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1 Katie Mahowski Honor's Thesis Spring 2011 Dr. Narayanan Identity Katie Mahowski Honor’s Thesis Spring 2011 Dr. Narayanan Identity Negotiation in Second Generation Gujarati-Americans in Florida Abstract In Gainesville, Florida, and surrounding cities there is a large population of Gujarati immigrants. The children of these immigrants are then raised in America, which produces a varied family dynamic. The campuses of the University of Florida, the University of South Florida, and the University of Miami all have organizations formed by second generation Indian immigrants, and all of these groups have a majority of Gujarati-American members. In this honor’s thesis, I use the distinction between the public and private domains to show how these Indian cultural and religious organizations use large events for the three main holidays, Navratri, Diwali, and Holi, as a space to negotiate the cultural and religious aspects of their Gujarati-American Hindu identity. These large events like garba are used for social, cultural, and religious functions, and facebook is the most common tool to market these events to outsiders of the Gujarati-American ethnoreligious community. Private sphere ceremonies like pujas, prayers, and fasting, occur within the home and with family instead of opening up to the public via facebook. The smaller events provide space for the family to instill religious values and beliefs in the second generation, since they did not have the same opportunities of being surrounded by 1 Hinduism. I demonstrate that the larger, public events are more a part of the American multicultural discourse and the American identity of the second generation, and that the smaller, private events function as a main component of the Hindu Gujarati part of their hyphenated identities. Abbreviations In this paper, I talk about universities in Florida, and the initials are frequently used. UF: University of Florida in Gainesville USF: University of South Florida in Tampa UM: University of Miami in Miami There are several campus based Indian organizations that use abbreviated names. ISA: Indian Student Association HSC: Hindu Student Council Introduction In Gujarati-American Hindu ethnoreligious communities, religion interacts with culture and the members can choose to “celebrate cultural and religious events in one space.”1 These communities help immigrants define their hyphenated identity and provide an outlet for them to negotiate it together. Especially among the youth of the second generation, social media, and facebook in particular, transforms the way members of the same ethnoreligious group network and define their identity within the public 1 Joshi, Khyati Y. New Roots in America's Sacred Ground: Religion, Race, and Ethnicity in Indian America. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2006. Print. Page 53. 2 sphere. There are aspects of Gujarati-American life that facebook does not facilitate, however, which includes the private domain. In this honors thesis, I will delineate the research group I’m investigating, my methods, why I chose Gujarati-Americans, and important facets of the Gujarati ethnicity. Also, since immigration is an important part of this thesis, I will provide a brief summary of the Indian immigration process and how it fits in to the notion of American multiculturalism. I will then break down ‘ethnoreligious’ by discussing religion and ethnicity as facets of a religio-cultural identity. Following this, I’ll talk about the Indian cultural and religious organizations that are in place to aid in the process of defining an identity, and the role facebook plays in this process for the second generation. I acknowledge the shifts occurring in the identity formations, and how facebook allows for them. After discussing my research areas, I will then present my data from the interviews before I draw conclusions. The data from my participants is organized according to the structure of the interviews. The questions flowed well and began with defining the social networks of each participant, as well as the shifts within them and how facebook plays a role. Then I discuss the organizations that each participant is a member of, and their respective uses of facebook. The public and private spheres each have their own sections, followed by the discussion of religious facebook statuses of my participants. Religion and culture is the next section, followed finally by Hinduism in America. This last section was not originally part of my questions, but the participants offered a distinction between American and Indian culture, so then it was created through the interviews. 3 I am researching how second generation Gujarati-Americans in Florida distinguish between culture and religion in social networking, and how facebook is becoming the tool most used in this networking. In this study, second generation refers to the children of immigrants who were born in the United States, or who arrived at a very young age. The upbringing of the parents and these second-generation Indian- Americans is therefore greatly varied, and spans both Indian and American cultures. This study includes in-depth personal interviews with Gujarati college students, ranging from juniors in college to graduate and medical students. I selected participants from my network of Gujarati friends from the St. Petersburg and the Gainesville areas, and then my friends introduced me to other participants. Of course, my contacts referred me to like-minded participants, a constraint that came up in one of the interviews. Everyone I was introduced to is facebook friends with my initial contacts, and I am personally facebook friends with my initial contacts. My participants are all currently attending college; they are therefore within the same age group (19-24 years). Their families are also part of the same socio-economic bracket because the parents have similar professions, including doctors and lawyers. Most participants know each other through one social domain or another, and therefore come from similar backgrounds. Although all of my Gujarati friends are female, I decided to also interview males to see if there are differences in perspective between the sexes. In quite a few past sociological studies, like those of Otto Jespersen in the 1920s, it’s proposed that women talk more than men do and are more socially active. Current research, as in Deboarh Cameron’s “Performing Gender Identity,” shows that gender is actually performed, and is not an inherent trait. Therefore, if there are marked 4 differences between the sexes it’s not because of biology, but the discrepancies are due to the participants’ performance of one gender or another. If the women in this study do use facebook for more social networking than the men do, then it would seem virtual networking is undergoing the same process as social networking did originally by beginning with gendered norms. We will then most likely see a shift in future usage as less biologically based on sex as facebook becomes even more widely used. The process of performing gender correlates to performing identity in that people can choose when and where to display these aspects of their personalities. I chose to research the Gujarati community because of its prominence in the St. Petersburg area in Florida, where most are members of the Gujarati Samaj that attend the Hindu Temple of Florida in Tampa. I am an adopted member of the Samaj, and have attended events at the temple as well as garbas. I noticed the strength of the social networking among members who are currently in college all over Florida, and have been invited to facebook events through organizations like the Indian Student Association at the University of Florida, which got me interested in the importance of virtual networking among second generation Gujarati-Americans. In Namita Manohar’s master’s thesis, she addresses the garba and how it functions within the Gujarati community. The garba is a Gujarati folk dance that is during Navratri, which is a nine-night celebration of the Goddess. It’s a very important part of Gujarati culture, so both the first and second generations are active and enthusiastic participants within the ethnoreligious community. Garbas take place all over the United States and are organized by various Indian or Gujarati organizations, like the garbas held at the University of Florida that are put together by the Indian Student 5 Association, and the garbas put together by the Gujarati Samaj in Tampa. One particular garba at UF did not have any prayers during it because it was not permitted on campus. Garba is described in Manohar’s thesis as a social gathering as well as part of Navratri, which means that the garba functions as a community event and also religious significance. Besides garba, another prominent feature of Gujarati communities is the language. Gujarati is in the top twenty foreign languages spoken in America, with the only other Indian language ranked being Hindi. All of my participants in this study can speak Gujarati at least comfortably, and most of them aspire to improve their reading and writing skills. Manohar’s thesis also describes the ethnic importance of the Gujarati language, and how the parents of my participants’ generation instill this value in their children from birth. Gujarati newspapers, magazines, and TV stations are now available in the United States, and all of my participants have these resources at their parents’ home at least, which makes the Gujarati language even more accessible. While none of my participants were forbidden to speak English at home, they are encouraged to speak in Gujarati with their family and do so on a daily basis, including phone calls when they are away at their university. Garba and the Gujarati language are the two most prominent features of the ethnoreligious community, and they both serve as unifying factors among Gujarati-Americans. Contrasting garba’s public domain, the emphasis on the private domain in shaping one’s identity furthers the idea that even if the participants were in India, they’d still have similar belief systems.
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