Katie Mahowski

Honor’s Thesis Spring 2011

Dr. Narayanan

Identity Negotiation in Second Generation Gujarati- 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 . 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 . 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 , 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 , they’d still have similar belief systems. Growing up in America is a more open forum for vast religions and cultures, so the participants have to work harder to maintain their Gujarati identity

6 than if they were in India. The communal events for Navratri, Diwali, and Holi help the

second generation and their families maintain the Gujarati aspect of their identity, while

the private pujas and ceremonies tend to the Hindu facet. The public events on facebook

make it easy for immigrants to integrate into an established Gujarati-American

community, which is necessary for their identity, since the private religious ceremonies

are already part of their lives.

As part of American multiculturalism, transnationalism is vastly increasing in

today’s world, making the research of the families of immigrants an integral part of

understanding the greater American landscape. The influx of Indian immigrants in 1965

after the reversal of the Immigration Act prompted investigation of the assimilation

processes of Indians into American culture. With the second generation, it is proposed

that we need to investigate the segment of American society that absorbs them and “what

happens as a result of such integration.”2 The segmented assimilation model applies

more to the second generation as they use diverse paths and because they integrate into

unequal segments of American society. The college age second generations are an

excellent example of this model because they are doing just that, deciding which parts of

American and Indian culture to integrate, and how to get these results.

Religion and ethnicity are definitely key in the realm where “meaning, identity,

and sense of place and belonging emerge,” so in my interviews I investigate the

distinctions between these components.3 I started out the interviews by asking questions

2 Purkayastha, Bandana. Negotiating Ethnicity: Second-generation South Traverse a Transnational World. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers UP, 2005. Print. 3 Vasquez, Manuel A. and Marie F. Marquardt. 2003. “Theorizing Globalization and Relgion.” In Globalizing the Sacred: Religion Across the Americas. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, pg. 50

7 about the participants’ social networks, and how much their families play a role in that network. The “religious theme” that these Gujarati-Americans have in their transnational lives is not one of exile, diaspora, or captivity, but is primarily about their own self- discovery, which is more evident when in college because they are finally on their own.4

Identity construction is something people from all stages in life contemplate, and in immigrating to America, these Gujarati communities must explore their beliefs, since their daily lives no longer necessarily have Hindu aspects, as they would in India.5 With the use of networking, the negotiation of identity is facilitated as the individuals have an opportunity to come together and share the same values-especially if they come from the same state in India.

As I investigated the social networks of my participants, I also asked questions about the Indian organizations that they are a part of. There are dance teams, sororities/fraternities, and other groups that are distinguished as religious or non-religious networks through the Florida universities that I’ve found to be generally largely Gujarati.

Interestingly, facebook is the number one outreach tool for all of the organizations; it replaces emails and previous websites. This is particularly striking because facebook is so new. Being founded in February of 2004 by a 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg,

Facebook started out as a networking site for Harvard, Zuckerberg’s alma mater, but by

2005 it became www.facebook.com.6 By July of 2007, facebook users reached 30

4 Vasquez and Marquardt, pg. 54 5 Eck, Diana L. A New Religious America. New York: HarperOne, 2001. Print. Pg 90 6 Markoff, John. "The Tangled History of Facebook." The New York Times. 31 Aug. 2007. Web. Feb. 2011.

8 million, and today facebook is the largest social networking site with an educational focus.7

The use of facebook as social networking is convenient for the demographic I’m researching because it is geared towards college students, it’s free, it’s international, and you can have pages for groups as well as your own personal profile. Both the Indian

Student Association at UF and at that of USF have facebook pages, as well as the various

Indian sororities and fraternities. Group events can have a specific page that allows the creator to invite guests so they can RSVP and see who else is coming, and photos and comments can be posted to these pages. Because almost all college students have a facebook, it makes sense to use it as a tool for any social network, because it’s certainly easier than typing all of those email address or calling that many people for a garba or other larger event.

Of course, although the Internet is so widely used, it’s not a perfect tool, as

Morozov discusses in “The Net Delusion.”8 The recent claimed use of facebook and twitter in social reforms and revolutions is blown out of proportion, as these social networking sites are used for counter-liberation as well. People tend to see these sites as more helpful politically than they actually are, according to Morozov and evidenced by an Egyptian man naming his daughter “Facebook” after the January 2011 struggles for liberation.9 These sites can be used by anyone for any means, and it is important to keep this in mind. My participants are American and so don’t often use facebook as their

7 Carlson, Nicholas. "How Facebook Was Founded." Business Insider. 5 Mar. 2010. Web. Feb. 2011. 8 Siegel, Lee. "Twitter Can't Save You." The New York Times. 4 Feb. 2011. Web. Feb. 2011. 9 Luschek, Matthew. "Egyptian Man Names Daughter "Facebook"" NBC. 21 Feb. 2011. Web. Feb. 2011.

9 outlet for political freedom since we have that right and it’s protected not exploited by the government. These students prefer to use facebook as a majority for social networking and event coordination, and it is a necessary tool for involvement within the ethnoreligious community and identity construction.

Since internet-based research on cultural and religion practices is so new, there are relatively few studies on how Indian-Americans are using it as a religious and cultural tool. There is more research with the Abrahamic faiths, like the book iMuslims which explores how the Internet has helped shape contemporary Islamic “discourse, identity, and community.”10 The umma, or community of Muslims, now extends past the physical community one is a part of and into the umma of cyberspace. Also, there are more resources for Christianity, like the Pope’s own facebook profile which extends his

“spiritual and ethical leadership into the increasingly digital world.”11 Through the

Pope’s own status updates and information, it is clear that the internet plays a very important role in the networking of modern day Catholic practitioners, which I propose is the case with many other faiths and cultures, including Hinduism and the Indian-

American communities.

