Lone Star Muslims

Transnational Lives and the South Asian Experience in Texas

Ahmed Afzal

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781479858880
• Topic: Theologie & Religion
• Subtopic: Asiatische Religionen

Lone Star Muslims offers an engaging and insightful look at contemporary Muslim American life in Texas. It illuminates the dynamics of the Pakistani Muslim community in Houston, a city with one of the largest Muslim populations in the south and southwestern United States. Drawing on interviews and participant observation at radio stations, festivals, and ethnic businesses, the volume explores everyday Muslim lives at the intersection of race, class, profession, gender, sexuality, and religious sectarian affiliation to demonstrate the complexity of the South Asian experience. Importantly, the volume incorporates narratives of gay Muslim American men of Pakistani descent, countering the presumed heteronormativity evident in most of the social science scholarship on Muslim Americans and revealing deeply felt affiliations to Islam through ritual and practice. It also includes narratives of members of the highly skilled Shia Ismaili Muslim labor force employed in corporate America, of Pakistani ethnic entrepreneurs, the working class and the working poor employed in Pakistani ethnic businesses, of community activists, and of radio program hosts. Decentering dominant framings that flatten understandings of transnational Islam and Muslim Americans, such as “terrorist” on the one hand, and “model minority” on the other, Lone Star Muslims offers a glimpse into a variety of lived experiences. It shows how specificities of class, Islamic sectarian affiliation, citizenship status, gender, and sexuality shape transnational identities and mediate racism, marginalities, and abjection.

1

Houston

Race, Class, Oil, and the Making of “America’s Most Diverse City”

Houston is a study in paradoxes. There are pines and palm trees, skyscrapers and sprawl; Tudor townhouses stop abruptly as cows and prairie take over. It deals in incredible extremes of wealth and culture. . . . Houston is all process and no plan. . . . One might say of Houston that one never gets there. It feels as if one is always on the way, always arriving, always looking for the place where everything comes together.

—Ada Louise Huxtable, Kicked a Building Lately?

Why Houston? Pakistani immigrants in Houston typically respond to this question by stating one of the following reasons for why they choose to come to Houston. Many cite the presence of family—kin and biradari (the patrilineal kin group) already living in Houston. Others, especially those from the port city of Karachi in Pakistan, maintain that the climate of Houston is vividly reminiscent of Karachi’s weather and is a significant factor in the decision to relocate to Houston. Yet others refer to the affordability of raising a family in Houston compared to say, New York City. Finally, the energy and medical sectors, the mainstays of Houston’s economy, have made Houston a leading destination for students and skilled professionals with backgrounds and training in engineering, management, and medicine.

These explanations provide insight into why Houston,¹ along with New York City, Washington, DC, Chicago, and Los Angeles, ranks among the metropolitan areas with the largest Pakistani populations.² In terms of statewide distribution, Texas is home to the fourth-largest Pakistani community in the United States, following New Jersey, New York, and California. The Pakistan embassy in Washington, DC estimates that there are currently half a million to a million Pakistanis in the United States.³ At the time of my research between 2001 and 2002, there were 50,104 Pakistanis in Texas, including 26,981 foreign-born residents and citizens, 10,442 U.S.-born citizens, and 12,681 noncitizens of Pakistani descent.⁴ One of the major Pakistani community organizations in Houston, however, doubles this estimate and places the total number at approximately 100,000.

Debates over the exact number of Pakistanis notwithstanding, and despite a relatively small percentage share of metropolitan Houston’s population of over 5.95 million as of 2010,⁵ Houston has emerged as a primary gateway city and destination for Pakistani immigrants, especially Pakistanis seeking employment in the energy and medical sectors. The inception of a Pakistan consulate in Houston in June 2004 and the ease of international air travel between Pakistan and Houston through direct and connecting flights on multiple airlines, including American Airlines, Emirates Airlines, and Pakistan International Airlines, further consolidate Houston’s status as a significant gateway and destination for Pakistani immigrants.

