Minhaz Kahn — the UC-Riverside alumnus who last week had to show immigration officers that he bought a one-way ticket back to his native Bangladesh — learned Tuesday that he doesn’t have to return home just yet. He will be able to stay in the country for another three months…[T]op federal counsel told a group of American Immigration Lawyers Association attorneys in a meeting last week that they will not automatically grant a stay for all other DREAM Act eligible immigrants who are awaiting deportation, says AILA attorney Leah Price. [SFWeekly]

I had the chance for a virtual sit-down with Minhaz right after the ankle bracelet was placed on him a couple of weeks ago. Here’s what he had to say.

When and why did your family come to the United States?

My family came in 1992 to flee danger. My dad left entrepreneurial success and political influence to work at gas stations and my mom left a teaching career and lost all significance her Master’s held, so to anyone who says immigrants come here to take anything from anyone is missing what many people have to leave behind for safety and the possibility of a better future.

Why wasn’t your father able to seek political asylum? What happened after he was deported?

I’m not completely sure why he wasn’t granted asylum. I never got to see the judge’s decision, but I think he missed an interview or something due to a lawyer not notifying him. After he was deported in 1997, he died (or in my whole-hearted belief, murdered) a couple of years later.

You’ve lived in the United States your whole life – why are you being deported now?

After my father left, my mother continued to try to legalize our status but further complications with shady people left us in limbo. By this time, I was headed off to college and legal status fell by the wayside of more immediate problems. Eventually this caught up with us, ICE raided out home at 4am in a September 2009. Since then, we were released under Order of Supervision and we were able to attempt to pursue steps to adjust our status but would report every 3 months. We still have things pending when I decided to move to SF to pursue better educational opportunities and asked to have my case transferred to the SF ICE office. It went smoothly, I even checked in with SF ICE and was let go. Then, they called me to come back in and told me I had to buy a plane ticket and that they were going to enforce my deportation and put an ankle bracelet on me until the 18th, when my flight would take place.

You’ve been a Dream Activist and are technically eligible for the California Dream Act. Why do you think this is important?

This country benefits when educational access is based on academic merit. That means, no matter your legal status, if you are a good student, you deserve the opportunity to continue that. I’ve been lucky to get through school but other undocumented students have even tougher circumstances. the CA DREAM Act gives access to already established funds to students who need it. It does not take away from citizens because those funds are already set aside based on high school graduation rates.5. For my mom, I’m sure it was financially tough. For me, I am not sure, I don’t have anything to compare it to. My childhood was interesting, we lived paycheck to paycheck, it wasn’t easy for my mom to get jobs. But I definitely feel I appreciate things more but you can say that about anyone who grew up relatively poor and especially undocumented families.

How has your mom dealt with all of this and how has she been able to keep it together?

 I really don’t know. She is a strong, if stubborn, woman.

You are studying neuroscience. what do you want to do with that?

I really wanted to get involved with research and I got a small taste of that at UCLA, but with my current situation needs me to consider work opportunities over that. So, I was trying to get a few classes I need to get into a PA program and have a stable career and then maybe pursue teaching science and math part-time later on down the line.

I thought only Paris Hilton and Lindsay Lohan wore ankle bracelets – how’s it feel to have that thing on your ankle? What are the rules around it?

It’s annoying. I literally had to scurry to drive home tonight to charge it before I began responding to you. It is my responsibility to take care of it and keep it charged (2 hours each day) otherwise I get in trouble. It is considered leniency, an “alternative to detention.” I cannot go outside of 65 mile radius of my address and I have to stay home one day a week for them to come check up on me, and also spend one day a week going to their office to check in. It also hurts like hell on my ankle bones without socks on. Sometimes it doesn’t work right, and beeps all night even though it’s been charged over and over. It’s run by a third party private company.

What have you learned from the process?

A lot. I follow the legal process a lot and I learn something new each time, but I only know one path right now: my own. Experienced lawyers have seen them all. Getting a good lawyer is hard. My current lawyer is awesome and truly fights for me, but I have had lawyers who are just salespeople with a diploma.

What can people do to help?

An ICE Chief Counsel is considering a package my attorney has sent them to jointly request my case be dropped. In the future, I might need support to get attention from Congressional offices. But what people can really do is keep in mind what is happening, and that my case is just a sample of what’s going on to others. Private companies are influencing the laws being passed in this country and then profiting off of people’s fears, ignorance and suffering.

Congrats to Minhaz and his lawyers for being able to gain the temporary stay. It doesn’t end here – Minhaz’s story is just one of many cases out there highlighting issues with Dream Act eligible students that are being forced into deportation proceedings after living in the U.S. their whole lives. One thing is clear – the immigration system is clearly backlogged and broken, no matter what side of the aisle you believe in. Reform is needed. Please follow Dream Activist to follow the latest stories from this movement.