Facebook allows users to update their religious status, or delete the status altogether. I asked my participants about their status and why or why not they chose to list one, as well as what the status meant to them. Following these questions, I finally asked the participants about their views on culture and religion, especially from the viewpoint of cultural Indians living in America and being in college away from their

10 Bunt, Gary R. IMuslims: Rewiring the House of . Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina, 2009. Print. 11 Drescher, Elizabeth. "Pope Invites His Flock to Join Facebook: Is the Digital Reformation Here? | (A)theologies." Religion Dispatches. 25 Jan. 2011. Web. Feb. 2011.

10 families. The process of going to college causes a negotiation of identity that can make a person’s worldview completely shift. Instead of always having parental roles in the house, moving out on your own makes it obvious what is important and how you actually define yourself for the first time in your life.

Research on the second generation Indian-American population is important because it has not yet been integrated into the larger story of immigration, ethnicity, and religious tendencies of youth cultures in America.12 This second generation population creates and defines a new popular culture that plays an important role in the greater society of the United States, and one that is much different from that of their parents. By focusing on this population of second-generation Gujarati-Americans and their social networking, it provides insight into other immigrant groups in America, and into the segmented assimilation model.

Interview Data Sections

Participants

I completed interviews with three women from the University of South Florida, one from the University of Miami, and five from the University of Florida. Each woman knew at least one other that I was interviewing, and most are friends on facebook. I interviewed more women at UF because I attend school here and in person interviews were easier to conduct. The women at USF are all seniors, and two are pre-med while the third is a liberal arts major. The woman from UM is pre-med, along with 3 of those from UF. The other two UF students are a psych major entering graduate school in the

12 Maira, Sunaina. Desis in the House: Indian American Youth Culture in . : Temple UP, 2002. Print.

11 fall and a History student graduating from a Master’s program in the spring. Over half of these participants grew up in the St. Petersburg area, which is where I first met them.

Everyone reported that they spend a lot of time with their family, but there is definitely a shift in the composition of the social networking from high school to college and then graduate school.

I also interviewed five male participants. Three are students at the University of

South Florida, with one sophomore and two seniors that are all in the pre-med track. The other two are students at the University of Florida, both of which are seniors and are entering medical school and a career in finance. I found it challenging to interview males because all of my Gujarati friends are female, so I had to be referred to all of my participants through those friends. I had a few interviews cancelled at the last minute by the participants, which is why my pool is smaller than I would have liked.

Social Networks and Facebook

In this study, the social networks are those people that each participant spends the most amounts of time and/or energy with. Adding the energy component means that the participant does not have to physically spend a lot of time with them, as for example with out-of-state relatives, but can talk on the phone and communicate in other ways to make up for the lack of time together. The social network is further sectioned into family and friends, since those are the two most important factors in this study, and how they interact. In my data, family is almost always a more important factor of the social networks, and the women feel more comfortable mixing friends and family than the men do.

12 Facebook ties in neatly with the social network, as it is a networking tool. Also, the facebook term ‘friend’ is used for anyone that is connected to your profile on the site.

There is a new Family Tree application that allows you to list family members via facebook, but it’s not very commonly used because facebook is used more for social networking within the friend component of one’s network. In this study, all participants are active facebook users, and everyone uses facebook more for networking with friends than with family. Therefore, facebook is active within the public sphere and not the private, which we will see also with the marketing of public events.

During my first interview, a male student at USF that I asked about his social network at first claimed that he did not spend a lot of time with his extended family.

When I further questioned him about his social network, he said “living with [his] grandparents makes [him] very close to them.”13 After I explained that extended family included grandparents, he realized that his social network was heavily dependent on immediate and extended family, and said he “thought extended meant, like, third cousins.”14 I find this highly indicative of the defining process of social networks, since most of the participants did grow up with extended family members very close to them.

To these participants, it would make sense that your closest family is your immediate family, and not the definition of the parents and siblings only. From this point on, I briefed all participants with the terms extended and immediate to equalize the results.

The other two male students from USF agreed that family is the most important factor in the social network, and all three USF students experienced a shift from high school to college. Since all three moved away from home for college, it was expected

13 Personal interview. 18 February 2011. 14 Personal interview. 18 February 2011.

13 that they spend less time with family now because of distance. They all talk to their family almost daily, however, and one of them remarked that every time he visits family members out of state he “meets some other cousin or uncle.”15 One of the USF students also said that growing up he learned that his “religion teaches family as the most important factor in life,” which influenced his decision to be very close to his relatives.16

This parallels the women I interviewed, since all nine of them also placed family as the number one priority in their social networks.

One of the male USF students went to an Episcopalian high school where most students were white or black.17 There were five Indian students (four of which were

Gujarati) that he became very close to, and then his network of Indian friends increased greatly in college. He almost joined an Indian fraternity with three other close Gujarati friends, but decided against it because he’s “too cheap for that.”18 The other two male

USF students have a fairly diverse network of friends from magnet high schools and their dorm life at USF, but one of them remarked that “you don’t talk about your non-Indian friends with your parents,” so his family may doesn’t know about his varied social networks.19 Since these two students live in dorms and one of them is also in a non-

Indian fraternity they spend time at a lot of events that aren’t related at all to Indian culture, which has shaped their network. These two men had the most diverse networks of all my participants, and had the least connections between their friends and family in comparison with the other twelve students, and they cited magnet schools as a reason for

15 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 16 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 17 Personal interview. 18 February 2011. 18 Personal interview. 18 February 2011. 19 Personal interview. 1 April 2011.

