The 9/11 Generation

Youth, Rights, and Solidarity in the War on Terror

Sunaina Marr Maira

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781479848508
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Antropologia culturale e sociale

Explores how young people from communities targeted in the War on Terror engage with the “political,” even while they are under constant scrutiny and surveillance Since the attacks of 9/11, the banner of national security has led to intense monitoring of the politics of Muslim and Arab Americans. Young people from these communities have come of age in a time when the question of political engagement is both urgent and fraught.
In The 9/11 Generation, Sunaina Marr Maira uses extensive ethnography to understandthe meaning of political subjecthood and mobilization for Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American youth. Maira explores how young people from communities targeted in the War on Terror engage with the “political,” forging coalitions based on new racial and ethnic categories, even while they are under constant scrutiny and surveillance, and organizing around notions of civil rights and human rights. The 9/11 Generation explores the possibilities and pitfalls of rights-based organizing at a moment when the vocabulary of rights and democracy has been used to justify imperial interventions, such as the U.S. wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Maira further reconsiders political solidarity in cross-racial and interfaith alliances at a time when U.S. nationalism is understood as not just multicultural but also post-racial. Throughout, she weaves stories of post-9/11 youth activism through key debates about neoliberal democracy, the “radicalization” of Muslim youth, gender, and humanitarianism.

1

The 9/11 Generation in Silicon Valley

The events of 9/11 and their aftermath generated some major shifts in identification and politics for South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American communities and for Muslim Americans at large. First, 9/11 was a watershed moment in the political engagement of South Asian and Middle Eastern communities and was experienced as a political catalyst that propelled these groups into the public square and compelled them to produce and participate in cross-ethnic and interfaith alliances. At the same time, a younger generation of Muslim Americans became increasingly engaged with Muslim identity as a basis for affiliation and mobilization and drawn to a framework of pan-Islamic solidarity. In Silicon Valley, these shifts have occurred in a region where difference and inclusion are overwhelmingly defined by an ideology of multicultural diversity and liberal tolerance and the mythology of the American Dream. The Islamophobic backlash generated contradictions for this imaginary of the greater Bay Area associated with pluralism and mobility, including for Muslim youth who are considered objects of the War on Terror.

In this chapter, I provide a brief overview of Silicon Valley and its cultural geography, including its class schisms, as contexts in which these youth grapple with cultural and religious discourses about belonging, affinity, and border crossing. I then explore the implications of the narrative of Silicon Valley as an oasis of multicultural tolerance for young people’s responses to the events of 9/11 and their analysis of Islamophobia and racism. 9/11 was seen as a crucible for a turn to Islam and greater pan-Islamic identification among some Muslim youth from Arab, South Asian, and Afghan American communities, while there is also an acute awareness of racial, national, and class politics that variously converge and conflict with the desire for an “authentic” Islam. These sometimes competing narratives of true or necessary collectivity, belonging, and affinity have profound implications for a politics of solidarity and subversion in the post-9/11 era. They are shaped by a longer history of racial and class tensions as well as cross-ethnic and transnational alliances and solidarities in Silicon Valley, a valley of dreams and repressed nightmares.

Silicon Valley/Silicon Curtain

Silicon Valley is a fascinating site in which to investigate the political responses of communities targeted in the War on Terror because, in part, of its demographic diversity and migration patterns in a region celebrated for its presumed multicultural inclusion and model minority success. San Jose, the urban hub of Silicon Valley in Santa Clara County, has the largest Arab and Indian American communities in the Bay Area and the neighboring cities of Fremont and Hayward are home to the largest Afghan community outside Afghanistan.1 In fact, a stretch of Fremont Boulevard in Fremont is (unofficially) known as “Little Kabul,” and the Afghan population has historically been concentrated in the Tri-City area of Fremont–Union City–Newark and in Hayward, from which many commute to work in Silicon Valley. It is striking that given the significance of the war in Afghanistan so little serious work has been done on Afghan Americans in Fremont/Hayward and, in general, negligible research has been done on youth from South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American communities in Silicon Valley.2

Arab and South Asian immigrant communities in the South Bay are part of a highly ethnically diverse region—though there is a notable dearth of African Americans. San Jose has a very large Latino/a population, including a historic presence of Mexican immigrants, and a significant South and Southeast Asian American, especially Indian and Vietnamese immigrant, population. San Jose’s Vietnamese American community (10.6% of the city’s population) is the largest Vietnamese population outside of Vietnam, and there are also sizeable Chinese American and Filipino American communities. The population of San Jose is almost exactly one-third Asian American and one-third Latino/a, with approximately 40% whites and a miniscule 3–4% African Americans in 2010, a distribution that is close to that of the population of Santa Clara County, which has a larger white population and slightly smaller Latino and Black populations.3

