotal role in transforming society from the industrial to the informational age (Saxenian 1985: 82). Fordist mass production has been replaced by advanced capitalism, and the shift from product- to process-oriented economies has flourished in Silicon Valley (Angel 2000). Such new economies modify urban areas and position Silicon Valley as a powerful player in the world economy. Saskia Sassen (1991) terms these dynamic metropoles "global cities" and notes the rise of informational industries that have transformed the nature of urban spaces and are central to globalization. Venture capital has been critical to the growth and development of technological and entrepreneurial projects, as well as the continued growth of Silicon Valley (Kenney and Florida 2000).

Labor is also flexible in Silicon Valley. Although since 2001 the region has been experiencing the latest wave of outsourcing to South Asia and other regions of the world in the form of data processing and call centers, the practice of outsourcing labor is not new in Silicon Valley. As early as 1963, Fairchild, a founding firm of Silicon Valley, built an assembly plant in Hong Kong (G. Matthews 2003: 230). The flexibility of labor arrangements is perhaps most stark in the practice called "body-shopping," in which workers are solicited from other countries to live and work in the United States on temporary visas (type H1-B). The quota of H1-B temporary workers rose dramatically during the late 1990s. Of those who were body-shopped, nearly half came from India to work in computer-related occupations (Aneesh 2006). These body-shopped laborers reported glass ceilings at work and racial tension in society (Prashad 2000). These decades of growth in Silicon Valley have initiated both growth and diversification of local populations.

Of all these periods, the late 1990s and 2000 are the years for which Silicon Valley is most renowned for its international power and status. By 1993, the region had once again picked up, and the United States began to outproduce Japan in microchip manufacturing (G. Matthews 2003). The area had added about 200,000 jobs since 1997, and average annual wages during this time were $46,000, compared to the U.S. average of $29,000 (S. Cohen and Fields 2000). Silicon Valley had a population of about 2.3 million in 2000 and about 1.2 million jobs. By 2000, the region was reported to be 150 percent more prosperous than the national average (S. Cohen and Fields 2000). At the height of the high-tech industry, Chinese and Indian engineers were running one-fourth of Silicon Valley's high-tech businesses and their companies had accounted for over 58,000 jobs and $16.8 billion in sales (G. Matthews 2003).

TRANSFORMING LANDSCAPES AND POPULATIONS

During several decades of rapid transformation, technology swiftly established an economic and cultural hegemony over this region, so much so that it has earned the name "technoburb" (Li and Park 2006: 121). In stark contrast to its bucolic past, contemporary descriptors of the region emphasize its modernity and international qualities. In the late 1990s, bill-boards on the strip of Highway 101 that connects San Francisco to San Jose via numerous towns in between that make up Silicon Valley attested to the centrality of technology in this region. Rather than including a smattering of the usual products-movies, drinks, airlines, banks-nearly every billboard advertised something related to technology. From must-visit websites to promises of superior networking infrastructure, there were barely any signs of life outside the high-tech industry. When I began my fieldwork in 1999, there were but a few remaining patches of former farmland waiting to be converted to corporate parks and housing.

Such dramatic commercial and residential growth has brought about a spate of problems, including environmental concerns, poor public planning, and an exceedingly high cost of living (Khanna 1997). Pollution due to toxic waste from semiconductor chips as well as defense production has been so menacing that it has earned the former "Valley of Heart's Delight" the unfortunate moniker "The Valley of Toxic Fright" (Pellow and Park 2002: 19). Transportation problems, congestion, and auto-emission pollution routinely violate EPA standards. While residents of the foothills can distance themselves from these problems to an extent, the less wealthy residents are unable to escape it. Even in the 1970s and 1980s job development far outpaced housing, causing a constant shortage of living space (Rogers and Larsen 1984). In order to avoid residential over-crowding while still raising much-needed tax revenue, extensive tracts of land were rezoned for industrial use, and this further exacerbated the housing shortage. Even worse, most places were zoned for single-unit rather than multiple-unit dwellings (Saxenian 1985).

(Continues...)

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Table of Contents

Preface and Acknowledgments vii

Introduction: Welcome to Desi Land 1

1. California, Here We Come, Right Back Where We Started From 25

2. Defining Desi Teen Culture 53

3. Living and Desiring Desi Bling Life 80

4. Desi Fashions of Speaking 100

5. Being FOBulous on Multicultural Day 119

6. Remodeling the Model Minority Stereotype 142

7. Dating on the DL and Arranged Marriages 167

8. In the New Millennium 193

Postscript 211

Appendix 1: Student Interview 213

Appendix 2: Faculty Interview 218

Appendix 3: Parent and Relative Interview 220

Appendix 4: Student Survey 223

Notes 225

Glossary of Hindi and Punjabi Terms 237

Bibliography 239

Index 263

Editorial Reviews

"An excellent, ethnographically rich study of the lives and practices of young South Asian Americans living in Silicon Valley, Desi Land lends itself to use in courses in fields including anthropology, cultural studies, gender studies, and Asian American studies. What I like best of all is that Shalini Shankar trains her lens on a particular generation's experience while providing us with a rich cultural history of life in Silicon Valley at the turn of the twenty-first century."--Purnima Mankekar, author of Screening Culture, Viewing Politics: An Ethnography of Television, Womanhood, and Nation in Postcolonial India

"In this exciting book, Shalini Shankar writes about Desi teens in Silicon Valley with deep sympathy, humor, and genuine insight. The high-school students come alive through ethnographic detail, and yet Shankar's analysis is sharp and thought provoking. Her theoretically sophisticated approach to diversity makes an important contribution to urban anthropology. I will recommend this book to everyone I know--scholars, educators, and advocates--who works with twenty-first-century youth."--Jan English-Lueck, author of Cultures@SiliconValley

"Shalini Shankar's Desi Land is a loving portrait of young people trying their best to fashion culture and life in jobless America. Thick description and rich analysis of young Desis is an eye-opener, whether you're wearing your mad tight color contacts or not."--Vijay Prashad, author of The Darker Nations: A People's History of the Third World

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