The Wat Thai Buddhist Temple in Silicon Valley was founded in 1983 by a group of predominantly middle-class men and women with different ethnic and racial identities. The temple, which functions as a religious, social, economic, educational, and cultural hub, has become a place for the community members to engage in spiritual and cultural practices.
 
In Creating a Buddhist Community, Jiemin Bao shows how the Wat Thai participants practice Buddhism and rework gender relationships in the course of organizing temple space, teaching meditation, schooling children in Thai language and culture, merit making, fundraising, and celebrating festivals.
 
Bao’s detailed account of the process of creating an inclusive temple community with Thai immigrants as the majority helps to deconstruct the exoticized view of Buddhism in American culture. Creating a Buddhist Community also explores Wat Thai’s identification with both the United States and Thailand and how this transnational perspective reimagines and reterritorializes what is called American Buddhism.

Desi Land is Shalini Shankar’s lively ethnographic account of South Asian American teen culture during the Silicon Valley dot-com boom. Shankar focuses on how South Asian Americans, or “Desis,” define and manage what it means to be successful in a place brimming with the promise of technology. Between 1999 and 2001 Shankar spent many months “kickin’ it” with Desi teenagers at three Silicon Valley high schools, and she has since followed their lives and stories. The diverse high-school students who populate Desi Land are Muslims, Hindus, Christians, and Sikhs, from South Asia and other locations; they include first- to fourth-generation immigrants whose parents’ careers vary from assembly-line workers to engineers and CEOs. By analyzing how Desi teens’ conceptions and realizations of success are influenced by community values, cultural practices, language use, and material culture, she offers a nuanced portrait of diasporic formations in a transforming urban region.

Whether discussing instant messaging or arranged marriages, Desi bling or the pressures of the model minority myth, Shankar foregrounds the teens’ voices, perspectives, and stories. She investigates how Desi teens interact with dialogue and songs from Bollywood films as well as how they use their heritage language in ways that inform local meanings of ethnicity while they also connect to a broader South Asian diasporic consciousness. She analyzes how teens negotiate rules about dating and reconcile them with their longer-term desire to become adult members of their communities. In Desi Land Shankar not only shows how Desi teens of different socioeconomic backgrounds are differently able to succeed in Silicon Valley schools and economies but also how such variance affects meanings of race, class, and community for South Asian Americans.

Gardening at the Margins tells the remarkable story of a diverse group of neighbors working together to grow food and community in the Santa Clara Valley in California. Based on four years of deeply engaged ethnographic field research via a Participatory Action Research project with the people and ecosystems of La Mesa Verde home garden program, Gabriel R. Valle develops a theory of convivial labor to describe how the acts of care among the diverse gardeners—through growing, preparing, and eating food in one of the most income unequal places in the country—are powerful, complex acts of resistance.

Participants in La Mesa Verde home garden program engage in the practices of growing and sharing food to envision and continuously work to enact alternative food systems that connect people to their food and communities. They are building on ancestral knowledge, as well as learning new forms of farming, gardening, and healing through convivial acts of sharing.

The individuals featured in the book are imagining and building alternative worlds and futures amid the very real challenges they embody and endure. Climate change, for example, is forcing thousands of migrants to urban areas, which means recent immigrants’ traditional environmental, nutritional, and healing knowledge will continue to be threatened by the pervasiveness of modernity and the homogenization of global capitalism. Moreover, once rural people migrate to urban areas, their ability to retain traditional foodways will remain difficult without spaces of autonomy. The stories in this book reveal how people create the physical space to grow food and the political space to enact autonomy to revive and restore agroecological knowledge needed for an uncertain future.
 

Most Native Americans in the United States live in cities, where many find themselves caught in a bind, neither afforded the full rights granted U.S. citizens nor allowed full access to the tribal programs and resources—particularly health care services—provided to Native Americans living on reservations. A scholar and a member of the Winnebago Tribe of Nebraska, Renya K. Ramirez investigates how urban Native Americans negotiate what she argues is, in effect, a transnational existence. Through an ethnographic account of the Native American community in California’s Silicon Valley and beyond, Ramirez explores the ways that urban Indians have pressed their tribes, local institutions, and the federal government to expand conventional notions of citizenship.

Ramirez’s ethnography revolves around the Paiute American activist Laverne Roberts’s notion of the “hub,” a space that allows for the creation of a sense of belonging away from a geographic center. Ramirez describes “hub-making” activities in Silicon Valley, including sweat lodge ceremonies, powwows, and American Indian Alliance meetings, gatherings at which urban Indians reinforce bonds of social belonging and forge intertribal alliances. She examines the struggle of the Muwekma Ohlone, a tribe aboriginal to the San Francisco Bay area, to maintain a sense of community without a land base and to be recognized as a tribe by the federal government. She considers the crucial role of Native women within urban indigenous communities; a 2004 meeting in which Native Americans from Mexico and the United States discussed cross-border indigenous rights activism; and the ways that young Native Americans in Silicon Valley experience race and ethnicity, especially in relation to the area’s large Chicano community. A unique and important exploration of diaspora, transnationalism, identity, belonging, and community, Native Hubs is intended for scholars and activists alike.

A collective ethnography of grassroots mobilizations for community safety across the Silicon Valley
 
This is a narrative of struggle and solidarity and a collective toolkit for grassroots opposition to militarization, policing, and ongoing conditions of war in the current conjuncture of racial patriarchal capitalism. Grassroots researcher Annie Paradise presents here a collective ethnography of the mothers and community matriarchs whose children have been murdered by police across the San Francisco Bay Area as they develop and practice autonomous, creative forms of resistance.
 
The War on the Social Factory: The Struggle for Community Safety in the Silicon Valley maps local families’ struggles to reclaim their households and their communities—to create a social infrastructure of care, justice, and safety outside state- and market-determined modes of “security.” Practices such as sustained vigil, testimony, and the production and circulation of insurgent knowledges are shown here to be part of interconnected justice efforts to demilitarize and decarcerate communities in the face of the multiple forms of violence enacted under late racial patriarchal capitalism. Paradise examines the expanding carceral processes of enclosure, criminalization, dispossession, expropriation, and disposability that mark the neoliberal "security” regime across the Silicon Valley and offers counter-counterinsurgent strategies and practices of co-generative, dynamic resistance.