Speaking of desis at Occupy Wall Street, last week I chatted with Arun Gupta, one of the founders of the Occupied Wall Street Journal. Gupta, who talked with me on the phone from a road trip to visit different sites of protest, has been working with newspapers off and on for the past two decades, and writes for publications like AlterNet and Al Jazeera. He’s also been with the Indypendent for the past 11 years. He told me about making the first issue of the Occupied Wall Street Journal happen in under 24 hours.

(Time-sensitive note for New Yorkers: If you want to hear more from Gupta, The New Yorker’s editor, David Remnick, is moderating a discussion about OWS tonight at Florence Gould Hall in NYC. 7 p.m. In addition to Gupta, the event features NYer staff writers John Cassidy and Jill Lepore, as well as former NY governor Eliot Spitzer. Online tickets are gone, but a limited number of free tickets will be available at the door.) And a BONUS read via Sonny Singh: Manissa McCleave Maharawal in conversation with Eliot Spitzer about OWS in NYMag, here. I blogged about Manissa earlier in this series.)

Gupta is no longer involved with the publication—he said he needs to refocus on the Indypendent, as well as his road trip to see all the different Occupy protests. But he told me a little bit about the founding of the newspaper, which he called the only polished media outlet in terms of getting out the perspectives of the people in Zuccotti Park.

At first, OWSJ’s founders wanted to pursue publishing the newspaper via the processes afforded by the protest’s General Assembly, or its media working group. However, he said, they quickly realized this wouldn’t work: agreeing on messaging would be too difficult and slow for a publication to react to events quickly. “There’s a value to having this media where you can react in real time,” he said. So instead, they set it up as an affinity group that operated autonomously and by consensus; technically, the OWSJ is not an official publication of OWS.

The first issue, Gupta said, wasn’t too hard to do, because it was put together with the aid of preexisting content and some strong photographers. It was funded via a Kickstarter campaign that aimed for $12,000 in 10 days and instead raked in $75,000. “It was just a wild success,” he said. (Each issue costs $4,000 to $5,000.) An artist contacted them to work on a spread of people holding signs. The resulting publication was a four-page tabloid. (See links to the past three issues of the Occupied Wall Street Journal here.)

At that size, Gupta would prefer to see it come out more frequently, perhaps with two issues a week, but publication has slowed. (Issues came out Oct. 1, Oct. 8, and Oct. 22. I spoke to Gupta after the second issue had come out, but before the third.) “Things can change dramatically within a couple of days down there,” he said. “I think you have to engage with the public in a regular fashion.”

Experience with the Indypendent led them to believe that a free print publication was the best way to connect with a large audience. “As print disappears the more important individual publications become, especially if you’re doing real journalism…. The public is hungry for real journalism,” he said. Subscriber-based publications and the Web are both self-selecting, he added, but of course, a free publication reaches a wider audience. The first issue’s first printing was 50,000 copies; a second printing added another 20,000. The second issue was another 50,000; they also printed 20,000 copies of a Spanish-language translation of the first issue.

Experience with the Indypendent led them to believe that a free print publication was the best way to connect with a large audience.

Now that he has stepped back from helping with the OWSJ, he is traveling around with the aim of interviewing Occupy protestors. I asked him what he was hearing and seeing in different spots. He noted the wide range of opinions. People he has interviewed at various sites agreement that something wasn’t working, he said, but opinions on solutions varied wildly. “I think this movement has a lot of potential to affect social, cultural, and ideological change, but it’s going to take a logn time for it to do that,” he said. He added that in recent years, some leftists movements have appeared and disappeared quickly; he posited that the left often struggles to get the resources that would sustain such change. Leftist groups “certainly punch above their weight, but still the resources are just so small and everyone is scraping for every penny they can get,” he added. For OWS to be different will take time.

*

When—in light of my previous posts about the people of color working group and some of its members—I asked him about race and the protests, he referenced his recent appearance on Democracy Now, where he faced off against Kai Wright. (As Unions, Students Join Occupy Wall Street, Are We Witnessing Growth of a New Movement? (Democracy Now video, featuring Arun Gupta and Kai Wright, plus transcript).) An excerpt from a piece Wright penned for Colorlines prior to the Democracy Now appearance (and which he annotated later):