14 this discrepancy. Although quite a few other students attended magnet schools in high school, they already had their close family friends from the local Gujarati community.

Two male UF students described their network with family being very important but overall spending more time with friends in both high school and college. These two are the only participants from the total fourteen that I interviewed that did not ever spend more time with family than friends at any point in their lives. One of these students is an only child, and is the only participant I interviewed that has no siblings, which could be a reason why he spends a lot more time with friends. They both agreed that they don’t go home too often, so friends have become an even bigger part of their social network in college. Between the UF students, one of them has always had about 70% Gujarati-

American friends and the other spent high school with a majority of white friends before coming to UF and shifting to over 80% Indian friends.

Most of my close friends are female Gujaratis, but it was pointed out that I’m getting biased results by three of the UF women because everyone I’m interviewing knows someone else; so they’re all more like-minded. One of the participants suggested if I want to get unbiased results I interview her roommate who is a cheerleader and has been “white-washed,” according to my participant, since high school, and had never taken interest in ISA or other cultural events, has mostly white friends, and identifies more as an American than Gujarati.20 In the continuation of this study, I would interview more people like suggested here that don’t fit similar networks like my participants.

20 Personal interview. 2 March 2011.

15 They also suggested that I interview males, which I told them was the other component of my thesis.

Except for two female participants, everyone’s close friends were introduced through family as young children. Two of the women (both from UF) didn’t feel as close to the Indian community in their hometowns and so therefore didn’t rely on their family and family friends to create a social network. Every participant experienced a shift of their friend group in college, with these two particular participants gaining a new set of very close Indian friends because of their membership in dance teams and then ISA and

HSC for one. One of the male UF students went through the same process, as he found a new network of friends through ISA and the dance teams in Gainesville. The other participants experienced a shift of new friends that didn’t really know their family well because they met in college and are from different areas. One of my participant’s family comes in town every semester, though, to “feed and meet” her friends so that “even though they may not know them well,” her parents have at least met her newfound friends.21 For all of the female participants, their parents know their closest friends very well, whether they are Indian or non-Indian. Three of the male participants feel this way, and there are two exceptions that don’t discuss non-Indian friends with their family.

All five male participants also stated that their parents know their close Indian friends from high school and earlier extremely well, but that their parents really don’t know any of their college friends well. The male students’ comment about not talking to parents about non-Indian friends seems to be a trend since there are two men that said their family is only close with certain few of their Indian friends, and these are the two

21 Personal interview. 2 March 2011.

16 with the widely diverse friend networks. This contrasts the female participants, whose families know their closest friends well no matter their ethnicity. The facebook networks of friends are similar to their real life networks, except that all of the participants’ family members less frequently have and use a facebook profile, where pretty much all of their friends are active users.

All participants also experienced a shift in their social network majority as moving away from home creates more time for the friend part of the network, but all participants decided that they still spend a lot of energy and time communicating with their family on the phone and visiting each other. Even though they may not be physically near their family, they all make time and spend a considerable amount of energy on the relationships with at least immediate family members.

Facebook definitely caters more to users’ public networking, however, as everyone uses facebook more for interactions with friends than family, even if family is actually more prominent in their social network. Each participant does use facebook to communicate with family elsewhere in the United States, London, and/or India, because

“it’s easier than calling them to see where they are in life.”22 On facebook, the social network is a little different from real life since there are “friends” from high school and other periods of life that the participants aren’t as close to anymore. None of my participants said that they had facebook friends that they didn’t actually interact with in public, which means that in order to be facebook friends with someone you have to have them as an acquaintance in reality.

22 Personal interview. 2 March 2011.

17 My participants show that the private familial domain is always a large factor in their life, but that shifts occur between that and the public sphere of friends and facebook.

The women are more comfortable mixing public and private than the men, but overall the two are fairly separate now that the participants attend university and don’t live at home.

Moving away makes the networks become more distinguished since friends and family can’t interact as easily, and the participants have to work at it if they want them to interact. For these Gujarati-Americans, family (the private sphere) is most important even though they may now spend more time in the public sphere with friends.

University organization networks and Facebook

The University organizations discussed in this paper, namely HSC, ISA, and the dance teams, are part of the public sphere of identity negotiation. The participants in this study use these organizations for social networking and as expressions of self. Facebook is the most widely used tool within all organizations in all of the universities (except for one dance team I will discuss later), and it’s made clear that English is the language on all of their facebook sites, since it’s in the public domain. Gujarati is most commonly used at the event itself with others who are comfortable codeswitching. Within the organizations on these three campuses, it’s obvious that they provide an outlet for identity negotiation and that they operate primarily in the public sphere.

All participants participate in Indian cultural events with friends that are on facebook with them. One of the USF participants indicated that the only way he wasn’t facebook friends with someone at an event was if he hadn’t met them yet. But by the time the event is over and he goes home, “the friend requests are waiting for me” and

18 then he is connected to the new people via facebook.23 The public event translates over onto facebook not only because of the virtual invitations, but because friends made also become part of the public social networking site. All students except for one male (from

USF) are active in Indian cultural or religious groups on their respective campus, and the outlier is a very active member of a temple group in Tampa that’s not affiliated through a university or facebook, which fits more into the private domain.24

Each group, HSC and ISA at USF, and ISA and dance teams at UF, uses facebook as a main means of mass communication. The president of HSC stated that he uses facebook the most because “it just works. People don’t always check their emails or text you back but they always check facebook.”25 ISA at UF and USF also use facebook as the main means of communication because their members are higher in number and facebook is the optimal tool for mass messaging, as well as for opening the event to outsiders within the public domain. The dance teams use facebook as well, but one of the males stated that “the girls post more on the pages than the guys do.”26 This gendered role could be because women are stereotypically more social than men, and use facebook more as a tool for networking than men do, at least for now, since facebook is a new phenomenon and is still being delineated in the public sphere.

