On this bright spring morning, I’m pondering a crisp fall afternoon I experienced last October, during my visit to Chicago. It was my first time visiting the city– I saw incredible feats of architecture, a piercingly blue lake, and lots of beer and pizza, all of which curated what I considered to be a very “American” experience. But a key part of what made Chicago feel so American was its composition of rich, distinct ethnic suburbs wherein diasporas not only congregate amongst people of their own heritage, but also invite others to infuse their own cultural traditions into ones that they brought from their homelands.
In the American Art Wing of the Chicago Art Institute, I viewed one of the most classic paintings in American history, American Gothic. I was most struck by the museum’s accompanying copy:
“Many understood the work to be a satirical comment on midwesterners out of step with a modernizing world. Yet Wood intended it to convey a positive image of rural American values, offering a vision of reassurance at the beginning of the Great Depression.”
As a child, this painting didn’t hold my attention.
I felt that it represented an America my family and I didn’t belong to. I was American, sure, in the sense that I was born in America. But when I looked at this image of stern white farmers standing in front of their home, I felt it impossible that I could have anything to do with this firmly “American” scene. I considered this image to represent an America that belonged to Evangelical Christians, or at least those who closely resembled them. I regarded faces that looked like those from the image with suspicion, because they looked too similar to those whose gazes I felt misunderstood by. It was because of these gazes that I learned to throw away the field trip chaperone paperwork in elementary school– I didn’t want the other kids to be made uncomfortable by how different I felt my parents were from what I imagined a PTA parent should be. My heart sank at school when people asked me why my hair was so oily, why my arms were hairy, why I would wear the usually loose-fitting, Indian reminiscent clothes that I did, why I struggled to pronounce certain words, or, maybe most memorably, when my middle school peers inquired if it was my dad that ran the neighborhood ice cream truck, and if so, if he was hiding a bomb under his turban. Despite the fact that my peers and I were from various races and income levels, for me at least, the feeling of the “right” kind of American parent, or person, persisted– some sort of iteration of those in American Gothic, maybe. And because my family immigrated to the United States nearly 70 years after this painting was created, I assumed that there could be no connection between these traditional, rural, American values and those of my family, who came from a place oceans away.
But now, as an adult, I define American differently. This was propelled in part by my research on Sikh migration to America, in which I understood that we, too, came to this country in large part because of these “rural values” – we came to farm, and to work on railroads. Puna Singh describes his first impression of California upon arrival in the early 20th century:
“The similarity of the California landscape to Punjab gave a sense of homeland to this
unfamiliar world. Puna Singh describes his first impression of California. "On arriving in
the Sacramento Valley, one could not help but be reminded of the Punjab. Fertile fields
stretched across the flat valley to the foothills lying far in the distance."
By 1930, the year in which American Gothic was painted, many Sikhs were already working on American farms, maybe with pitchforks in hand like the man in the painting... and in modern day, Sikhs may have more in common with the rural white American farmer than one may otherwise expect. We serve the same land, the same water. We’re just as harmed when the environment is threatened – see this article.
So no, I no longer think being American is about the look. Or the accent. Or the occupation. Or the turban. Or lack thereof. I’m more interested in who is plowing the land. Who grows the crops. Who is transporting cargo up, down, and around the country day in and day out. The resolute look of the American farmers in American Gothic is the same one I see in my people– a determination to stay. To prevail. While America’s ownership and composition has changed over time violently, its land is timeless and universal– despite what American legal history has detailed.
Motif Mix: Belonging
Below are works that have to do with my conception of belonging. Belonging isn’t about assimilation or dilution– it's about connection and creation. What you give to those around you, and what they give you.
ridesharing the styx - by roro <3 - communion | Essay by Roro, May 2025
One of my favorite things I read this month is this very poetic piece about being drunk in an uber ride back home. This writing takes the reader through many interesting ebbs and flows, each paragraph painting a more layered picture than the last. The bit I found most interesting was about how the uber environment changes in those instances where the driver is a fellow South Asian man.
