You Don't Have to Choose: On Being South Asian and American at the Same Time

Identity · Heritage · Belonging | By Abhishek & Elisa, En Route Designs | May 2026

If you live in North Texas, you've heard what's been happening in Frisco. City council meetings that were once about zoning and school budgets have become venues for a different kind of speech. Crowds arriving with cameras and agendas, shouting about an "Indian takeover," filming families at the temple, mocking the names of Indian American council candidates. Our neighbors. Our community. People who built this city.

We live here. We raise our children here. And we've been sitting with what this moment means...not just as residents, but as parents, and as the founders of a brand built on the exact idea now under attack: that South Asian heritage belongs in American life.

This blog post is our response. Not out of anger but out of clarity. Because what gets lost in all of this noise is a nuanced truth that our children deserve to hear, loudly and often:

You can be deeply, fully American and embrace your South Asian hertitage and culture. These identities don't compete. They compliment and complete each other.

What "Assimilation" Actually Means

Let's be honest about a word that gets weaponized: assimilation. The critics often use it to demand that immigrants and their children disappear into a particular version of American identity, one that leaves no room for kurtas, South Asian clothing, food and traditions. 

But that's not what assimilation means, and it's not what the American story has ever actually been. Every wave of immigrants to this country: Irish, Italian, Jewish, Vietnamese, Mexican, Indian and Pakistani have brought something and built something. They learned English. They took on jobs that contributed to their suburbs/cities. They voted, served on PTAs, paid taxes, started businesses, built suburbs. They became American. And they did all of that without erasing who they were.

Assimilation into American civic life? Absolutely. That's a value we share. But cultural erasure as a prerequisite for belonging? That's not Americanism. That's something else entirely.

The Indian Americans showing up at Frisco City Council meetings, speaking up, running for office. That is assimilation in its most genuine form. That is participation in democracy. 

The Double Life Is What Breaks Us

Here's what nobody talks about enough: the psychological cost of performing two separate identities.

So many of us who grew up as first-generation South Asian Americans know this feeling intimately. American at school. Indian at home. Never fully either. A lot of us grew up during our childhood years stuck in our heads and stuck in our insecurities. This identity problem is real especially in parts of the US where there are not as many South Asians families/kids. 

That fracture is real, and it has real consequences. Research consistently shows that bicultural identity conflict. The sense that your two cultures are in opposition, correlates with lower self-esteem, higher rates of anxiety, and a weaker sense of belonging. Not because heritage itself is harmful. But because being made to feel that your heritage makes you less American creates a wound that takes decades to heal.

Studies on second-generation immigrants find that children who feel they must choose between their heritage culture and their American identity report significantly lower wellbeing outcomes than those who are supported in holding both identities simultaneously. Cultural pride, it turns out, is not the enemy of belonging — it is the foundation of it.

The alternative is the integrated identity. It's a richer, more resilient version of American. Children who feel proud of where they come from are better equipped to engage with the world around them, not more isolated from it.

To the Frisco Community — and Every Community Like It

To our Indian American neighbors in Frisco and across North Texas: we see you. The anger directed at families who have spent decades building this community is wrong. It is factually wrong. Some of the the speakers were largely not even Frisco residents.

The answer is not to disappear. It is not to prove we belong by being less visible, less South Asian, less present. The answer is the opposite.

Raise your children with the full weight of who they are. Teach them Diwali and the Fourth of July. Cook dal and barbecue on the same weekend. Let them grow up knowing that their heritage is not a liability. It is a gift that most people around them simply haven't had the privilege of carrying.

We believe the next generation of South Asian American children should be raised knowing both who they are and where they belong. They will be the ones who make that unity real.

The first step is refusing to shrink. The second is making sure our children never feel like they have to.

Abhishek & Elisa are the co-founders of En Route Designs, a South Asian-inspired children's clothing brand. They are a mixed South Asian and American family raising their children in Frisco, Texas.