What will he need to feel at home in "America"?

Iranian Americans first started arriving in the United States in large number around 1979, near or around the Iranian Revolution. That was nearly thirty years ago. Since that time, the children who came over with their parents, and those who were born here, have grown into highly professional, highly educated young adults who in a relativlely short time, will be carrying Iranian culture forward. 

This new generation is undeniably Iranian and American, ready to embrace all the new technologies, the liberties, the energies of the United States, while still maintaining a connection to the rich and extensive heritage from which they descend.  

Perhaps we could say that in this new generation, we are no longer burdened by the feelings of exile that may have plagued our parents. We are free to choose our own identities, so to speak. We are not looking back to the time that felt closest to home. Instead, we are free to make a home for ourselves here in this new land.

What will this home look like in our hands? What will we hand down to our own children? What aspects of Iranian culture will we elect to keep? Surely, we will keep the chai, the steaming heaps of rice, the tarof, the generosity and the devout commitment to family. But will we drink our tea with soy milk? Will we have new definitions of family? What traditions will serve us best here in the States? Who have we become as a culture over the past thirty years? Where do our parents hope the next thirty years will take us?  

This blog aims to exlore these questions as well as to initiate a documentary film project that will do the same. Both projects attempt to understand what it means to be “Iranian American” in the current political and cultural era, as well as to conjecture as to what it will mean in the future to be such. The blog will walk with us through our creative process, feature articles or stories or Maz Jobrani jokes we feel are demonstrative of cultural formation, and of course, help us to build a community of people with shared experience, coming together to process and productively use those experiences to engender positive change.

Please visit the “We Are Iran” portions of this webpage for more information regarding our documentary film project. And please contact Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz at any time with suggestions, ideas, and above all, with your own personal stories of change, evolution, cultural development, cultural memory, and anything else that is of interest to you regarding your experience as an Iranian, a United States American, or as a person somewhere in between.