The Indian American population has emerged as the fastest-growing community in San Jose (approximately 44,000 or 4.6% of the city’s population in 2010), even though South Asians here are more dispersed and less concentrated than in Fremont, where many live in the same neighborhoods and even the same apartment complexes.4 The Pakistani community in the city of San Jose itself is much smaller (approximately 2,000 in 2010) than the Indian American population, and the Bangladeshi and Sri Lankan populations reportedly miniscule.5 Santa Clara County has the largest Arab population in the Bay Area, according to the 2000 U.S. Census (the largest group is Egyptian, followed by Lebanese, Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi). Exact demographic data on the Arab population, however, is difficult to obtain given that it is not included as a separate racial category in demographic data, since the Census categorizes Arabs as whites and Arab is a category listed only under ancestry; nor are Afghans listed as a separate category or in demographic data for Asian Americans. The Arab American Cultural Center of San Jose estimated that there are approximately 30,000 Arab Americans in the greater San Jose area during the time of this research. Many Arab and South Asian Americans live in the more affluent suburbs around San Jose, and also in towns extending up the peninsula toward San Francisco. As the high-tech industry expanded, it drew many Arab and South Asian scientists, engineers, and professionals who eventually moved out of urban areas into wealthy suburbs such as Santa Clara, Campbell, Cupertino, Los Gatos, and Saratoga.

The Afghan population in San Jose is very small, with an official estimate of only 813 (Ahuja, Gupta, and Petsod 2004), and Afghan Americans tend to be concentrated in less expensive cities and towns, such as Fremont and Alameda. The director of the Afghan Coalition in Fremont estimated that the population of Afghan Americans in Fremont was about 15,000 in 2008. Fremont also has very large Chinese, Indian, and Filipino American populations in a city that is almost half Asian American.6 The Indian American population in Fremont has grown rapidly to become the second largest in California in 2010, after San Jose’s, though it constitutes a much larger proportion in the city, almost a fifth (18.1%, or 38,711) in 2010.7

Many people I spoke to who were not from Silicon Valley were surprised to learn about the large concentration of Arab Americans in San Jose, including Arab Americans themselves. This is probably because Arab communities have historically been more visible in San Francisco, where they own many small businesses such as convenience stores and liquor stores and where they are also actively engaged in the liberal political and cultural milieu of the city. Yet the concentration of Arab Americans in Silicon Valley is not surprising, given that San Jose is actually the largest city in the nine-county Bay Area, and the third largest in California with a population of almost one million people (958,789 in 2011); it is the tenth-largest city in the United States. But of course the more important issues underlying this growth, both of the city and of these immigrant communities, is tied to the story of Silicon Valley, home to the computer industry and to corporations such as Cisco Systems, IBM, and eBay, the three largest high-tech employers in San Jose, as well as to six universities and colleges, including San Jose State University.8 It is this economic context that has drawn Arab and South Asian immigrants, in particular, to the larger San Jose area or Santa Clara Valley, an area that has been mythologized as the “Valley of Dreams” (Pellow and Park 2002). Images of South Asian capitalist entrepreneurship color the public imagination of Silicon Valley, yet the mythology of the American Dream was ruptured for Muslim South Asians (especially Pakistani Americans) who became “enemy number one” after 9/11, not to mention Arab Americans, as well as Sikh Americans mistakenly targeted by the racist backlash.

The much celebrated success story of Silicon Valley masks the presence of communities that are economically struggling and obscures a more complex, and much less publicized, class and racial politics. This is what some call the “Silicon Curtain,” which masks “the oppression and immiseration of thousands of workers and residents” by a self-image of “progress” and prosperity produced by public relations firms determined to sell the American Dream (Pellow and Park 2002, 3). On the one hand, the median household income in San Jose in the period 2007–2011 was $80,764 (with a mean of $102,220), and in Fremont it was $98,513 (with a mean of $114,684).9 On the other hand, racial segregation divides the affluent areas of Palo Alto and the foothills of Silicon Valley from the “flatlands” populated by people of color in East Palo Alto, Mountain View, and San Jose. By the mid-1990s, economic inequality across race, class, and gender was wider in Silicon Valley than in other parts of the United States (Pellow and Park 2002, 67–68). Writing about the transformation of Silicon Valley in 2013, George Packer observed that homes in Palo Alto cost more than $2 million on average, yet there had been a 20% increase in homelessness, noting, “After decades in which the country has become less and less equal, Silicon Valley is one of the most unequal places in America.”10