The male USF student highly involved in the temple said that they don’t use facebook, but that his religious group comes together by word of mouth, which is something the other participants mentioned as a useful networking tool-especially for

23 Personal interview. 24 March 2011. 24 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 25 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 26 Personal interview. 28 March 2011.

19 ISA.27 He goes to temple as often as can, and catches rides from other Gujaratis, some of which are also college students. Members telling their friends, phone calls, and emails to the temple’s youth program facilitate these and other events. This student said that they don’t try to use facebook because they’re “not prostheletizing others, but coming together for religious purposes.”28 These events seem to be more a part of the private sphere, where word of mouth is a more appropriate way to engage others than facebook is.

When the female and male participants attend Indian cultural and religious events, they all partake in code switching between English and Gujarati, or “Gujulish” as one of them coined.29 On facebook, however, everything is posted and messaged in English because it’s available to all members and non-members, some of which may not be

Gujarati or may not know the language. The president of HSC stated that at public events he “uses English unless he knows someone speaks Gujarati, too,” since he doesn’t want to assume and make someone feel uncomfortable.30 They are all very aware of non-

Indians and outsiders of their group looking at the events via facebook, since it’s a public domain.

Besides two of the USF women I interviewed, and the male from USF who only attends events through the temple, everyone else participates in the three major holidays as well as other aspects of Indian life, including dance teams, throughout undergraduate years. Two women from UF did not participate before college, but the other seven had competed in dance competitions before. Some now choreograph for their dance teams,

27 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 28 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 29 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 30 Personal interview. 1 April 2011.

20 and have joined more than one variety of dance team throughout their undergraduate career.

Aside from two USF women and the three men at USF, participants are or were involved in a dance team through their university. The female graduate student from UF had resigned from her active status in dance and cultural organizations because of time constraints and differences in opinion with other members, but the others are still active.

The Indian Student Association is by far the most popular organization, since eleven participants are members at UF, UM, and USF. It does not have religious affiliations, and therefore events put on by ISA are not permitted to be religiously active. For example, UF held a garba for fall 2010 and there was no circumambulation of deities because it was on campus in the O’Connell Center and not permitted through a non- religious organization. The Hindu Student Council, which is active at USF but no longer at UF due to lack of attendance, is the only religiously centered organization that conducts pujas and other religious events.

In ISA, HSC, and within the dance teams at all three schools, there are more

Gujarati members than other Indian ethnicities. There is a trend, however, at all schools that is leading into more mixed memberships as well as officer positions. Every organization uses a facebook page to post events, pictures, comments, and videos, and all pages generally employ English to make the pages more outsider-friendly, although the participants that were comfortable code-switching with English, Hindi, and Gujarati used these languages interchangeably at the events themselves. The facebook events are used for major events like garbas, Diwali, and Holi, as well as dance practices and meetings and other regular events. USF’s garba dance team was the only group that employed

21 texting as much as facebook, since those 16 girls are all Gujarati and have strong relationships with one another already.31

As presented here, facebook is the best and most used tool for networking with these Indian campus organizations because they’re in the public domain. For less public events, like the male USF student’s temple group, word of mouth is the best tool. The women could be more concerned with negotiating their identity since they mix the public and private sphere more, and are using facebook to further this arbitration. The only instance of using texting/emails more than facebook is within a close all-Gujarati dance team of only 16 women, so they don’t need to employ the public networking when they interact so much in the private and public spheres. Facebook is used to market to outsiders and the public as well as giving members of the ethnoreligious community space to interact and communicate.

Garba and the public sphere

The garba can fit under many categories because it serves more than one function, so it’s separate in this paper. Garba is part of the public sphere, and many of the organizations discussed here facilitate and even sponsor local garbas during Navratri.

Despite this lead role in sponsorship and garba’s importance, not all members of the university organizations attend garba.

Two of the female participants from the University of South Florida stated that they didn’t really attend major events like garba anymore because their main group of

31 Personal interview. 25 Feb. 2011.

22 friends no longer attends, either.32 They said that they used to attend a lot of events in high school, but since entering college it’s faded from their lives. This was particularly interesting because both women are members of an Indian sorority on USF’s campus, and their sorority is responsible for coordinating much of these events within the Tampa community. They were the only members I interviewed that are part of an Indian sorority, and they also mentioned that the sisterhood has a website and a facebook and other communicative tools, but that facebook is their main mode of communication because it reaches more people and is easy to use. One of their co-workers teased them, saying that they “use their facebook accounts more than once every hour” after I had asked them if they were frequent facebook users.33

Garba, as mentioned before, is the most popular Gujarati dance event. Namita

Manohar also mentions the three major events as the most attended events within the

Gujarati community in her master’s thesis. The local communities like ISA often mark

Diwali with a dance performance or other collaborative show. HSC and ISA coordinated this year’s Holi celebration at USF by providing colored powders at a local park and food for the attendees. These events are always on facebook, since they take place in the public domain. There are pujas and other private rituals that coincide with these events, but they are done at home and without the public facebook networking.

