โ Scribed by Julia Meredith Hess
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
The Tibetan diaspora began fifty years ago when the current Dalai Lama fled Lhasa and established a government-in-exile in India. For those fifty years, the vast majority of Tibetans have kept their stateless refugee status in India and Nepal as a reminder to themselves and the world that Tibet is under Chinese occupation and that they are committed to returning someday.
In the 1990s, the U.S. Congress passed legislation that allowed 1,000 Tibetans and their families to immigrate to the United States; a decade later the total U.S. population includes some 10,000 Tibetans. Not only is the social fact of the migrationโits historical and political contextsโof interest, but also how migration and resettlement in the U.S. reflect emergent identity formations among members of a stateless society.
Immigrant Ambassadors examines Tibetan identity at a critical juncture in the diaspora's expansion, and argues that increased migration to the West is both facilitated and marked by changing understandings of what it means to be a twenty-first-century Tibetanโdeterritorialized, activist, and cosmopolitan.
Contents
List of Figures and Tables
Acknowledgments
Note on Tibetan Transliteration
Introduction: โWe Will Always Hold Tibet in Our Heartsโ
I. Locating the Tibetan Diaspora in a World of Nation-States
1. Tibet in Diaspora: Locating the Homeland from the Margins of Exile
2. India, New Mexico, and the Specter of Tibet: On the Trail of the Tibetan Diaspora
3. โTibetannessโ Where There Is No Tibet: Culture in a World of Nation-States
4. Refugees to Citizens, Tibetans, and the State
II. Expanding the Diaspora, Transforming Tibetanness
5. The Tibetan U.S. Resettlement Project: The Lottery, the โLucky 1,000,โ and Immigrant Ambassadors
6. Tibetans in India: Deterritorialized Culture, Occidental Longing, and Global Imaginaries
III. Tibetans in the United States
7. A New Home in Diaspora: The First Years of the TUSRP, 1992โ1996
8. โCulture Is Your Base Campโ: Tibetans in New Mexico, Youth, and Cultural Identity
9. Statelessness and the State: The Meanings of Citizenship
Conclusion: Tibetans in the New World
Notes
References Cited
Index
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<p><i>Immigrant Ambassadors</i> explores transformations in Tibetan identity as increasing numbers of Tibetans move from being stateless refugees in India and Nepal to citizens of the United States.</p>
Immigration is continuously and rapidly changing the face of Western countries. While newcomers are harbingers of change, host nations also participate in how new populations are incorporated into their social and political fabric. <P>Bringing together a transcontinental group of anthropologists, t
<div> <p>Immigration is continuously and rapidly changing the face of Western countries. While newcomers are harbingers of change, host nations also participate in how new populations are incorporated into their social and political fabric.<br> <br> Bringing together a transcontinental group of anth