Gendered Ethnicity: Creating a Hindu Indian Identity in the United States

Based on a study of three Hindu Indian religio-cultural organizations whose members live in and around a metropolitan area in California, this article examines the central role played by gender in the creation of ethnic communities and cultures among Hindu Indian immigrants. Gender relations and constructs are reworked during the course of immigration and settlement and are crucial to the Hindu American ethnicity developed in the United States. The author argues that migration and settlement result in an interrelated but distinct sequence of gendered processes at three analytical levels—the household, the local ethnic community, and the pan-Indian umbrella organizations. The processes occurring at the three levels intermesh in a complicated and contradictory dynamic. The contradictions are manifested in the construction of gendered ethnicity and in gender practice, particularly at the organizational level.