Public events that are posted on facebook are always managed in such a way to make outsiders feel more comfortable. If the facebook events were entirely in Gujarati, then people who don’t speak the language would not feel like they could participate with the ethnoreligious community. By expanding the public events to welcome non-members

32 Personal interview. 18 Feb. 2011. 33 Personal interview. 18 Feb. 2011.

23 of the community, these Gujarati-American groups are becoming a large part of the

American multicultural discourse. With India being physically far away, these events provide a culturally rich experience for Indians and non-Indians alike34 that helps

Gujarati-Americans further define their identity while simultaneously showing others a facet of their hyphenated community.

Since garba functions both as a religio-cultural event as well as a social event as mentioned earlier, it could be part of the public and private spheres. Family and friends attend garba, so it includes a mixture of both networks. It’s the most versatile event for my participants, so it provides great opportunity for identity negotiation. The fact that there are members of the community that don’t attend even though they’re linked to garba through their organizations shows that they don’t need this facet of their identity.

They don’t attend because their friends don’t, so clearly garba is only a social function for them. If a Gujarati-American views garba as more than a social function, they will always attend whereas for those who view garba for social purposes won’t attend without a network of friends.

Pujas and the private sphere

Puja ceremonies contrast the garba because they are entirely within the private sphere, and do not provide the same social networking as the garba and other public events that are on facebook. There are many other ceremonies that are done within the private sphere at home and without virtual networking, and as mentioned in the

34 Joshi, Khyati Y.

24 introduction, it’s the time where families pass down Gujarati rituals and Hindu religious traditions to their American children.

One of the women indicated that she prefers to attend temple services, and she was in the only one besides a USF male who said that she regularly attends temple.

When she brought this up, the other female participant stated that it was only because

“she’s a Brahmin,” so of course she enjoys temple services with her family.35 This was the only time that any reference to caste was brought up in any of my interviews, but also one of the only two times someone said temple was important to their Hindu identity. I did not ask the participants about their caste, so I can’t tell from my data if there is a correlation between Brahmins and temple attendance. These two temple attending participants do put emphasis on attending with family, however, and not networks of friends, so it seems temple is a private facet of their identity.

There is a large part of my participants’ lives that are private and therefore not a part of facebook. Because all of my participants place heavy emphasis on the personal belief system and daily actions of Hinduism, this includes the practices that are done in the home with family. Raksha Bandhan is a ritual of “performing a ceremony where the sisters bless their brothers with well wishes by tying a ‘friendship bracelet-like’ bracelet for good luck. The bracelet is supposed to stay on the brother’s wrist until it falls off on its own.”36 This event is never on facebook because it takes place within the family and is part of the private sphere in expressing Hindu Gujarati identity.

35 Personal interview. 18 Feb. 2011.

36 Personal interview. 25 Feb. 2011.

25 Birthdays and annual ceremonies for those that have passed are other aspects of the private domain. The birthday prayers are “either in the house or at the temple”37 but the puja ceremonies for those that have passed are usually done within the home. These events would not be public in most families since they are very personal and are not larger scale holidays or celebrations. Fasting is another example of an even less public event, since some of my participants’ mothers fast on certain days and are the only family members to do so. Fasting is “kind of like praying where you’re hoping for a better future or something to happen, so fasting once a week shows sacrifice.”38

All participants mention prayer, another part of the private domain, as an integral part of their Hindu identity. Before college, they engaged in prayer with their families before leaving for school or work for the day, and then again in the evenings when everyone came together at home. There are house-cleansing rituals called havans, and there are also puja ceremonies for the three major holidays, along with others. These main three are a part of both the public and private spheres of Hindu Gujarati-American life and have large-scale events that are posted on facebook and have social and religious components, as well as the solely religious puja ceremonies held within the family at home. They’re also the overwhelmingly most common holidays my participants attend and bring up as important within Indian communities in the United States. The private domain does not generally provide space for outsiders to experience this larger ethnoreligious community, but rather more importantly provides an outlet for parents to

37 Personal interview. 25 Feb. 2011. 38 Personal interview. 25 Feb. 2011.

26 teach their children about the Hindu faith and the Gujarati culture since it’s not part of the greater American society.39

Contrasting these large public events are those within the more intimate private domain of the home and family. Puja ceremonies and fasting are not part of the space where culture and religion interact because they are distinctly religious acts. Pujas, fasting, and prayers can either be done solitarily or with family members, and so facebook is never a part of the process. The raksha bandha ceremony is something done with the whole family, but even then there is no social networking to market the event.

These function within the private sphere as an outlet for the parents and family members of the second generation to pass on their religious traditions as they would have done in

India.40 The second generation is given a chance to focus on the religious significance of their familial ethnoreligious community, and to learn about their religion in America but without the possible implications of doing so in a multicultural context. The parents and family instill their religious values and beliefs in an intimate setting so the second generation has an opportunity to experience Hinduism the way the family did, growing up in India.

The private sphere, as shown, aids in the negotiation of the Hindu identity, as well as the Gujarati identity. It contains pujas, havans, raksha bandhan, temple services, birthday prayers, daily prayers, and other ceremonies for the three major holidays. The private domain is more important within the familial aspect of the social networks, and doesn’t include the networks of friends. My participants greatly value the private sphere,

39 Joshi, Khyati Y. 40 Joshi, Khyati Y.

27 and the public domain is not weighted differently in their lives because both are needed to form their sense of self.

