Soon after arriving in the United States during the 1960s and 1970s, Pakistani Americans began building key institutions such as cultural and religious organizations and ethnic entrepreneurial economies to support their growing communities. They founded houses of worship. They celebrated and reconstituted cultural practices from Pakistan in both fresh and familiar ways, imbuing those practices with new, uniquely American meanings and significance.

Subsequent generations continue to expand and transform this basic ethnic infrastructure to serve the needs of their changing communities across the United States. The constructed nature of ethnic culture means that being Pakistani American signifies different things to the different people who identify as such.

This module is about Pakistani American institutions that foster ethnic identity and community.