Negotiating Identities

This work gives a gendered perspective on how immigrant communities conceptualize and indeed actualize the process of reconstruction in a foreign land. Faced with a disjunctive crisis, religion becomes a major symbolic resource in the rebuilding of a community. The community in question is South Asian, and the material representation of their coming together is the Sri Venkateswara temple in Pittsburgh. Clearly positioning herself in the field of women's studies, the author feels that the "immigrant" has generally been treated as a monolithic construct and that the dimension of gender has been ignored. Through this study, she asserts that immigrant women's experiences cannot be treated as though they were identical to those of of men.