There are literally millions of people who have been kicked out of their homes, laid off or forced to work multiple part-time jobs, caught in predatory debt traps and, yes, so harassed by cops that they have petty criminal records that make them unemployable. These millions are neither lobbying Congress nor marching across the Brooklyn Bridge; they’re trying to make it through the week without another crisis. They are also overwhelmingly and not in the least bit coincidentally black people. And I suspect that until we build our politics around their participation, we will continue to miss the point. Everyone will continue to suffer as a result. Well, everyone except the Wall Street fat cats who have gone right on with their theft throughout their occupation. [full piece, Here's to Occupying Wall Street! (If Only That Were Actually Happening)]

Gupta argued that Wright’s take missed the point of the protests, which have no leadership to do the sort of outreach Wright suggests; instead, Gupta said, OWS has created a space. Early on, the protestors counted few New Yorkers and few people of color among their number; now, he said, New Yorkers and people of color are organizing and using the huge platform that OWS affords. “Yes, if you go down there you are going to be dealing with people’s white-skin privilege, but so what?” he asked. “We have to struggle with this and deal with it”—engage in a principled fashion, he added, not sit on the sidelines or dismiss it. When he went to the protests in its earliest days, he said, it did not include many members of the New York left. “The movement was a rejoinder to everyone’s failed politics,” he said. “I include the left in this.”

Related links:

Occupying, and Now Publishing, Too (NYT.com)

India Abroad cover, featuring desis at Occupy Wall Street (including Sonny Singh!) and more Arun Gupta in the associated story

Personal sidenote: I recently signed on to OccupyWriters. Check out the full list of signatories and original works by Francine Prose, Lemony Snicket, D.A. Powell, Duncan Murrell, Anne Waldman, Danica Novgorodoff and Michael Voll, Maureen Miller, Daphne Carr, Alice Walker, Paula Z. Segal, John McManus, David Hollander, Blair Braverman, Scott Sparling, and Joshua Cohen at Occupy Writers.

When I first talked to Sonny Singh, Thanu Yakupitage, Manissa McCleave Maharawal and Hena Ashraf about two weeks ago, Occupy Wall Street was just gaining steam, and I was newly intrigued by what I’d heard of the quartet’s intervention to eliminate post-racial language from the OWS declaration.

Talking about one of her earliest visits to the protests, Manissa McCleave Maharawal told me, “It felt like a space where people were talking about things.”  But, she added, “it needs to be thinking about the role of people of color.” When the post-racial language came up, she said, “I think there was an urgency to it.

“I didn’t want that line to be published because I knew that it would prevent me from being as fully on board with this movement as I had been, and it would prevent other people like me from getting fully on board,” she said. “I want to be able to bring my people down here.”

And eventually, they did. A recent POC working group meeting saw more than 100 attendees. Maharawal, a longtime activist who is also a CUNY anthropology graduate student, says part of the protest’s appeal for her has been the pull of the space. “It feels like it’s changing all the time,” she added. “It feels organized and disorganized at once.”

And, she added, it also felt open to growth. While the change didn’t go through without debate, by fighting for it, they were able to get it done. For Maharawal, who had never spoken in front of such a large group before, it was intense—especially because these were people she wanted on her side. “I don’t think any one of us would have been able to do that if there hadn’t been five or us there, four of us there—it was so important that we were all together,” she said.

Thanu Yakupitiyage had gone to the General Assembly the evening before the intervention and heard one person talk about the need to be in solidarity with people of color, with queer people. “But I didn’t see that reflected in who was speaking,” she said. The post-racial language caught the attention of the four of them, as well as a few others.

“It was trying to talk about unity but it was completely negating and neglecting the experiences of oppressed people,” she said. “Why in order to be completely united do we need to erase difference? …What bothered me about that paragraph was that I didn’t think that this was a movement that could grow if it was starting from such a naïve place…. If you want to use the slogan ‘another world is possible’ you have to acknowledge the realities of today.”

To get their change passed, the four of them had to declare it as an “ethical objection.” Hundreds of people turned to look at them. “We were so visible,” Yakupitiyage recalled.

UPDATE, FRIDAY MORNING: Brookfield, the private owner of the park, has postponed the cleaning. See a story on The New York Times website. However, my own Facebook feed still has information about confrontations between police and protestors… Waiting for more. Reuters has a blog of Occupy events in different locations: see this. 

Are you at Occupy Wall Street or another protest? Send us your images and tell us what’s in them: v_v@sepiamutiny.com

Story to be continued…

I no longer live in New York, and I was following the Occupy Wall Street movement only vaguely when last week, something on FB caught my attention… and kept it. It was a lengthy note by Hena Ashraf, chronicling how she and a few other desis had gone down to Liberty Square on Thursday night and argued to change some of the language in Occupy Wall Street’s primary declaration.