Facebook Status: Hindu

Out of the 9 women I interviewed, 7 have Hindu as their religious status on facebook. The 2 outliers do not currently have a religious status and one is from UM and the other from UF. The UM student doesn’t have a religion listed on facebook because she doesn’t have any of her other biographical information filled out, but she still identifies herself as a practicing Hindu.41 The UF grad student has a reason for not having a status, as she doesn’t know how to sum up her mixed feelings towards religion into a “pithy facebook quote.”42 Her status is the only one that has undergone changes, from Hindu to “Hindu” to Atheist and now nothing. Her changes all happened in college, when she began studying religion from the academic viewpoint, and in particular a class on Hinduism.43 The 7 women who identified themselves as Hindu on facebook mostly said that it was because they are “proud to be Hindu, and to show others their faith.”44

Every male identifies himself as Hindu, but when I asked them about their religious status on their facebook profiles, every one of them had to double check. I found this surprising, but one of the males said that he didn’t really pay attention to his profile since for him “facebook isn’t the end all.”45 This is the same participant who engages primarily in activities with the local temple as opposed to larger scale public

41 Personal interview. 10 March 2011. 42 Personal interview. 2 March 2011. 43 Personal interview. 2 March 2011. 44 Personal interview. 18 Feb. 2011. 45 Personal interview. 1 April 2011.

28 events that are marketed through facebook, so he has less emphasis on public events anyways. The male participants obviously don’t use facebook as a way to voice their religious ideals, and may not be as invested in facebook as the females I interviewed, since the women all knew their religious status and why it was so. Also, the fact that it is up to the women to post photos and comments about the dance teams on their facebook pages adds to the evidence that women value facebook as a tool to perform identity more than the men do.

Facebook is obviously playing a larger role for immigrant communities and cultures than other technological advances, which is important for future generations because the faster they become connected with this site, the faster cultural activities are made available to them. Since facebook is so new, one of the women I interviewed commented that “facebook use in India is retarded,” meaning that her family and friends in India use facebook too freely, and don’t realize the implications of posting pictures on the internet that anyone can see.46 Facebook, being founded in the northeastern United

States, obviously will have a learning curve in other countries. I’m interested to know how facebook is used as cultural networking within ethnic communities in India, if it’s used, and how it’s different from those same communities in America, but this could not be done for my honor’s thesis.

For my data, the women being more aware of their religio-cultural status on facebook leads into the idea that they’re more concerned than the men about negotiating their identity within the public sphere. As mentioned earlier, women are also more apt to update the facebook sites of their organizations, so perhaps they take facebook more

46 Personal interview. 15 March 2011.

29 seriously than the men as a valid networking tool. Wanting to share your religious affiliation with larger networks invites questions and conversations from people that are and aren’t of the same belief system, which helps in identity arbitration. Facebook can definitely be used as a tool along with private domain events to help define the religious facet of one’s identity.

Religion and Culture

Not one person that I interviewed thinks that religion and culture are mutually exclusive in their lives, even though the majority of their organizations are cultural and not religious. The most resounding reasoning for this response is that “everything that is said to be cultural has religious roots, from nose piercings to bindis to garba.”47

Everyone had the opinion that with Hinduism and Indian cultural events like garbas,

Diwali, and Holi, even if the religious aspects aren’t celebrated-like the garba on UF’s campus- the religious roots are still there. The UF female graduate student brought up the term “culturally Hindu” as a way of describing religious affiliation, which asserts that the cultural aspects of Hinduism are noted and accepted.48 None of the participants view

Hinduism as strictly a set of principles and beliefs, but extended the idea of being Hindu into their everyday lives and activities.

One of the male USF students used his dad as an example of how religion and culture can clash because “as a Hindu, he talks about accepting all religions,” but if the

Pakistanis are being talked about, then it’s “I hate Pakistanis and Muslims are terrible

47 Personal interview. 25 Feb. 2011. 48 Personal interview. 2 March 2011.

30 people.”49 The student feels that his father has a hard time separating what he’s lived through culturally and his religious ideals that are “simple-but not easy to implement.”50

The grappling that occurs in instances like with this student’s father are in the private space of religious practice, and are some of the most important in delineating one’s belief system. The ideal of Hinduism as an accepting faith is the public belief, but there are many who struggle privately about the details of personal principles.

Both the males as the females made the same reference in that “culture and religion are intertwined for sure because our cultural events have religious backgrounds.”51 One of the UF participants mentioned that his family puts up a

Christmas tree every year, even though they are most definitely not Christians. When I asked him why, he said that “the Christmas tree is part of American culture,” and that his family only does this when they’re in America.52 Obviously, Christmas is a religious holiday, so for it to be labeled as American culture is definitely the intertwining of the two concepts from someone who is American but not Christian.

The HSC president talked about how important it is to question everything that is religiously significant. His understanding is that it’s pointless to “do something when you aren’t sure what it means,” whether it’s a puja in private or a public garba.53 This is part of his struggle in organizing religious events for the members because “the religious significance is so important and yet so few people know.”54 This belief resonates with that of the women I spoke with at UF who felt that Hinduism in America is deteriorating.

49 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 50 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 51 Personal interview. 28 March 2011. 52 Personal interview. 28 March 2011. 53 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 54 Personal interview. 1 April 2011.

31 Another USF male brought up the other side of the coin, that “here in the U.S. there’s more of an open forum” for religion, and that his growing up around a lot of non-Hindus

“expanded [his] own ideals.”55 One of the UF participants agreed with him, since

“maybe [he’s] more open minded because [he] grew up in America.”56

Most of the participants told me that their status as a practicing Hindu had little to do with temple services, and three of the female UF students got into a heated discussion about the corrupt temple politics that go on.57 They also brought up the point that

Gainesville has zero temples, “although it has three mosques,” which makes it even harder for UF students to attend temple services as a community if they were so inclined.58 Instead, these three UF students stated that their personal relationship with

God is more important, and that as long as you abide by the more important beliefs, like

“God is everywhere and in everyone,” that you are a practicing Hindu.59 This lack of temples makes religion more intertwined with culture since religious aspects have to be coupled with daily activities and cultural events.

