hts or running water,  he says.
Nationwide, the poll suggested that Asian Americans as a group think they have done much better economically than Hispanics think they have done. Asian Americans also have a far more optimistic view of their chances for success. Eighty-four percent of Asian Americans guessed that the average Asian American is at least as well off as the average white American, and 58 percent said they have the same or better chance of becoming wealthy.
Hispanics, on the other hand, tended to be more pessimistic and to believe others  critical views of them. In the poll, 74 percent of Hispanics said the average Hispanic is worse off than the average white, and 41 percent cited low motivation and unwillingness to work as a reason for their lack of advancement. Yet studies show that Hispanics have an unusually high level of participation in the work force.
 We are very susceptible to what others think about us, so we absorb those negative stereotypes in defiance of the facts,  says Cecilia Munoz, Washington director of the National Council of La Raza, a Hispanic advocacy group. A 1994 survey by the council found that Hispanics have been most often
depicted on TV and in films as  poor, of low sta deceptive, and criminals. 
In the Post/Kaiser/Harvard poll, only one-quarter Americans cited unwillingness to work as a major ob Hispanics; many more agreed with Hispanics that problems and lack of educational opportunities are gest problems. In assessing the status of Asian A whites cited only language difficulties as a major suggesting that whites believe that Asian Americans f barriers than Hispanics face.
More Hispanics say they thought they face the i crimination as a group, but despite their relative ecom cess, more Asian Americans say they and their rela friends had experienced prejudice personally.
A majority of both groups agree that minorities she their way up without special government help but a that government should protect their rights, for ex: enacting tougher laws against workplace discriminai in interviews, many Hispanics and Asian Americans   deep concerns about a rising tide of anti-immigrant
Some specialists say the recent political furor o\ immigrants has exacerbated a false impression that foreigners are arriving on U.S. shores. In the poll, th dents guessed that 65 percent of Hispanics in the Uni were bom in foreign countries. According to the Council of La Raza, only 33 percent of Hispanics x in foreign countries.
 I see many Latinos trying to distance themselves i roots as they react to the wave of anti-immigrant ss says Harry Pachon, who directs the Tomas Rivera Ce I keep asking, how does an Anglo driving down the s out which Latino is native-born, which is a refugee, undocumented? 
IN OTHER WAYS, THE POLL SUGGESTED TH/ respondents are not especially hostile to either ethnic Three-quarters said it  wouldn t make much differen country if the number of Hispanics or Asian Ameri' to increase significantly. Less than one-quarter said be a  bad thing  if either group were to grow subsl
Yet the perception of growing xenophobia has cr sions between foreign-bom and more established and Asian Americans. Even in a community such a Heights, in Queens, N.Y., where Korean, Cuban, V and Colombian immigrants live in tolerant proximit' generation residents expressed concern in interviews erate or illegal newcomers are creating a negative iff ethnic minorities.
People have this idea that we are coming here in quantities to invade America and go on welfare. Ti that most of us were bom here, we are working har< to school,  says Mario Vargas, 22, a college studt parents emigrated from Colombia.  But these days, t types are making it harder for the rest of us. 
i
168
'j
Article 34
NEIGHBORING FAITHS
HOW WILL AMERICANS COPE WITH INCREASING RELIGIOUS DIVERSITY?
hana l eck
Uma L. Eck, Ph.D. 76, professor of comparative religion and In- n studies, chairs the Committee on the Study of Religion in the acuity of Arts and Sciences and is also director of the Pluralism reject. The project's multimedia CD-ROM, On Common Ground: World Religions in America, will be published in early 997 by Columbia University Press. Eek's most recent book is En-ountering God: A Spiritual Journey from Bozeman to Ba-aras (Beacon Press, 1993). This article is slightly adapted from cPs 1996 Phi Beta Kappa Oration, delivered during Commence-teni week.
I first came to Harvard as a student of the culture and re g10' lot India. I was fascinated by India's many religious r Itions -the interrelations, tensions, and movemen s iindu, Buddhist, Jain, Muslim, and Sikh traditions over many Untunes in a complex culture. But never did 1 imagine 'agan teaching here in the late 1970s that the very m e
counter in a world shaped by a new geopolitical and a new "georeligious" reality.
For me, this journey began in the academic year 1989-90. Suddenly the contextual ground under my own feet as a scholar and teacher began to shift. In the past, I had always had several students from India in my classes on India, but in that year, their numbers increased. Only now, they were not from India, but were Indian Americans, bom and raised in San Antonio, Baltimore, or Cleveland. They were, as I discovered, the children of the first generation of immigrants who had settled in America after the passage of the 1965 immigration act. That historic event finally removed the legal legacy of racism that had been built into immigration legislation from the first Chinese exclusion act in 1882 to the Johnson Reed Act in 1924, which effectively barred Asian immigrants for four decades. The 1965 policy opened the door again for immigration from Asia and from other parts of the world.
