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

by Shalini Shankar

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.

Genres: Anthropology, Race, Nonfiction

264 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2008

About the author

Shalini Shankar is Professor of Anthropology and Asian American Studies at Northwestern University. Her expertise and interests include youth, language, media, race & ethnicity, South Asian diaspora, and Asian American Studies.

Reviews

[Rohit · Rating 3 out of 5]

Interesting and often amusing sociological study of South Asian American teenagers in Silicon Valley. My own biases made me enjoy the initial few chapters more, as they were less about talking to the kids and their antics and more about getting a general look at the political economy of Silicon Valley and the changing positions of South Asian immigrants. The actual details of the kids' lives will hit close to home for most Desis who grew up in the San Francisco Bay Area (perhaps a little too close to home!), although this book gets more dated as time goes on--things are somewhat different now than they were in the 1990s, which is when the majority of the interviews and analysis in this book are from.

[Hannah Emery · Rating 4 out of 5]

I read this as a reference text for a South Asian teen character in my current writing project, and it served that need admirably; I feel as though I'm walking away with a much better understanding of the culture the young woman in my story may have come out of. The book's also a solid ethnography on its own merits, with good background information about the culture being surveyed and very strong depictions of teens from a variety of Desi subcultures. I would have liked to see a little more self-reflection on the author's part about her own experience as a South Asian interviewing South Asian immigrant parents and first-generation students, but overall, I thought this was a solid text. From a research methods perspective, I also appreciated the inclusion of interview questions at the end.

[Mariam Rawwas · Rating 4 out of 5]

An ethnography of Desi high schoolers in the Bay Area in the late '90s, in the midst of the dot-com bubble. The title seeks to conjure up Disneyland, the context-setting signaling Baudrillardian ambitions in its reflections on American culture. But the ethnographic work is far more down-to-earth, largely tackling high school politics and cultural consumptive practices, at the intersection of class, race, religion, gender, etc. In some sense, I appreciate just how focused the study is, able as it is to cut across the diasporic populations gathered under that heading "Desi," but the zoomed-in and zoomed-out portions of the text never feel like they truly synchronize into a cohesive whole. It seems as though much broader claims want to be made—about the American dream, about immigrant populations and their relation to the US and its culture more broadly—but it is always left unclear just how much extrapolation is possible from such a tight case study.

[Priya · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have been reading a lot of ethnographic research or research-inspired books this year, to understand how it's written, but this ended up more pleasure reading than anything else. A couple of notes -
- The interviews are from the 90s. I'm not sure how relevant they are now, but they don't claim to be. As an Indian living in the Indian subcontinent, I have no skin in the game and wouldn't know what is and isn't accurately captured. It was very interesting nonetheless.
- During my years as a school teacher, I had taught several students whose families had shifted to Bangalore after a few decades in the US. I found shades of them in many of the experiences described.

[Elevate Difference · Rating 4 out of 5]

Desi Land, Shalini Shankar’s ethnographic exploration of Desi teenagers in Silicon Valley during the late 1990s, is a fascinating look at South Asian American youth culture at a pivotal moment in modern American history.

The setting of the book makes it particularly compelling: California during the dot-com boom, when a confluence of "model minorities" are populating an increasingly profitable and technologically advanced work force. The combination of South Asian economic liberalization and American cultural capital creates a generation of Desi Land teenagers who are consumers of both traditional American pop culture and increasingly popular Bollywood and other South Asian music and movies. The teenagers deal with both pressure to be Americanized and encouragement (and desire) to express their cultural identities, with the caveat that they fit neatly into school-sponsored "Cultural Days" and do not disturb the white hegemony of their schools or communities.

The highly particular nature of this book belies its richness; Shankar delves deeply into the interplay of race, class, gender and social status. Desi Land determines its subjects' class in social and economic contexts, and defines teens as either middle class or upper middle class according to a set of criteria that includes "the type of work their parents do, whether both parents work, and their parents' level of education, English proficiency, neighborhood, home, cars, and lifestyle." The students are also defined by the terms "FOBby" (from the acronym for "fresh off the boat") or "popular," depending on their social standing at school. Gender also plays a pivotal role in the life experiences of the teens in Desi Land, and Shankar does an admirable, if understated, job of relating the additional set of conflicting expectations placed on the young women she interviews.

Shankar sympathetically recounts the teens' experiences in schools, family life, social and religious activities, and romantic relationships, as well as their hopes and dreams for the future, all with a researcher’s eye for patterns of behavior and belief, and a fellow South Asian's firsthand understanding and empathetic detail. This book’s vibrancy and immediacy, even a decade later, make it an absorbing read for anyone interested in cultural studies.

Review by Jennifer Wedemeier

[Mike Mena · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent linguistic anthropology ethnography. Accessible to non-linguistic anthro people and overall an accessible and exciting book. For those interested in youth, class, race, indexicality, stereotypes, silicon valley cultures.