I recognized some of the names in her story from my own time in New York: Sonny Singh (of, among other things, Red Baraat) and Thanu Yakupitiyage, an immigrant rights activist who is also a Lanka Solidarity member. And another, whom I didn’t know: Manissa McCleave Maharawal. These four, it seemed, had formed the posse primarily responsible for the intervention that had me riveted.

Here’s how it looks in the Occupy Wall Street notes:

Block 4—Grievance in supporting a document that claims that my oppression on the basis of gender, sexual orientation, religion, and things not mentioned on this document are something that happened formerly and not in the present day.

Response: This can be addressed.  The document says that these divisions have formerly happened.  We know they happen now, that’s why we’re writing it this way.  This document is saying “we want to leave this shit in the past where it belongs to create a new America, world, new society, where everyone is equal.”  We do not mean to ignore present-day issues.  It was drafted so we can leave that behind.

Block 5—That phrase erases so much history of oppression, it is idealistic, not realistic.  We still think it should be changed, and we think it’s an ethical issue.

Response: Rephrase, “formerly divided” so we can have what you would like to see written.  Then the working group can decide whether we want to move to consensus without it.

Let’s all relax!

We appreciate the process, we appreciate everything you’ve done, we want a small verb change, we feel it is an ethical matter.

“As one people, despite divisions of color of our skin…”

Response: We’re fine with that.  Let’s meet after and decide which phrasing to use.

Block withdrawn.

And here’s a snippet of what it felt like, from Manissa’s point of view:

Let me tell you what it feels like to stand in front of a white man and explain privilege to him. It hurts. It makes you tired. Sometimes it makes you want to cry. Sometimes it is exhilarating. Every single time it is hard. Every single time I get angry that I have to do this, that this is my job, that this shouldn’t be my job. Every single time I am proud of myself that I’ve been able to say these things because I used to not be able to and because some days I just don’t want to. 

And from Hena’s:

Long story short, we got the paragraph changed to adequately address our concerns that it reflect issues around dynamics of power and privilege that marginalized people feel every single day. This was a very hard discussion to have, and it felt so real, it hurt. It hurt that it had to happen, it hurt that we had to explain what is really behind racism to this man, and the people around him, it hurt that so many tried to disrupt us. But at the same time, we were meant to be there, meant to be heard, to make this happen, to make these changes occur. And there were a lot of people sitting there and listening in and contributing constructively. We walked away realizing what we had just done – spontaneously come together, demand change, and create it, in a movement that we are in solidarity with, but also feel a need for constructive criticism.

How many activities and movements or even conversations have I forgone, thinking that they had no space for me? How many times have I thought that some purportedly progressive activity wasn’t even considering anyone like me? How many times have I walked away, rather than saying anything, because I was bone-tired?

Thanu-Sonny-Manissa-Hena-anyone else who was there: THANK YOU, THANK YOU, THANK YOU—

I can’t embed this one, but if you go to about the 53:30 mark, you can actually see the post-General Assembly discussion (thanks, Manissa, for pointing this out).

All four of them chatted with me, so stay tuned for an update, or Part II!

Franz Kline's New York

I had been asleep when the first plane hit the World Trade Center’s North Tower. What woke me was the sound of my wife sobbing. A phone call had come from India, from an editor, asking me to write. So, that is how we learned about what had happened.

The piece I wrote that day had some anger in it, anger not only at the hijackers but at the Americans. This was the kind of thing that would be called “the chicken coming home to roost” argument. A few days later, in the New Yorker issue dedicated to September 11, with its famous black cover designed by Art Spiegelman, I read a piece by Amitav Ghosh. His brief essay told the story of a man, an engineer involved in the design of the Twin Towers, staying back in the building to help people escape. The man and his wife, both of whom worked in the destroyed buildings, were Ghosh’s neighbors. And Ghosh’s piece was filled with a kind of sad tenderness that made me feel ashamed about my rage. I felt as if I had arrived drunk at a funeral.

That feeling would change. It would change around the time the first bombs began falling on Afghanistan. Or maybe even before, when I read pieces by writers like Arundhati Roy, offering sympathy for the victims of the attacks but not flinching from offering critique, including of the role that the Americans had played in funding the Taliban in their strategic fight against the Soviets. The change had certainly come by the time I read another piece in the New Yorker, this one by Akhil Sharma. Titled “Bonus,” this brilliant piece only briefly invoked the attacks but so deftly did it portray their appearance and disappearance amidst financial calculations in the mind of a Wall Street executive, that it served a reminder that the necessarily sentimental piece written by Ghosh wasn’t the only way to represent September 11.

So, right from the beginning, the attacks and the question of one’s proper response to it had been a problem for me. I began teaching a class that I’d call the “literature of 9/11.” I wanted to understand the different responses to the attacks and the fateful consequences.

