Posted in Book 2 Comments Articles and ReviewsДЄ sampling of articles about the book Bengali Harlem and the Lost Histories of South Asian America, from The MarginsвЂ™ Naeem Mohaemen, Hyphen MagazineвЂs S. Their stories of ingenuity and intermixture challenge assumptions about assimilation and reveal cross-racial affinities beneath the surface of early twentieth-century America. Many started families with Creole, Puerto Rican, and African American women.ДЄs steel and auto workers in the Midwest, as traders in the South, and as halal hot dog vendors on 125th Street, these immigrants created lives as remarkable as they are unknown.

At a time when Asian immigrants were vilified and criminalized, Bengali Muslims quietly became part of some of AmericaвЂ™s most iconic neighborhoods of color, from TremГ© in New Orleans to DetroitвЂ™s Black Bottom, from West Baltimore to Harlem. Vivek BaldвЂ™s meticulous reconstruction reveals a lost history of South Asian sojourning and life-making in the United States. The stories of these early working-class migrants vividly contrast with our typical understanding of immigration. As factory owners sought their labor and anti-Asian immigration laws closed in around them, these men built clandestine networks that stretched from the northeastern waterfront across the industrial Midwest. Two decades later, hundreds of Indian Muslim seamen began jumping ship in New York and Baltimore, escaping the engine rooms of British steamers to find less brutal work onshore.

The American demand for вЂњOriental goodsвЂќ took these migrants on a curious path, from New JerseyвЂ™s beach boardwalks into the heart of the segregated South. In the final years of the nineteenth century, small groups of Muslim peddlers arrived at Ellis Island every summer, bags heavy with embroidered silks from their home villages in Bengal.

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