What is remarkable, as well as instructive, about the relatively recent growth of the Pakistani population in Houston is the way in which Pakistanis, whether foreign-born or U.S.-born, have created a strong sense of place in Houston—a facet of the Pakistani experience that is abundantly evident from the narratives and experiences discussed throughout this book. From the settlement of middle-class Pakistanis in plush multiethnic planned suburban communities like Sugar Land, Pearland, and Missouri City to the establishment of multiuse localities that include mosques and Islamic schools, ethnic businesses, and residential areas like Hillcroft Avenue, and from the Pakistan Independence Day Festival to radio airwaves, Pakistanis have developed a vibrant community and public life with roots in Houston. A vast majority of the almost two hundred Pakistanis I formally interviewed, across class, professional, and sectarian affiliations, citizenship status, age, gender, and sexuality, as well as many more with whom I engaged during participant observation, were adamant about their rootedness in Houston and referred to Houston as “home.” Locating the Pakistani community within this metropolis demonstrates how a transnational population at the turn of the twenty-first century claims a sense of place, home, and belonging to Houston.

This chapter begins with a brief genealogy of Pakistani population movements to Houston. I address the changes in U.S. immigration policies and laws in 1965 that facilitated the classed flows of highly skilled labor from Pakistan as well as from elsewhere in Asia. Next, I historicize patterns of racialized and classed urban development in Houston. I explore how Houston’s oil-based economy has played a vital role in shaping urban spatialities within which Pakistanis are embedded. Although Pakistanis reside throughout the greater Houston area, concentrations of Pakistani immigrant populations have formed in several sections of southwest Houston outside of Interstate 610 (also termed “the Loop”), which circles around the older downtown sections of Houston. Pakistani settlements are concentrated outside the Loop in multiethnic neighborhoods in sections of southwest Houston such as Hillcroft Avenue and Bissonnet Street, and in the more affluent planned settlements such as Sugar Land. These localities exemplify geographical distance from the nineteenth and the early twentieth-century white, African American, and Latino urban settlements formed inside the Loop.

Settlement patterns in southwest Houston represent the more recent multiethnic localities that emerged with the conjunction of the real estate market collapse and the recession in the 1980s. The newly constructed gated communities and residential buildings had been designed with the professionals employed in the oil and gas sectors in mind. With massive layoffs and unemployment in these core industries, numerous buildings became vacant and available in the rental market for newly arriving professionals and service-sector laborers from countries like Pakistan. Established white residential areas in the northern and western sections inside the Loop maintained their demographic cohesion, limiting large-scale habitation by new immigrant communities in these areas. The close association between historically minority neighborhoods and the longstanding African American and Latino communities and businesses that they served created further incentive for new immigrant communities to set up house in newer developments in the southwest that were heretofore unmarked racially. My survey of two major localities, Hillcroft Avenue and Sugar Land, illustrates the ways in which Pakistanis are making claims to space in Houston.

Three overarching and intersecting themes characterize development in Houston and establish the larger urban contexts for situating the study of the Pakistani experience within local specificities. One is the nexus between corporate interests, political elites, and private real estate developers in shaping Houston’s built environment; second is the centrality of economic imperatives in shaping patterns of urban growth; third is the racialized and classed production of space and locality that has led to the making of an exceptionally diverse but segregated metropolis. As I discuss subsequently in this chapter, pronouncements of Houston as the most ethnically and racially diverse city in the United States in the year 2013 are qualified by assertions of persistent racial segregation in residential patterns. Celebrating diversity in terms of ethnicity and cultural differences rather than race often cloaks persistent racial tensions; therefore, analyzing social and spatial divisions in Houston in terms of race, rather than ethnicity, makes visible historical categories of difference, experiences of injustice, and differential access to resources and opportunities. This chapter seeks to position Houston’s Pakistani population within these broader historical, urban, and racialized contexts and developments, and set the stage for a consideration of the life experiences, economic processes, and mass-mediated engagements that appear in this book.

