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Highly educated Indian and Pakistani immigrants arrived in boomtown Houston in the 1960s and 1970s, readily securing employment as engineers or other white-collar professionals. At the same time, they faced racism in housing, the workplace, university campuses, and restaurants. Asians were "conditionally included"--that is, accepted for their economic value but often, socially outcast. The racial calculations made by Indian and Pakistani immigrants in a rapidly internationalizing city were fraught with contradictions. They sought places and spaces where they felt tolerated, even if not completely welcomed into the fold. At the same time, they wielded their class status and ethnicity as tools by which they could both distance themselves from other racialized minorities and attempt to bypass their own racialization altogether. The experiences of immigrants of color reveals the racial architecture--that is, those norms that upheld the structure of white privilege--of a changing American South. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘High skilled’ Kamma migrants from Coastal Andhra domiciled in the USA maintain strong ties with their villages and towns of origin. Since the 1990s, one key way in which they have sustained relations with their roots is through transnational philanthropy. Over the last two decades, migrant donors have diversified the modalities of their philanthropic engagements, increasingly institutionalizing them through US-based transnational associations. While the institutionalization of philanthropy may appear to be an import from the USA, closer examination reveals its historical antecedent in the caste-based Varaalu system practised by the Kammas during the late colonial period. The transnationalization of older forms of giving are marked by key modifications in the way giving is conceptualized—from being localized, need based, and individualized to being based on merit, efficiency, and professionalization. The term ‘donation’ is used to describe their philanthropy, rather than daan or charity, and the politics of semantics points to the modernizing impulse within the community to transcend caste owing to their diasporic location. Yet, by aiming to reach deserving beneficiaries while upholding meritocracy, donors often circulate philanthropic resources horizontally on a caste inflected and highly politicized transnational plane. The discourse and practices of transnational giving in post-reform India bring out the contradiction that simultaneously obscures the workings of a caste while transnationalizing its boundaries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]