“The gravity of this encounter is no longer escapable. It charges the name ‘Rajesh’ that flashes across my screen, just as it charges his corresponding bemusement at the name ‘Roro,’ incongruent with my face and linguistically devoid of heritage, clearly obfuscating whatever identity it might once have retained. Sometimes he will speak to me in Hindi and I will crease my expression with a feigned apology, mustering a:
“Sorry, I don’t speak—”
Each word reeks of self-consciousness, painfully aware of its own affected accent. The silence which follows my statement is no longer that anonymous ambience of the rideshare. It is now something laden with expectation. Though he never indicates it, I shrivel under the lamp of his imagined disappointment, measuring the distance between us in each tradition and tongue I fail to embody. I swallow back a lump in my throat and it is shaped like the subcontinent.
Whenever the conversation persists, I feel compelled to perform a bastardised version of my own Indianness. I tell him I am Malayali, though my attempts at the language are pathetically self-revealing. I dodge questions about girlfriends and pass with flying colours on questions about my education, delicately stepping around minefields like queerness or my redundant law degree that might expose me as an imposter; tip-toeing forever around the sin of ethnic fraudulence.
But in contorting myself to placate his paternal gaze, I only seem to pull back the curtain on my own flimsy scaffolding. Each fumble at cultural fluency divulges something I don’t mean to say: unrelenting vagueness about family, ignorance about film and music and religion, geopolitical opinions expressed with the practiced care of someone who learns through research and not lived experience. Every equivocation becomes an admission of guilt. I out myself as not simply inauthentic, but as someone actively divorcing myself from brownness in fear that it has rejected me first. In this moment, I am neither the anonymous passenger nor the self I have curated, but something uncomfortably, undeniably real—a person caught in the act of becoming someone else.”
The sin of ethnic fraudulence. A horseman signalling the end of their children’s generation as they know it. Earlier I discussed how it felt to be a member of a community and feel rejected by those outside of it. But what about instances like these? Where one is immediately reminded of the ways in which they’ve departed from their own community– how they made the choice to be drunk in this uber, to move away from the template of “Indianness”. In times like these I feel like I’m reaching for something. Maybe something to mend the gap that has only steadily increased since I was born, with each year I spend in America and not the lump in my throat that is “shaped like the subcontinent”.
In Defense of Despair | Essay by Hanif Abdurraqib, May 2025
Here Hanif writes about how despair doesn’t have to be an end point. Below he describes the monthly workshop he holds for high school writers in his home state of Ohio.
“I am reading poems of accumulating affections with brilliant young writers who are about to leave a city we all love, and go to various elsewheres, and I am doing so because I want them to consider the responsibilities of the heart, responsibilities that the world will attempt to detach them from in the name of individu
]alism, or the ever-growing realities of isolationist attitudes and power’s contempt for community. I am asking them, as I am continually asking myself, to imagine a heart that feels a connection to the hearts of others, even others you do not know. I would like to think that this is what nudges me forward, more than some mythological concept of “hope.” In the silence of a room after the reading of a poem, when the only sounds are small gasps and sniffles, I can say to myself that we are all carrying a unique ache, or a unique memory, or a unique desire that the poem ignited. And I would like to know about it. I would like to know what few inches of the wretched world can be made into an adequate space for you to mourn, or to make a plate of food, or to dance in your living room, or to bury something you’ve finally decided to put down.”
I love this piece because to me, hope isn’t about this unshakable belief that everything is okay or that it will certainly get better. Rather, my hope, like Hanif’s, comes from the love I have for those I am connected to, those to whom I belong and who belong to me.
The NYPD’s War on Graffiti Writers: Lady Pink | Video by Living Proof New York, May 2025
Lady Pink is an internationally known graffiti writer & artist who played a pivotal role in New York’s subway movement (Living Proof). In this video, Lady Pink speaks to the incredible things that happen when one refuses to conform– or to belong. Rejecting the elite and the mainstream creates opportunity for one to develop their own authentic voice, and to cultivate a community that pushes these boundaries alongside you. Authenticity is key, no matter the medium.