U.S. Immigration Policy and Pakistani Labor Flows

A genealogy of Pakistani migration to Houston provides an important starting point for locating Pakistani community formations with specificities of the local milieu. Pakistanis have been coming to Houston since the middle of the twentieth century, primarily as students. Between the years 1946 and 1965, the number of Pakistanis in Houston has been estimated at less than a hundred, mostly university and graduate students.⁶ Relatively new entrants in the ethnic landscape in Houston, Pakistanis began arriving in large numbers following reforms in U.S. immigration law, notably the passage of the U.S. Immigration and Naturalization Act in 1965. Prior to 1965, immigration law had favored European immigration, severely restricting the immigration of Asians to the United States until after World War II.⁷ The landmark Immigration and Naturalization Act of 1965 abandoned prior legislation that had set the national origins quota system based on the makeup of the United States population in 1890.⁸ The 1965 act replaced the quotas with an annual limit of 170,000 immigrants (subsequently raised to 270,000) for countries outside the Western Hemisphere.

In the five years following the 1965 immigration reforms, over 30 percent of total immigrants came from outside of the Western Hemisphere (Williams 1988), and Asia became a major source of immigration to the United States.⁹ Although Asians had constituted less than 4 percent of total U.S. immigration between 1921 and 1960, Asians made up 35 percent of legal immigration from 1971 to 1980, and 42 percent from 1981 to 1989. From 1971 to 1989, more than 4 million Asians, primarily from China, India, Korea, the Philippines, and Vietnam, immigrated to the United States (Ong and Liu 2000). From the mid-1960s until the late 1980s, the majority of Pakistanis in Houston were Western-educated and trained professionals in the medical, oil and gas, and energy sectors, and part of the Pakistani middle class and the elite (Najam 2006) who acquired capital, established kinship relations, and moved flexibly within and between multiple nations (Ong 1999).

The Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted legal status to undocumented immigrants meeting specific requirements, along with the Immigration Act of 1990, which increased the numbers for family-based immigration, led to a significant increase in the Pakistani population in the 1990s. A pattern of chain migrations, whereby a first wave of recruited professionals in highly skilled labor is followed by a second wave that includes family members and kin working primarily in service and ethnic businesses, is found in cities throughout the United States, including Houston. In the 1990s, highly skilled Pakistani workers in Houston sponsored the immigration of relatives in the homeland as well as those who resided throughout the South Asian diaspora, notably in the Gulf States, the Middle East, Africa and Asia.¹⁰ Following the Gulf War in 1991, for example, many semiskilled and unskilled South Asian workers based in the Gulf region immigrated to the United States as well as to Europe (Prashad 2000). A smaller group of immigrants consists of political refugees belonging to Pakistani religious minority groups and political groups who had come to the United States to escape persecution under the dictatorial regimes in Pakistan and reside in exile in Houston.

In addition to Pakistani immigrants from elsewhere in the world, Houston has witnessed an increase in the in-migration of Pakistani men and women from southern states other than Texas since the late 1990s. This has made Houston the South Asian hub of the southern and southwestern United States, akin to New York City in the Northeast and Chicago in the Midwest. For Pakistani students, professionals, and entrepreneurs in Florida, Alabama, Louisiana, Georgia, North Carolina, and South Carolina, Houston emerges as the preferred city of intended residence. Indeed, Houston’s thriving South Asian ethnic economy offers employment opportunities for the working class and business opportunities for entrepreneurs. Houston also draws consumers looking for ethnic goods and services that may not be readily available in smaller towns and cities in neighboring states.

The steady increase in the Pakistani population in Houston over the last three decades has contributed to the presence of Pakistanis in all major income levels, occupations and professions. Pakistanis in Houston represent all major Pakistan ethnolinguistic and religious communities in Pakistan (Williams 1988). The presence of Pathan, Punjabi, Sindhi, Kashmiri, and Balochi ethnolinguistic groups, and of Ismaili, Shia, Sunni, and Ahmadiya Muslims, as well as of Zoroastrian, Christian, and Hindu Pakistanis, represents a microcosm of contemporary Pakistan. Despite the ethnolinguistic and religious differentiation and diversity within the Pakistani population, however, the majority of Pakistani immigrants and families in Houston are Sunni Muslims from Urdu-speaking communities in the port city of Karachi, the largest and most populous city in Pakistan. Shia communities are an important demographic force despite Sunni Muslims being the larger population, in large part because of their concentration as entrepreneurs and white-collar professionals employed in the energy and medical sectors.