T..     Hindus from Baltimore, here were Muslims from Prov!de   rsev phey represented the
Sikhs from Chicago, Jains from hI	yj religious reality,
emergence in America of a new cultural ano y
. the 1990s to the drew me to India would lead me scholar of com-study of the United States. So how is it t a * past hve PMative religion and Indian studies as Sfearful to be tread-years studying America furtively at s ' distinguished  g on the territory of some of Harvard s zeaiously? Molars, then unapologetically, flagran y>- 3 began here ^at intellectual passage from India to study Amer-at Harvard. The circumstances that drove	United States,
raise important issues for Harvard, or uS en perhaps for the world. They are issues
From Harvard Magazine. September/Oct
As a scholar of India, I had taken note of the effects of the new immigration on that country, the so-called  brain drain,  as thousands of Indian professionals, doctors, and scientists left India for the United States. I have to admit, however, that I had never stopped to think what this would mean for the United States until the children of this first generation of Indian immigrants reached college age and enrolled in my classes at Harvard that year. There were Muslims from Providence, Hindus from Baltimore, Sikhs from Chicago, Jains from New Jersey. They represented the emergence in America of a new cultural and religious reality.
  0^44   1996 by Diana L 1996, PP- 38^'
Eck. Reprinted bv pe ssion-
169
6. ASIAN AMERICANS
Some came from very secular families and knew little of their Indian heritage. Others had grown up in the new Hindu or Mus-i	lim culture of temples and Islamic centers their parents had
'	begun to establish here in the United States. Some had been to
|	Muslim youth leadership camps, organized by the Islamic Soci-
'	ety of North America. Some had been to a Hindu summer camp
at Rajarajeswari Pitha in the Poconos, or to a family Vedanta camp at Arsha Vidya Gurukulam in Saylorsburg, Pennsylvania. Some were involved as founding members of the Jain Youth of 1 North America. Straddling two worlds, critically appropriating   i	two cultures, they lived in perpetual inner dialogue between the
i I'	distinctive cultures of their parents and grandparents and the
I t	forceful, multiple currents of American culture. In their own
struggles with identity lay the very issues that were beginning to torment the soul of the United States.
The new questions that arose were not only those that under-i lay the foreign cultures requirement of the Core Curriculum   J	how we might understand some  other  civilization so different
: 	from our own. Other questions pushed themselves to the fore:
What does it mean to speak of  our own  culture? Who do  we  :	mean when we say  we?  How are  difference  and  otherness 
1 defined, and by whom? The word  multicultural  signaled the fact that every dimension of American culture had become more i complex. Racial issues became multisided, with Hispanic and J Latino, Korean and Filipino, Chinese and Indian perspectives. | Religious diversity shattered the paradigm of an America the so-j' ciologist Will Herberg had confidently described as a  three re-i ligion country  Protestant, Catholic, and Jewish. By the 1990s, ' there were Hindus and Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains. There were more Muslims than Episcopalians, more Muslims than Presbyterians, perhaps soon more Muslims than Jews.
The sons and daughters of the first generation from South Asia rose at Harvard to become some 5 percent of the Harvard undergraduate population. In the spring of 1993, when that first class graduated, I slipped into the balcony at Memorial Church for the Baccalaureate service and sat with the families of Mukesh Prasad and Maitri Chowdhury, the first marshals of the Harvard and Radcliffe graduating classes that year both Hindus. Maitri recited a hymn from the Rig-Veda in ancient Sanskrit. It was a new Harvard. It had happened in four years.
The Puritans founded Harvard College to provide an educated Christian ministry for the churches. Before Judah Monis, a Sephardic Jew, was hired to teach Hebrew in 1722, he publically converted to Christianity. But both Judah Monis and Cotton Mather would be astounded at Harvard in the 1990s its Chinese and Korean Christian fellowships, its diverse and vibrant Jewish community, its rapidly growing Islamic Society. In December 1994, Ae newly founded Harvard Buddhist Community observed the Buddha s Enlightenment Day for the first time ever at Harvard. There in the Divinity School s Braun Room, beneath the august portraits of a long lineage of divinity deans, some so Harvard students from a dozen Buddhist lineages sat on rows of square zabutons, listening to Pali, Tibetan, and Vietnamese chanting and rising, one by one, to make offerings of incense
What has happened at Harvard has happened at major universities throughout the country. In the 1990s, universities have become the microcosms and laboratories of a new multicultural and multireligious America. It is not uncommon to have Hindu an Jew, Muslim and Christian in a single rooming group. These
changes in university demographics have come not froi but from the rapidly changing cultural and religious ] of the United States. Harvard s issues, America s issues come, increasingly, a fresh recasting of many of India s i world s issues: race, culture, religion, difference, dive whether it is possible to move from diversity to pluralis
I knew in 1990 that my own teaching context had changed and the scope of my academic work woul change, too. Increasingly, it became clear to me that shape of traditional fields of study was inadequate to world. In my field, those of us who study Buddhism, Hinduism all earn our academic stripes, so to speak, by study in Japan, Egypt, or India, doing language studie editions and translations, fieldwork. And those who s gion in America focus largely on the Protestant main: perhaps on Catholics, or American Judaism but not < can Buddhism, not on the Muslims of America, not on of America. And those historians who focus their wor] has become known as ethnic studies are curiously sil the religious traditions of America's ethnic minorities Islamic tra