Immigrant Ambassadors

Julia Meredith Hess is an Adjunct Research Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico.

"In sum, Immigrant Ambassadors provides a valuable look at Tibetan cultural flexibility and political action in the context of official immigration to the United States. As Tibetans increasingly move from South Asia to other destinations around the world, the questions Hess raises about Tibetan political allegiance in Immigrant Ambassadors will remain current, and the answers she provides—especially her conclusions regarding the portability of Tibetan political agency—will be an important point of engagement for future studies."—Carole McGranahan, American Ethnologist "This very valuable chronicle of a unique immigration act in U.S. history highlights some of the bureaucratic ambiguities that have so many people caught 'betwixt and between' societies today. Hess' fieldwork-based conclusions consistently ring true, adding significantly to the literature about Tibetan refugees and contributing an important case study to the documentation of citizenship and immigration in this country."—Keila Diehl, University of California, Berkeley "This book provides new ways to consider the idea of loyalty to a state or nation and new insights into the experiences of the Tibetan Diaspora in the West. With an impressive array of interviews, the book reveals the many ways Tibetans abroad communicate their identities."—Stephanie Roemer, author of The Tibetan Government-In-Exile: Politics at Large