The Making of a Racialized Metropolis

Houston’s emergence as a global metropolis attracting immigrants from all over the world, including post-1965 waves of Pakistani skilled labor, began in the second half of the twentieth century. Houston originated in the nineteenth century, however, as a result of the Allen brothers’ speculation on what was then swampland. Starting in the 1830s, the city “was sold aggressively to outsiders by the real estate developers who packaged the mosquito-infested swampland and called it Houston” (Shelton et al. 1989: 3). Private developers, not city planners, directed the dynamic growth that would come to characterize the greater Houston metropolitan area (Garreau 1992). By the late nineteenth century, Houston had become a major center for lumber, cotton, and grains attracting a blue-collar workforce made up of African Americans and Mexican immigrants, as well as a white-collar workforce that was almost exclusively white (McComb 1981). The agriculture-based economy led to the development of an infrastructure of railroads, warehouses, cotton gins, and banks, and by 1910, Houston was a railroad town servicing the Texas Gulf Coast and hinterlands (Fisher 1986).

Despite its origins in the nineteenth century, Houston owes its extraordinary growth as a metropolis in large part to the energy sector, and especially the discovery and extraction of oil, in the early twentieth century. Oil rapidly became the motor of Houston’s booming growth. By the 1930s, oil-related industries contributed to more than half of all the jobs in Houston, attracting workers from rural and small-town Texas and beyond (Shelton et al. 1989). Continuing patterns begun in the nineteenth century, the growth in the industrial workforce was racialized: administrative and professional jobs were dominated by whites, and the blue-collar workforce was predominantly African American and Latino.

In the early twentieth century, as major oil companies consolidated their control over the Texas oil industry, automobile production in Detroit stimulated the need for crude oil production and raw materials produced in Houston, linking Detroit and Houston in the oil industry–automobile culture nexus that transformed urban life in Houston, as well as across the United States (McComb 1981). Oil replaced coal as the primary fuel for locomotives and industrial plants, embedding Houston within national economies and projects of industrialization and urbanization (Vojnovic 2003b). The rapid increase in automobile production led to the emergence of 1,200 oil companies and 300 oil supply houses in Houston, supported further by oil refineries and oil-related industrial facilities, oil equipment, and oil-services and port facilities (Shelton et al. 1989). Although small oil companies controlled the oil fields through the 1930s, the balance of power shifted to large oil companies only a decade later in the 1940s. While the main offices were located in the northern states, oil companies maintained subsidiaries as well as oil facilities like refineries and office buildings in Houston that provided infrastructure for the oil boom.

Throughout the city’s history, private developers, capitalists, and the political elite would play central roles in practices and processes of Houston’s development.¹¹ Although Houston has a reputation for privatized development independent from government, an examination of Houston’s political economy offers a more complex picture. Urban studies scholar Igor Vojnovic (2003b) argues that during the twentieth century a local growth coalition, composed of local business interests and local government officials, successfully lobbied for federal subsidies guided by the goal of building a shipping channel and port facilities to attract oil-related companies to Houston. In 1914, the Houston Ship Channel was completed after Buffalo Bayou was dredged to create a deepwater channel leading to the Port of Houston east of downtown (Shelton et al. 1989). Nearly a century later, this port would become the second-largest port in the United States in terms of total tonnage and first in terms of foreign tonnage.¹² Federal aid and capital were also used to construct public buildings, city hall, parks, monuments, schools, and roads, guided by the interests of Houston’s private industrial and real estate corporations.

During World War II, the federal government provided further capital for private and joint private-public oil-related companies, including the petrochemical industry, aviation fuel, and synthetic rubber, all of which were necessary for the war economy (ibid. 1989). Following World War II, a rising demand for oil and oil products such as asphalt, jet fuel, plastics, and other petrochemicals received continued support, including tax subsidies from the federal government (Vojnovic 2003a). Federal money also supported road building, sewer facilities, and airport construction in Houston. The postwar boom contributed to the increase in transportation companies, including truck, pipeline, and shipping companies and a concurrent growth in steel, aluminum, metal fabrication, oil-tool, and construction companies (Shelton et al. 1989).

By the 1970s, the oil industry had restructured, shifting its major operations and subsidiaries, including production, consumer, and marketing operations, to Houston....