In fact, Asian Americans and Pacific Islanders are among the groups whose median household incomes are below those of Santa Clara County in general, and many, including South Asians, work in low-wage manufacturing jobs.11 The notion of the “model minority” Asian American, or immigrant entrepreneur, is a classic trope in Silicon Valley that has colored the image of South Asian immigrant communities in particular. It is indeed true that there are relatively affluent, technically skilled South Asian and Arab American professionals in Silicon Valley.12 Yet during the early 2000s, the economic downturn and the slump in the high-tech industry had impacted Silicon Valley, and its effects were visible in the layoffs and outsourcing of jobs, which, combined with the later housing market crash and subprime mortgage crisis, produced even deeper economic insecurity among these communities in the South Bay during the recession years.13 While home foreclosures in Silicon Valley dropped by one third from 2008 to 2011, median household incomes also dropped to the lowest levels in eleven years in 2011, with African Americans and Hispanics suffering the most, and the percentage of families on food stamps in 2012 had doubled since 2000.14

The Silicon Curtain and the nightmares it conceals is thus the story of Silicon Valley that remains largely untold. Ash Kalra, the first—and only—Indian American city council member in San Jose, observed that there are “a lot of working-class neighborhoods” that coexist with “extremely wealthy neighborhoods” and that San Jose has done “a poor job of helping to integrate the lower-income workforce into the success that has been created through Silicon Valley.” A tent city erected by the homeless actually sprang up near the San Jose airport, one of sixty encampments that mushroomed in Santa Clara County in the wake of the “great recession” of 2008.15 Kalra pointed out that the high cost of living in Silicon Valley, which has persisted beyond the dot-com crash, has meant that those earning lower salaries often end up commuting from towns further away with cheaper housing, such as in the Central Valley, traveling almost two hours each way to work in jobs in the high-tech industry. Furthermore, the freeways have destroyed many immigrant communities as houses were torn down to build the maze of interstate highways that have come to characterize the region (Pellow and Park 2002, 64). Silicon Valley is not a fixed spatial location, but a place that draws residents and workers from various locations who are necessarily mobile and often precarious as well as one in which many struggle to survive.

The high-tech industry has shaped the racial geography and political culture of Silicon Valley, and it has also influenced the social and cultural experiences of immigrant and Muslim communities in this area, before and after 9/11. So while there are affluent Arab and South Asian professionals in Silicon Valley, they remain relatively invisible and there is not an urban infrastructure or cultural landscape that provides a context for the active and visible staging of ethnic politics as in San Francisco. Vic Zikoor of the Arab American Cultural Center (AACC) in San Jose commented on the difficulty of constituting an Arab American “public sphere” in Silicon Valley, including at AACC events, given that people in the area live in dispersed communities and often commute long hours so they are often “stressed by work and traffic.” Silicon Valley’s “spatially isolated and spread-out residential patterns, its shopping strips and malls, its auto gridlock, its rapid demographic turnover, and the rampant individualism among its most talented workers” is for some an obstacle to forming a “close-knit civil society” (Cohen and Fields 2000, 191).

I discussed these contradictions with Ragini Srinivasan, a young Indian American who grew up in San Jose, and who was editor of a local Indian American magazine, India Currents, at the time we spoke. I met her at a café in a Santa Clara mall and she astutely observed over lunch that the strange paradox of Silicon Valley or the “South Bay” is that it is a “place of excess” and also “lack,” which she associated with a missing “urban energy.” In her view Silicon Valley has “excess money, excess immigrants, excess space, excess traffic” but is “missing some sort of dynamism,” despite its many “cultural institutions, and . . . thinkers and start-ups and entrepreneurs,” due to its suburban character. The lack of urban culture in this social and cultural landscape, with its tract homes and strip malls, shapes the ways that particular groups insert themselves into and mobilize in the cities and technoburbs of Silicon Valley and Fremont/Hayward, which are lacking in urban density and where public culture is based largely on consumption and strip malls. The public culture of Silicon Valley is often contrasted to San Francisco and Oakland/Berkeley, which are indelibly associated with histories of radical protest cultures, particularly the antiwar, Black Power, ethnic studies, feminist, and queer movements. Yet this genealogy of Bay Area radicalism sometimes overshadows the realities of activism, the burgeoning nonprofit industry, and consumerist liberal multiculturalism that has transformed the area. The seductive romance of the 1960s often thwarts a discussion of contemporary police brutality (except in horrifying moments such as the murder of Oscar Grant in Oakland), the mammoth prison-industrial complex, gentrification, and the flight of people of color from Berkeley/Oakland. Yet there is indeed traffic between the “city” (San Francisco) and the East Bay and South Bay, and social networks that connect them, within the limits of a challenging terrain where class and racial segregation and limited public transit are often deeply confining.