An important part of the impulse behind this has been my search for other voices, voices from India and Pakistan, for instance. I have used books like Mohsin Hamid’s Reluctant Fundamentalist or H.M. Naqvi’s Home Boy to, well, provincialize the monumental sense of grief that Americans often have about the attacks of 9/11. We need to ask ourselves about the other lives that were destroyed by the attacks, not on that day, but through the changes that followed.

In recent years, my course has focused on linking what happened on that bright September morning to everything else that has followed, for example, the image of a man in an orange suit kneeling in a cage in Guantanamo. Last semester, when I taught this course, I included in the syllabus a reading of two excellent works of reportage from the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq: David Finkel’s The Good Soldiers and Dexter Filkins’s The Forever War. From this perspective, what happened on that Tuesday a decade ago seems impossibly distant. We are now stuck in the quagmire of war and intolerable suffering.

When I was an undergraduate in Delhi three decades ago the prescribed reading for us was Kamala Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve. The novel wasn’t very good. I think it was in the syllabus because it hit you over the head with the image of rural suffering—poverty, flood, famine, you get the idea. I’m skeptical of middle-class people talking at great length about the lives of the lowly. I’d rather deal with their—our—calm complacency instead.

A few years ago, when I was staying in a friend’s barsati in Delhi’s Defence Colony, my host came home one evening with a painting. The canvas showed a work done in Kalighat style, but the subject was modern. It showed a bhadralok couple sitting together, drinking tea; behind them, on a table with a blue tablecloth, stood a big television set showing the World Trade Center. Smoke was coming out from one of the towers. On the edge of the screen, on the right, another plane was visible in the sky. The image spoke to me.

The artist’s name was Kalam Patua, and I can only guess at his intentions for doing the painting. But what his remarkable work communicated to me was the complexity of a world in which disaster gets consumed as easily as a cup of tea. And that wasn’t all. I was also drawn to the intact world of the Indian middle-class, to the fact that it was in touch with the daily life of the planet but not necessarily in a way that disturbed its inertia. I tried to write about that world in my first novel Home Products (which was published in the US under the title Nobody Does the Right Thing).

But, like Markandaya’s Nectar in a Sieve, the “literature of 9/11” draws us back to the pathos of distant suffering. In fact, I believe it represents a new low definition of bare life. We read accounts of incarcerated men in Guantanamo, or American soldiers with amputated limbs, or the death of children from drinking mud, and we see how much of life’s terrain, the realm of individual subjectivity, is subject to the brutal will of the state. Which is to say, for me, the “literature of 9/11” is an ongoing exploration of the ways in which life and liberty—or their absence—are authored by the military state.

There are several artists, including the Bangla-American Hasan Elahi, who have responded with great inventiveness to the new regimes of surveillance introduced after the attacks of September 11. Toward the beginning of the semester I ask my students to read the 9/11 Commission Report but I always follow it up, sooner or later, with a presentation of the work of the artists like Elahi, Trevor Paglen, Martha Rosler, and Jill Magid.

In a week, my new class will meet. This time I will use an essay that I just read last night. It’s by Pico Iyer and has appeared in the latest Granta Magazine. Iyer writes of his experience of being stopped and subjected to interrogation at airports in Japan. This happened to him after the 9/11 attacks. He writes of how his American friends assured him that this was happening to them too. In other words, it wasn’t just his brownness that earned him this scrutiny. Maybe. The point that Iyer wants to make, however, is that brown folks had always found it difficult to cross borders. They were always suspect.

I’m not sure I want the tragedies of September 11 and its aftermath to be reduced to the matter of travails of travel. The airport isn’t a battlefield; nor is it a quiet village suddenly erupting in fire because of a drone strike. Nevertheless, the conclusion that Iyer offers is stark and eloquent, and I’d like my students to consider what he is saying: “I understand why my friends feel aggrieved to be treated as if they came from Nigeria or Mexico or India. But I can’t really mourn too much that airports, since 9/11, have become places where everyone may be taken to be guilty until proven innocent. The world is all mixed up these days, and America can no longer claim immunity. On 12 September 2001, Le Monde ran its now famous headline: WE ARE ALL AMERICANS. On 12 September 2011, it might more usefully announce: WE ARE ALL INDIANS.”

AASIF MANDVI by Rob Kelly

The years after 9/11, I could have sworn there was a clicking noise whenever I used the landline at my parent’s place. It could have been a bad phone, or it could have been due to the, as Saheli said, “crappy connectivity that year.” I would half-jokingly have side bar conversations with the so-called secret eavesdroppers, letting them know “I know you are listening!” or my thoughts on Dick Cheney.

