Navigating South Asian/Desi Identity in Silicon Valley

• In Event: South Asians in/and America: Engaging Solidarities, Specificities, and Intersections in Educational Research in Troubled Times

Abstract

Objectives
Given that Silicon Valley has its own sets of cultural values and social contexts (Shankar, 2008), I address how the experience of being a teacher educator in Silicon Valley has shaped my identity and survivance as a cis-gendered South Asian American woman with disabilities. I use critical autoethnography to juxtapose the messiness of colonialism, liminality, border crossings, and the complexity of survivance.

Perspectives, Framework, and Method
Drawing from Homi Bhabha’s (1994) notion of third space, I highlight how oscillations between several cultural and social identities come together in uneven, complex ways within the framework of critical autoethnography (Ellis, Adams, & Bochner, 2011). In my autoethnography, I play with this juxtaposition to explore how ableism, patriarchy, colonialism, communal expectations, and transnational identity development played and continues to play a role in schooling and in hidden and overt curriculum and pedagogy.

I moved to the West Coast of the United States when I was a sophomore in high school. Before that, I was in a town about 90 miles north of Boston, Massachusetts in a racially, economically and linguistically diverse community. When my family moved to the suburbs of Portland, Oregon, in 1999, I attended a predominantly white high school, and was one of two South Asian students at the entire school (the other, consequentially, was my younger sister). Navigating identity as South Asian in a predominantly white space left me conflicted about sense of belonging. The frustration of the three years I spent at this school propelled me back to Boston into a racially diverse college filled with other South Asian students. I focus on the influence and trajectory of schooling in relation to identity development, disability, isolation, racism, patriarchy, and communal expectations.

Research from post-1965 immigration describes how many South Asian (Desi) settled into other ethnic enclaves in California but had limited opportunities to be seen as Desi in public and remained socially marginalized. While early Desi immigrants in California struggled to maintain an identity, Shankar (2008) explains that many early first-generation South Asians used the expression, American Born Confused Desi (ABCD) to describe the tension that existed between their cultural clashes, particularly for home and school. This was certainly how I grew up, born in the United States to Indian parents, constantly in conflict about my cultural and social identity and raised in cultural spaces that pathologize disability while normalizing the resultant ableist forms of oppression.

Last year, I began working as a special education professor in Silicon Valley, which breaks the cultural stereotypes and expectations of acceptable professions for Desi people. Shankar (2008), in Desi Land, describes how Silicon Valley juxtaposes two places: “the promise of technology-dangled dreams of success and…a place of deep-seated racism and prejudice” (p. 2).

Significance
As a teacher educator, I am compelled to interrogate dominant discourses in the overt curriculum and structures of oppression in the hidden curriculum. This autoethnography rejects essentialization, stereotyping from within and outside communal spaces, and offers decolonial possibilities in teacher education from culturally and socially inclusive perspectives.

Author

• Saili S. Kulkarni, San Jose State University