Designing Our Own Path, Telling Our Own Stories: Using DesiCrit for Education to Examine First-Generation Indian-American Identities and Experiences in Music Education.

다국어 초록 (Multilingual Abstract)

First-Generation Indian-American (FGIA) students and educators remain largely invisible in music education scholarship, often subsumed under monolithic Asian American categories that fail to capture their complex racialization, cultural hybridity, and transnational realities (Cayari, 2021; Palkki et al., 2024). Existing literature on music education continues to privilege whiteness and Western classical traditions, erasing diasporic perspectives and undervaluing the cultural wealth that FGIA communities bring to music learning (Hess, 2021; Sanchez-Gatt et al., 2025; Yosso, 2005). In this study, I addressed these absences by centering FGIA voices and theorizing conditions that support their persistence in music education using DesiCrit for Education (DCE), a theoretical lens I developed that extends DesiCrit (Harpalani, 2013) and Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2023) to account for caste, hybridity, and anti-colonial resistance.The purpose of this study was to explore how FGIA music educators navigate their educational and professional trajectories, and what factors enable their persistence in a field that often marginalizes their identities. Specifically, I asked: (1) How do FGIA educators recall their K-12 music experiences? (2) How do family, community, and out-of-school contexts shape their participation in music education? (3) How do higher education programs influence their career decisions? and (4) What factors support their persistence in the music education profession?Using a qualitative case study design (Yin, 2018), I examined the experiences of four FGIA music educators. Data included semi-structured interviews (Roulston, 2010), focus groups (Krueger, 2014), and researcher reflexive journaling (Merriam & Tisdell, 2016. I coded data iteratively through constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 2014), with the tenets of DCE guiding both thematic development and interpretation. Reflexivity served as an ethical anchor in this process, allowing me to interrogate my inbetweener positionality (Milligan, 2016) and resist imposing my frameworks onto participants' stories.Analysis revealed that FGIA educators experienced music education as a site of both belonging and marginalization. Participants' narratives illuminated nonlinear musical pathways shaped by negotiations of cultural hybridity, intergenerational dynamics, and the pressures of racialization in predominantly white spaces. Their persistence was relational and collective, sustained by mentors, identity-affirming communities, and critical moments of reframing success. Participants described how they strategically navigated assimilationist expectations while simultaneously cultivating resistance to cultural erasure. From these findings, I developed a conceptual model of FGIA persistence in music education, which delineates five interrelated domains: affirming hybridity as a pedagogical resource, fostering social belonging, redefining success beyond assimilationist logics, supporting the development of critical consciousness, and creating identity-affirming spaces. This model offers researchers a lens for understanding persistence as more than individual resilience; it highlights the structural, relational, and cultural conditions that may make persistence possible.I suggest both theoretical and practical implications of this work. I advanced DCE as an analytic framework capable of representing the racialized and diasporic realities of FGIA educators, offering tools for future research across minoritized groups in music education and beyond. Practically, these findings call on PK-12 teachers to create classroom environments that affirm hybridity and resist tokenism, teacher educators to model anti-colonial pedagogy and build affinity spaces, and researchers to embrace reflexive methodologies that center minoritized voices. Ultimately, I found FGIA persistence as a collective and culturally situated process, grounded in relationships, identity affirmation, and resistance to systemic erasure. Centering FGIA voices challenges music education to move beyond superficial diversity toward practices that sustain and empower.