{"id":30186,"date":"2013-04-07T02:36:36","date_gmt":"2013-04-07T02:36:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=30186"},"modified":"2015-01-17T20:49:42","modified_gmt":"2015-01-17T20:49:42","slug":"mit-scholar-vivek-bald-uncovers-forgotten-history-of-south-asian-immigrants-new-york-city-arrival","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=30186","title":{"rendered":"MIT Scholar Vivek Bald uncovers forgotten history of South Asian immigrants’ New York City arrival"},"content":{"rendered":"

MIT Scholar Vivek Bald uncovers forgotten history of South Asian immigrants’ New York City arrival<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

New York Daily News<\/a>
\n2013-01-17<\/p>\n

Erica Pearson<\/a><\/strong><\/p>\n

New book chronicles little-known story of Muslims from what’s now Pakistan and Bangladesh, who built a multiracial community in Harlem decades before they were legally allowed to immigrate to the U.S.<\/em><\/p>\n

Virtually all Asian immigration to the U.S. was banned when Aladdin Ullah\u2019s father \u2014 who left East Bengal<\/a> to work on a British steamer \u2014 jumped ship in the 1920s and settled in New York.<\/p>\n

Like hundreds of other Muslim sailors at the time, he found a home in Harlem<\/a> \u2014 marrying a Puerto Rican woman and opening one of the city\u2019s first Indian restaurants. He stayed there until his death in 1983.<\/p>\n

\u201cI see, now that I\u2019m older, he kind of romanticized what Harlem was to him,\u201d said Ullah, 44, a comedian and playwright who grew up in the George Washington Carver Houses<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u201cI think my father looked at Harlem as where, \u2018Here is where people greet you, These people embraced me for what I am.\u2019 \u201d<\/p>\n

Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and filmmaker Vivek Bald<\/a>, is the author of \u201cBengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America<\/a>,\u201d published this month by Harvard University Press.<\/p>\n

Bald believes Ullah\u2019s family is the last in East Harlem<\/a> with a direct connection to a little-documented community that thrived decades before the first large waves of South Asian immigration to the U.S…<\/p>\n

… In many ways, the histories of these early immigrants became lost because they were forced into the shadows, Bald said. Race-based immigration laws \u2014 starting with the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882<\/a> and extending until the quota system was overhauled in 1965<\/a> \u2014 made their presence illegal.<\/p>\n

\u201cIf you were an Asian person, with very few exceptions you were legally barred from entering the U.S. like other immigrants,\u201d said Bald. \u201cYou were not deemed fit to become a citizen, and in many states you could not legally own property.\u201d<\/p>\n

But in Harlem, Bengali immigrants married into African-American and Puerto Rican families and found jobs as doormen or dishwashers.<\/strong> In the 1940s, Bengali vendors sold hotdogs from carts along Madison, Lexington and Third Aves…<\/p>\n

Read the entire article here<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MIT Scholar Vivek Bald uncovers forgotten history of South Asian immigrants’ New York City arrival New York Daily News 2013-01-17 Erica Pearson New book chronicles little-known story of Muslims from what’s now Pakistan and Bangladesh, who built a multiracial community in Harlem decades before they were legally allowed to immigrate to the U.S. Virtually all […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1649,12,16,459,8,20],"tags":[14302,14301,1463,12149],"class_list":["post-30186","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-anthropology","category-articles","category-asia","category-history","category-media-archive","category-usa","tag-aladdin-ullah","tag-erica-pearson","tag-new-york-daily-news","tag-vivek-bald"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30186","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=30186"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/30186\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=30186"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=30186"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=30186"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}