I was reminded of this as I was reading Aasif Mandvi’s Op-Ed over at Bloomberg just now (h/t Ludovic):

When U.S. troops marched into Iraq in 2003, I, like many Americans, was outraged at what I considered a senseless and unjustified military action. As I spoke to my mother about it on the phone, I noticed that the angrier I got, the more uncomfortable she became.

At first I thought perhaps she disagreed with me, that her awkward silences on the other end of the line resulted from her biting her tongue. Had she, like many of her fellow Americans, bought into the claim that Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden were simply opposite sides of the same al-Qaeda nickel?

When I pressed her on this, she quietly replied, “Perhaps we should not discuss this over the phone.”

What do you mean? I said. Why on earth not?

Because, she answered, “You never know who is listening to us.” [bloomberg]

Read the rest here. Were we out of the realms of normal to think that our phone lines could be wiretapped? I don’t think so. It was THE Muslim Witch Hunt of 2001 – the antiquated version of our modern day Islamophobia. With Homeland Security agents knocking at our door and unmarked white vans parked in front of our house, it was very realistic to think that our line could be wiretapped. Ten years later, it still seems very realistic and in fact it feels that progress has not been made but rather undone. As Mandvi states, “That moment when the world came together and shared a grief that transcended faith, nationality and politics is undone….What I hope for in the next 10 years is a War against Fear.”

Haroon, Abdul Musavir, 31, and Shazad Ali, 31, were mowed down as they stood on the pavement protecting their mosque and businesses in the community. Today, a 32-year-old man was being questioned on suspicion of murder.

The father said he was standing round the corner as the car mounted the pavement and knocked down the three young men. He said he acted instinctively and helped – without realising his boy was one of the trio who were fatally injured. Mr Jahan said: ‘The car came up on the pavement for God knows what reason and I was standing nearby. ‘I heard it happen and I turned round and I saw three people on the ground and my instinct to help and I started CPR and someone told me that one of them was my son.’ [dailymail]

Some moving words from Tariq Jahan, father to the 21 year old Haroon Jahan.

I’m not condoning the violence, but clearly the situation has reached a critical moment in the UK and the people believe things have got to change. Mass media is billing what is happening in the UK as a “race” riot or a “youth” insurgency – but the victims in this case were South Asian youth. The #UKRiots goes far deeper than that.

Haley — South Carolina’s first female and minority governor and the country’s second Indian-American governor — listed her race as “white” on her 2001 voter registration card… The state Democratic Party, which first obtained the public record, is calling Haley out on the matter and challenging whether her inconsistency on the card might have made her ineligible to voter under the state’s new Voter ID law. [postandcourier]

Oh Nimrata… As much as our politics and preference in alleged love affair diverged, I took a certain pride in knowing that we had our first South Asian American woman in governership. To marginalize yourself, when in leadership role, marginalizes the rest of us. Changing your name from Nimrata to Nikki is one thing, but changing your race? It’s skin. It’s blood. Unless you are Michael Jackson, it doesn’t rub off.

Now that I think about it, I think I have just the product for you, thanks to Sandeep Sood. This just may fit your need.

So Nikki, I’m going to give you the benefit of a doubt – like the 25% of South Asian Americans who marked themselves as White in the 1990 Census. This is your Public Service Announcement – No matter how great your dermatologist is or how much Fair & Lovely Inside you ingest, you are not White. You are a minority. A South Asian American. A woman of Indian heritage and Sikh parents.

And next time we hear someone Desi insist on their Whiteness, we can say, “She totally just pulled a Nikkie H.”

I love me some primary sources/historical material, so imagine my delight when I discovered the South Asian American Digital Archive, which I first heard about from a friend of Vivek’s. You can get lost on this site for many hours, looking at everything from the Gadar Party to old SM favorite Dilip Singh Saund (and by the way, I would like a dollar for every time he has been mentioned on SM).

It turned out that Vivek’s pal, SAADA President Samip Mallick, was working on SAADA with, among other people, a friend of a friend of mine, Manan Desai. The two of them agreed to do an interview about it for Sepia. This interview was conducted via the standard Interwebs.VVG: Thanks so much for doing this chat. As you know, I think this is a really cool project–I’m the kind of person who can fall into the wormhole of the Internet pretty quickly, especially when it comes to Fun Historical Facts (or… Less Fun Historical Facts From Which We Might Learn). This site has such great potential… can you tell us a little bit about how you got started?