All of the male participants feel that being a practicing Hindu is more about personal beliefs and praying on a daily basis than attending events within the public sphere. One USF student states that “Hinduism is life,” so it doesn’t matter if you perform certain rituals at specific times, but that you “know and believe in everything you do.”60 A few of the male participants brought up vegetarianism as a way of

55 Personal interview. 18 February 2011. 56 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 57 Personal interview. 3 March 2011. 58 Personal interview. 3 March 2011. 59 Personal interview. 3 March 2011. 60 Personal interview. 1 April 2011.

32 demonstrating their belief system and “treating the universe well.”61 Understanding the connectedness of the divine and oneself and one’s actions carry much more weight than anything else in these men and their Hinduism practices, which provides further evidence that the private practices carry more significance than the public events, and places importance on the interaction between religion and culture.

The males talked about food and alcohol as culturally significant more than the females did. All but one of the males is a vegetarian, and brought this fact up without me asking about it. The meat-eater said that his family is fine with his diet in America, but when they visit India he “has to hide the evidence that he eats it.”62 Alcohol was brought up as a taboo thing in India, and that the participants could never tell their family in India about their legal drinks, whereas family in America is more comfortable with it (only with the male child, however). Food and alcohol is definitely important in the discussion of culture, and my data shows that the men have more freedom in choices than the women.

Religion and culture are clearly not mutually exclusive terms within this ethnoreligious community. There is no way to cleanly separate Hinduism from Gujarati culture for these participants, since there are so many cultural values worked into their understanding of the Hindu faith. Aspects like food and alcohol seem to be more cultural than religious, especially since they’re uneven components of males and females. Since my participants all grew up in America, this takes the paper into the next section of

Hinduism in America because the American culture has an impact of the Hinduism my participants are familiar with.

61 Personal interview. 24 March 2011. 62 Personal interview. 18 February 2011.

33

Hinduism in America

As a part of the American discourse, all participants decided that in this country there is more exposure to other faiths and traditions, which can make it tough for Indian-

Americans to “focus on Hinduism alone.”63 Comparatively in India, Hinduism is everywhere you go, and “there are temples on every street corner.”64 This doesn’t always produce more positive effects, however, as “people don’t know what rituals mean, so they can be practicing religion blindly.”65 Hinduism and its practices are almost too accessible in India as contrasted with people having to try to find Hinduism in America, as evidenced by the non-existent temples in Gainesville despite the large Hindu population.

About half of the participants had defined their Hindu religious status as a purely personal practice, and one that involves praying every day and getting guidance from parents about spirituality and daily practices. They decided that for them it wouldn’t really matter if they were in America or not, that they would still hold the same beliefs and practice in the same way. Two of the UF ISA members did, however, bring up the fact that religious holidays through Indian cultural events are geared away from religious roots in order to get more people to attend.66 They did acknowledge that this was “from the viewpoint of an organization,” which is within the public domain, and that not every member of ISA or the dance teams are Hindu, so for some there really is no religious

63 Personal interview. 15 March 2011. 64 Personal interview. 25 Feb. 2011. 65 Personal interview. 3 March 2011. 66 Personal interview. 3 March 2011.

34 significance.67 The UF grad student brought up the issue that Hinduism within the

American multiculturalism discourse is a “specific form that centers on the belief of a certain God-and a singular God.”68 Events like India Fest where people gather to sell

Indian food and clothing and perform Indian dances “commodifies the Indian culture and traditions” to make it fit into American culture and it’s views about religion.69

These larger events were also criticized for providing people to “show how Indian they are to family and friends” by showing off outfits from India, makeup and jewelry from India, and their dance moves.70 Judging by the overwhelming amount of pictures and comments on facebook events after them, there is definitely evidence for this reasoning. One garba I attended at UF in fall 2010 had an intermission-since the arti couldn’t be performed on campus-and there was popular music being played. I overheard a few of the ISA members talking about how it was inappropriate and that it was “bad enough they couldn’t hold a puja,” and that this music just made it even worse. This could have been a statement to assert their Indian-ness, but it also could have been genuine concern over the garba itself.

The participants all mentioned their parents having a large role with their upbringing in an Indian culture and religion. About half even say that their closest friends are children of their parents’ closest friends in America. That being said, three of the female UF students also brought up the fact that once you enter college and move away from home it’s “up to you to carry on the teachings that parents instilled in you.”71

67 Personal interview. 3 March 2011. 68 Personal interview. 2 March 2011. 69 Personal interview. 2 March 2011. 70 Personal interview. 2 March 2011. 71 Personal interview. 3 March 2011.

35 These three women told me about some of their friends that “went wild” in college because “the strict parents aren’t around anymore.”72 Two of these women are seniors while one is a junior, so the seniors are winding down their undergraduate years and have more free time, but don’t choose to spend it in ways their parents would deem inappropriate.

Three females from USF told me about an HSC puja event that they attended at

UF when the organization was still active. They went to a puja for Diwali that was being held by the graduate students of HSC, and were appalled at what they encountered. All during the puja, members were texting, talking, and “acting so rude-like they were only there to tell their parents they went to puja and not for the devotion.”73 The women left directly after the puja-skipping the meal following the service because they were so frustrated. The women interpreted this as the “deterioration of Hinduism today” where

Hindus don’t know or care to know about the significance of days like Diwali.74

Interestingly, HSC was the one organization where members and even officers didn’t necessarily trace their ancestry back to India. HSC attracted members from the

Caribbean and other areas of the world, so does that mean the aspect of “deterioration” isn’t Indian, but that it’s purely Hindu? Or does it have something to do with the fact that puja is more successful in the private sphere instead of the public sphere? To research these questions, the presence of puja in the public sphere needs to be looked at in

America, India, and other Hindu areas of the world.