The Coast | Short film by Sohrab Hura, 2020
Sohrab Hura’s transfixing film The Coast (2020), on view at MoMA PS1 as part of his first survey in the US, takes place during the annual religious festival of Dasara in Tamil Nadu. It’s filmed on a beach at night, and the celebrants, who have embodied various characters with masks and costumes, enter the sea at the end of the day to return to themselves, cleansed. The mood of the film shifts and morphs, as turbulent as the breaking waves. Shot against an ink-black sky, the film begins with a grating, mechanical soundtrack that creates a sense of tension and anxiety. In slowed-down footage, people, many of whom are fully clothed, appear to struggle toward the shore, like castaways. Eventually the soundtrack fades and is replaced by the soft, rhythmic sounds of the waves moving over the sand. We see mothers laughing with children, couples helping each other out of the water, play and joy replacing fear. The coastline, in Hura’s works, is not only a changeable border between land and sea, but also a stand-in for other porous and contested borders and for the fluctuating nature of fact and fiction (Dykstra, 2025).
I saw this film displayed at MOMA PS1 in February and I’ve thought about it a lot since. Society is defined by stratification. Clear lines define where people should be and go and what they should do. But on the coast, in the water, that doesn’t matter– because nature belongs to everyone. Rather, we belong to it. In this film, you see the weight of caste and injustice get washed away by the water, if even for a moment.
Eroticize the Hood | Essay by Jose Sanchez, 2024
In his book review of Queer Newark by Whitney Strub, Sanchez reflects on the history and contemporary conditions of Newark, New Jersey– challenging its perception as “irredeemably unsexy, violent, destitute”.
“The 1960s are remembered as the moment that Newark would begin to unravel, yet Lvovsky argues convincingly that “the steady ebb of white, middle-class families left space not just for growing Black neighborhoods but also for a commercial culture that flouted traditional sexual norms.” As in other cities, these were “semi-private spaces that nurtured boundary-pushing behaviors that might have drawn more hostility on the streets,” from prostitution to cross-dressing to interracial coupling. Here too Newark parallels but doesn’t duplicate New York, showing the liberatory possibilities opened by the urban crisis. Post-uprising Newark’s story, Kristyn Scorsone writes in another chapter, “is not a simple declension narrative of the fall of another postindustrial northern city.” Queer community-building in this period, generally a Black phenomenon, “laid the groundwork for the city’s queer and transgender community to engage in later kinds of queer institution-building, such as entrepreneurial businesses,” as well as political organizing and the ballroom scene of the 1980s and ’90s.”
Due to my upbringing in Sacramento, I am always interested in these “semi-private spaces”. The things that happen because it's not the city– the liberatory possibilities. How people take care of each other when all eyes aren’t on them.
Challa | Performance by Gurdas Maan, 2016 (?)
This is a live performance of one of Gurdas Maan’s most famous songs. When I rewatched this video recently I was on the verge of tears. I felt my heart swelling. In the diaspora we get caught up in how we fit in, how we’re similar. How we can make it work when we’re not at home anymore. But this video reminds me that that was never the point. What we got going on is so rich, so deep, so beautiful. The colors. The dance. The music. The poetry in the lyrics. That’s us and no one else.
Oneness | Writing by Guru Gobind Singh, compilation by Jvala Singh
Oneness (ektā ਏਕਤਾ) is the foundation of Sikh philosophy and this perspective provides the drive for devotion (bhakti ਭਗਤਿ) and service to humanity (sevā ਸੇਵਾ). This vision sees unity across identities of gender, regional and religious differences, and socio-political hierarchies.
This vision was articulated and taught by all the Sikh Gurus, including Guru Gobind Singh who writes:
ਸਰਬ ਕਾਲ ਸਰਬ ਠਉਰ ਏਕ ਸੇ ਲਗਤ ਹੋ
saraba kāla saraba ṭhaura eka se lagata ho
Through all times, at all places,
To me it all appears as the One
Akāl Ustati [The Praise of the Immortal], verse 20
In closing, my vision for belonging is always forged by the above. We’re all part of the same light.