Samip Mallick (SM): Sugi, thanks so much for inviting us! Our organization, the South Asian American Digital Archive (SAADA) was started in 2008 based on what we saw as a very critical need in our community. There were at that time… and continue to be to this day… no other archives that are working to systematically document and preserve the history of the South Asian American community. And, as a result, we feared that this important history was in danger of being lost. Our mission is not just to document and preserve the history of our community, but also to ensure that these histories are more widely known to everyone, especially within our own community. It seems like we’re always coming across really fascinating stories that we just had no clue about. And we feel like having a greater understanding of the history of our community will give us a better sense of not just who we were, but of who we are today and who we aspire to be.

Manan Desai (MD): I agree, and I think accessibility is one of the central ideas behind our project. There’s something really gratifying about providing access to historical materials directly to the public without a great deal of mediation. Our goal is to allow the reader to confront and understand the material for her or himself.

VVG: What are your personal favorites in this collection? I got a kick out of seeing a younger version of SM’s own Taz, working for SAAVY. I also love seeing the history connected to the University of Michigan, of course, since I teach there (and you’re both connected to the university too)… “The India Society of Detroit” info was pretty awesome. What were the biggest surprises for you as you started gathering material?

MD: “The India Society of Detroit” material was really interesting and totally surprising. Having grown up outside of Detroit, I didn’t expect to see such an early presence of South Asians in the city all the way back in 1911, let alone read about it in a Calcutta-based publication like the Modern Review. We’re trying to follow that trail even further.

Building our Gadar Party collection has been really exciting, too. The Gadar Party was a radical, anti-imperialist organization based on the West Coast, which spread out internationally throughout Europe and Asia. Its membership was made up of South Asians–mainly Sikhs–agitating against British rule in India. They published a newspaper Gadar, as well as pamphlets like the ones we’ve digitized and published online. So, I hope that our collection will be valuable for raising awareness about the history of the early 20th century South Asian diaspora. [VVG: the picture at right is from the Gadar Party collection.]

SM: One of the collections that we’re processing right now is one that I’m particularly excited about because it’s a fascinating history that I just didn’t know anything about. The Watumulls are one of the first South Asian families to settle in Hawaii. Jhamandas Watumull moved to Hawaii in 1913 and opened a retail store in downtown Honolulu that would eventually be named the “East India Store.” The store flourished, selling raw silk goods and “aloha shirts” on the island, turning into a major department store, before eventually opening additional branch stores in Waikiki and in downtown Honolulu. The Watumull family also has made a huge and lasting impact on Hawaii through their philanthropic work, supporting the arts, education and other causes. We’ve been working with Mrs. Indru Watumull to document and preserve their family history and these materials are now being published online in our archive.

What was wonderful about working about the SAAVY materials is that Taz had been very diligent and forward-thinking and had carefully maintained a variety of SAAVY’s organizational materials even after her work with the organization had ended. In addition to digitally preserving and providing access to historical materials, we would also like to work closely with the community to create a greater understanding of the importance of archiving as well as what it takes to ensure that materials, both digital and non-digital, are preserved for the long term.

VVG: You guys recently sent me a note saying you’d gotten a great grant. Tell us a little about the support you’ve gotten in the past and the kind of support you’re looking for, especially from the likes of our SM readers. If someone has material they want to digitize and submit, is there a process for doing that? What makes the cut? Or are you just digitizing everything you find so far?

SM: Yes! In fact it was our first grant, which we’ve received from a local philanthropic organization in Chicago called the Asian Giving Circle (AGC). AGC members each commit to donating a minimum of $250 a year for at least two years, and the funds are then allocated in a grant competition to support organizations working within the Asian American community in Chicago. What was really wonderful for us with this grant was the opportunity to meet many of the members of the Asian Giving Circle who had given money out of their own pocket to support our mission of preserving history. The work that we do is a labor of love for all of us involved. We’re an entirely volunteer-run organization. But, of course, like other non-profit organizations, we rely on the generous financial support from those who value the work we’re doing.

We certainly are interested in working with anyone who has materials that they think should be included in the archive. And not just those who have materials themselves, but also those who’ve maybe heard a story about South Asian American history or have an idea for a collection that they think is worth documenting. The best way to get in touch with us is by email, at info@saadigitalarchive.org We’re very eager to be in contact with anyone who wants to work collaboratively with us to document and preserve South Asian American history. [VVG: emphasis mine!]

MD: Some of our more interesting collections have come from people just tipping us off about a story that we then follow. We’ve recently started a collection on the Bellingham Riot in the state of Washington, in which a white mob attacked and ousted hundreds of South Asian settlers in 1907. This archival work is being done collaboratively with Professor Paul Englesberg, who lives in Washington, has been recovering and documenting a lot of this history himself and was eager to share his findings. If anyone has an idea of something to pursue, let us know!

VVG: Relatedly, any spaces in your collections that you’d particularly like to fill? Any challenges with any particular communities or types of material?