The suburban character of Silicon Valley and Fremont/Hayward inflects the possibilities of protest culture and youth activism and of reshaping political geographies. Cities have historically been associated with the space of protest politics and with providing a geography for revolt and resistance. According to Masao Suzuki, a Japanese American community activist who has been involved in organizing with Muslim and Arab American communities in Silicon Valley, San Jose is “not really a city” and he underscored that it has a conservative political environment, shaped by a largely professional class of high-tech workers and large immigrant communities, in which public political mobilization is not easy. As Suzuki noted, the antiwar rally in San Jose against the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003 was ten times smaller than the huge march in San Francisco. Yet in 2006, he recalled, the May Day immigrant rights march in San Jose that galvanized Latino communities, in particular, was the third largest in the U.S., so the region has seen upsurges in particular political movements since 2001.16 Various forms of urbanism and suburbanism give rise to different kinds of social struggles, movements and nonmovements, or acts of political encroachment by the oppressed and invisibilized, which can emerge in spaces where spectacular public protest may seem unlikely (Bayat 2013, 13). The larger issue that I explore in this book is how the politics of this region and possibilities for cross-ethnic solidarity are deeply imbricated with a culture of neoliberal capitalism and multicultural recognition that has generated sometimes acute tensions for South Asian, Arab, and Afghan American youth after 9/11, and that emerge from the liberalism of race politics as well as persistence of racial and class divides in northern California.

De-Bugging: “Success” and Solidarity in the South Bay

The contradictions between idealized narratives of liberal “diversity,” achievement, and self-reinvention in Silicon Valley and the realities of the conservative political culture in this hypercapitalist region need to be situated in the history of the production of “Silicon Valley” as a space emblematic of technological “progress” and cultural heterogeneity. The label “Silicon Valley” was first used in 1971 by local government and business officials to promote Santa Clara Valley as it shifted from a region known for an agricultural industry to one with a growing technology industry, fueled by the military and defense research (Pitti 2003). The area’s first high-tech companies actually emerged in the late 1930s, and Hewlett Packard was founded in 1937 by two Stanford University graduates as Silicon Valley became a significant site for the emergence of the “military-industrial-university complex,” with collaboration among the military, federal government, local municipalities, and universities (Cohen and Fields 2000; Pellow and Park 2002, 59–60). The presence of Stanford University in Palo Alto played an important role in developing what came to be known as the “showcase region of late capitalism,” as did the military contracts awarded to the university and local industries beginning in World War I and continuing through World War II and the Cold War; this military-industrial-academic collaboration contributed to the celebrated and “mythic characterization of the region as a brave new world” (Cohen and Fields 2000; English-Lueck 2002, 7–8).

This mythologized history of Silicon Valley—and California in general—that enshrines individual entrepreneurship and a “heterogeneity of classes, ethnicities, national cultures, self-identified subcultures, and organizational cultures” (English-Lueck 2002), masks what historians of the region describe as, in the words of Stephen Pitti (2003), the “Valley’s often forgotten poverty” (4). Simmering racial and class conflicts have erupted at various moments alongside struggles by marginalized, indigenous, and immigrant communities. Major strikes and labor unrest have marked the racialized class tensions in Silicon Valley between the largely Latino/a and Asian American agricultural workers and corporations. These emerged in the shadow of the entrepreneurs and settlers who invaded and devastated this region since the genocidal violence against its indigenous (Muwekma Ohlone/Costanoan) population beginning in the eighteenth century, the Gold Rush, and continuing racist and anti-immigrant policies (Pellow and Park 2002, 50; Ramirez 2007, 8, 40–57).

The transition in the Valley from agricultural production and fruit canneries, which historically employed Latino/a, Asian, and immigrant workers, to the technology industry during the Cold War led to increased unemployment and a widening gap between rich and poor. Since the 1970s, Mexican immigrants and Latinos, as well as Asian and African Americans, have generally provided low-wage labor for the assembly and service work that ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1 The 9/11 Generation in Silicon Valley
• 2 The New Civil Rights Movement: Cross-Racial Alliances and Interfaith Activism
• 3 Human Rights, Uncivil Activism, and Palestinianization
• 4 More Delicate than a Flower, yet Harder than a Rock: Human Rights and Humanitarianism in Af-Pak
• 5 Coming of Age under Surveillance: Surveillance Effects and the Post-9/11 Culture Wars
• 6 Democracy and Its Others
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• About the Author