72 Personal interview. 3 March 2011. 73 Personal interview. 3 March 2011. 74 Personal interview. 3 March 2011.

36 Everything cultural and religious in this country is deemed “much more

Americanized,” versus in India where it’s all “grounded in real, colorful life.”75 One of the UF participants said that his white friends view events like India Fest that are geared towards outsiders as “exotic events,” whereas to him and his team “it’s just raas, and we’re just dancing.”76 If the participants in these events are solely focused on their art form, then does it commodify their ‘exotic’ art within the multiculturalism discourse, as asserted by the female UF graduate student? This student claims that it does not, but he said that he has “never really thought about it like this before.”77

This data demonstrates that both the men and women of the second generation

Gujarati-American ethnoreligious community in Florida value family greatly, and spend most of their time with other members of their community whether in public or private spaces. Their lives are transnational since they have family and friends in India and the

UK, mostly, and their families raise them according to Gujarati culture. Growing up in

America means that they are part of the multiculturalism in this country, and that they have more freedom than their parents did when they were young and in India. Culture and religion cannot be separated for any of my participants, so being a Gujarati-American

Hindu is something that can’t be dissected without losing meaning. Involvement in

Indian ethnic organizations is one way to publicly maintain the Gujarati aspect of their identity, since the Hindu part is usually negotiated with the family in private space.

75 Personal interview. 1 April 2011. 76 Personal interview. 28 March 2011. 77 Personal interview. 28 March 2011.

37 Conclusion

During my interviews, I was careful to pose questions that did not indirectly assert my own personal preconceptions. Since it’s impossible to conduct analysis without preconceptions, the first step is acknowledging this fact and that I have my own lens. As an American Catholic, I can understand the process of negotiating a religio-cultural identity, but I also realize that everyone’s development is strictly their own. Having close

Gujarati friends and attending Samaj events in the Tampa area makes me more aware of the ethnoreligious community, and also shows my participants that I am not approaching this study from an academic perspective only. With ethnographic studies, it’s crucial to maintain loyalty both to academia and the group in question. Reporting without demonizing or romanticizing aspects of a community leads to a descriptive research approach instead of a prescriptive one, and with smaller scale research in an undergraduate thesis it’s impossible to generalize these results into a broad scale anyways.

There is also consideration for the observer’s paradox, which is a concern for any interview-based study. When people are interviewed, it’s impossible for them to provide completely accurate answers, as we are statistically not reliable sources of data. By interviewing fourteen people, I try to provide enough data to account for this theory.

Also, basing research off facts such as the percentage of Gujarati members in particular organizations and within their social networks provides for more accurate response. I do realize that the questions revolving religion, culture, and American society are tough to ask and just as challenging to answer. By attending events within the community I am investigating, I give myself more time and space to take this paradox into account.

38 The ethnoreligious community in question, Hindu Gujarati-Americans, definitely exemplifies Khyati Joshi’s research in that they structure events so that religion and culture can be practiced and celebrated in the same event within the same space.78 The larger events that take place during the three most popular holidays are the best examples of this interaction between both culture and religion, and fact that the facebook event pages are geared towards outsiders of the ethnoreligious community. Participants like myself who come to garba with friends that are members of the community attend to be part of something socially and culturally, instead of the religious aspect that follows of the Hindu faith focus on. These events are definitely part of the public domain of these communities, and part of the public sphere is outreaching to other people who are interested in their religio-cultural identities. Garba provides space to negotiate what it means to be Gujarati, as it’s a dance that originates in , India, but also allows for the American identity as the garba is publicized and there are always non-members of the ethnoreligious group present. By marketing the events associated with the three prominent holidays, the Gujarati community becomes part of the larger American multicultural discourse.

The public domain of the ethnoreligious community in question is focused around networks of friends and university organizations and events. Public events provide space for social function and the Gujarati and American facets of identity, whereas the private domain is family based and is geared more towards Gujarati and Hindu aspects of self.

Both domains are needed in the process of negotiating identity, as they focus on the two important networks of the participants’ lives. The private sphere events don’t provide for

78 Joshi, Khyati Y.

39 social networking like the public events do, but instead allow the family to instill important Hindu practices and Gujarati traditions that aren’t accessible through the

American multicultural discourse. Of course the two spheres aren’t mutually exclusive, just like culture and religion aren’t. Within American culture, there is more freedom in identity than in India, but it’s more pronounced for men than for women. These participants are using every aspect of their daily lives to further their own personal exploration of growing up a Hindu Gujarati-American member of society.

With the novelty of facebook, there’s less research since it hasn’t been around enough to study the past and present of the social networking site. Facebook plays such a large role within the Gujarati-American community in Florida, and other virtual sites are important for Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, and other faiths, that it’s important we pay attention to how these websites are affecting our immigration and assimilation trends.

For UF, USF, and UM in Florida alone, the Indian organizations rely heavily on facebook, meaning that as soon as a Gujarati-American moves to Florida they should join the site to be connected with their ethnoreligious community. Although the private domain is not conducted via facebook, it’s necessary to be social with members of the community in a public event before you can become part of the private sphere. By assessing the use of facebook within these organizations, this honor’s thesis shows that there’s a lot to learn about the Gujarati-American ethnoreligious group and the members’ hyphenated identity negotiation within the public and the private spheres.

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