MD: There are still a lot of gaps to fill. For one, there’s a real, ethical obligation for our generation to document the struggles of South Asian communities, and particularly Muslim and Sikh communities in the aftermath of 9/11. We’ve actually recently begun working with SAALT (South Asian Americans Leading Together) to do just that.

It’d be also incredible if we could do larger collections on some key South Asian enclaves in the U.S.–Jackson Heights, Edison, Hamtramck, Devon Avenue. We are also mindful that South Asian American can easily become an euphemism for Indian American, and we’d like to avoid that by recognizing the diversity in our community and being engaged with the community at the broadest possible level.

VVG: I really appreciate your conceiving and executing this as a South Asian American project. What led to it being framed that way, rather than around any one specific community, ethnicity or nationality?

MD:One of the aims of SAADA was to investigate the history of South Asians in the United States in terms that are more specific and grounded than dominant narratives that have rendered the community into one homogeneous group. The category “South Asian American” isn’t perfect, but our aim in using it is simply to be as inclusive as possible.

That said, I think the process of collecting and discovering materials about how South Asian communities have framed their identity through different categories — ethnic, national, caste, religious, regional, etc.–can really tell us a lot about how identity is negotiated and re-invented in the United States. Not to mention, how the state and the media have produced their own categories for South Asians–you can really see this in our collections of materials about early immigration. [VVG: The pictures below are from the early immigration collection.]

VVG: Where would you like this project to be in ten years?

SM: First and foremost, as an archive we enter into a bond of trust with the community we serve to ensure that the digital materials in our possession are well taken care of and preserved. As those who’ve dealt with anything digital are very well aware, technology and software are changing at a breakneck speed. That will be plainly evident, for example, if you try to open a Pagemaker file or access a Geocities website. As a digital archive one of our primary concerns is to ensure that even if software changes or the way people visit our archive changes, the digital materials we care for will still be accessible to the public.

Our other major goal is to work closely with the South Asian American community to ensure not just that we do a better job of documenting, preserving and providing access to our history, but to work together to ensure that our stories are told and retold for future generations.

Illegal immigrant students in that state’s colleges may soon be eligible for state-funded financial aid. A bill called the California Dream Act is working its way through the state legislature. It would allow students who attended at least three years at a California high school to apply for financial aid.

NPR’s Carrie Kahn has our report.

CARRIE KAHN: Sofia Campos came to California when she was six. Her parents brought her and her two younger siblings from Peru. Campos said she had no idea her family had overstayed their visas. She didn’t find out she was here illegally until she was ready to go to college.

Ms. SOFIA CAMPOS: When I was 17, I tried to apply for federal financial aid. So I asked my parents for the Social Security number, and that’s when they had to tell me that I didn’t have one. [link]

President Obama is on the record as supporting the DREAM act nationally and it was introduced (yet again) in the US Senate in May of this year.

This bill would provide conditional permanent residency to certain illegal and deportable alien students who graduate from US high schools, who are of good moral character, arrived in the U.S. legally or illegally as minors, and have been in the country continuously for at least five years prior to the bill’s enactment. If they were to complete two years in the military or two years at a four year institution of higher learning, the students would obtain temporary residency for a six year period. Within the six year period, a qualified student must have “acquired a degree from an institution of higher education in the United States or [have] completed at least 2 years, in good standing, in a program for a bachelor’s degree or higher degree in the United States,” or have “served in the armed services for at least 2 years and, if discharged, [have] received an honorable discharge.”[3] Military enlistment contracts require an eight year commitment, with active duty commitments typically between four and six years, but as low as two years.[4][5] “Any alien whose permanent resident status is terminated [according to the terms of the Act] shall return to the immigration status the alien had immediately prior to receiving conditional permanent resident status under this Act.”[6] [Wikipedia].

But this might all be too late for Mandeep Chahal. Deportation day could be Tuesday. You might want to write a letter against this if you have a minute today:

Mandeep, a DREAM Act eligible student, and her mother face imminent deportation on Tuesday, June 21, 2011. Mandeep grew up in Mountain View, California and attended Santa Rita Elementary School and Egan Junior High School. She graduated from Los Altos High School in 2009 and is now an honors pre-med student at UC Davis.

Mandeep came to the United States in 1997 when she was six years old, and only discovered she was undocumented when she was 15.

If Mandeep and her mother are forced to leave, their family will be torn apart and Mandeep’s two U.S. Citizen siblings will be left without their mother. [link]

Kids shouldn’t pay for the “sins” of their parents. Especially if they work hard and have the potential of making our society better. Enough with the out of control “enforcement only” way of dealing with immigration.