Bald, Vivek. Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2015.

== Summary ==
Vivek’s
book, Bengali Harlem  looks at the lost history and hidden
population of Indian laborers who by the mid-1940s had become part of the
fabric of U.S. society, “living, working, and bringing up families in the
shadows of its restrictive anti-Asian immigration laws.” (5) These migrants
hailed from modern day Bangladesh and Pakistan and were predominantly Muslim.
Denied official belonging, these South Asian migrants became part of “another
nation” in working class neighborhoods of color from New York to Baltimore to
Detroit. As they maintained ties to one another, they also developed Puerto
Rican, African American, and West Indian extended families and friends. They
were among the “many populations of peasants and workers whose traditional
means of livelihood had been disrupted by colonization, industrialization, and
the mechanization of agriculture,” and came to the United States to access jobs
and markets. (9) Unlike other immigrant communities
(Germany, Greek, Italian), these immigrants did not form ethnic enclaves, but
formed networks embedded in working class Creole, African American and Puerto
Rican neighborhoods. As a result, they built complex identities and
multi-ethnic families that varied depending on context. “They were ‘white’ when
they attempted to claim citizenship, ‘Hindoo’ when selling exotic goods,
‘black’ or ‘Porto Rican’ when disappearing into U.S. cities or actively
attempting to evade the immigration authorities.”(221) Moreover, the South
Asian migrant experience shows (contrary to the assumption that Asians were
“shut off” from the U.S. from the 1920s until 1965) that there had been an unbroken
stream of migration, much of it working class and Muslim that started well
before the passage of the Asiatic Barred Zone Act and continued through the
exclusion era.
Example:Amir Haider Khan, who worked in different ships and factories, port cities and industrial towns, forged alliances across different ethnic, gender, and racial lines and “expanded his conceptions of justice and injustice, broadened his racial consciousness, and sharpened his convictions as a political actor.” (140) His memoir reveals how his experiences transformed him from “’an ignorant and impoverished’ teenage coal passer to a committed young internationalist and anti-imperialist.” (141)
See also: Thomas Guglielmo, Lara Putnam, Matthew Jacobson