How Does Culture Immigrate?

Artists and Scholars Explore the Ways Their Work Helps Them Understand Homeland

Home can be physical or imagined—a point of departure and return but also a memory or feeling. When migrants and immigrants move across borders, they bring along the places they leave behind through language, art forms, religion, food, and culture. How does that movement shape them, and the places they depart and arrive? And how do they navigate the burdens of supposedly representing an entire culture, nation, ethnicity?

These were the guiding questions posed to a panel of cultural practitioners at last night’s Zócalo/Soraya event, “How Do Homelands Cross Borders?” Presented …

Can Bureaucracies Be Sustainability Innovators?

How India’s Coal-Dependent Government Has Harnessed Its Power to Build Better and Cleaner

Bureaucracies are often thought of as stiflers of innovation and growth. But the Indian government, one of the biggest bureaucracies in the world, has made some surprising gains in the …

My Story

My story
is the story
of a hoe wearing thin
of a factory becoming a ruin
of a road falling out of repair

my story
is the story
of stone
turning …

Mayor Garcetti, Delhi Is Waiting to Transform You—And the Future of L.A. | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Mayor Garcetti, Delhi Is Waiting to Transform You—And the Future of L.A.

If You Become Ambassador to India, Here’s What You Need to Know About My Hometown

Namaste Garcetti-ji,

The rumor that you, the mayor of my adopted hometown, Los Angeles, will be President Biden’s next ambassador to my native country, India, is picking up steam. And so …

A Letter From India, Where the World Is Collapsing | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

A Letter From India, Where the World Is Collapsing

The Official Count of Cases and Deaths Doesn’t Reflect the Full Tragedy Unfolding Here

Every morning, I wake up in my home in a middle-class locality in Bangalore, the Silicon Valley of India, and heave a sigh of relief. I do not have temperature; …

Auto Draft | Zocalo Public Square • Arizona State University • Smithsonian

Dispatch From India’s Farmers Protest

The Ongoing Protests Have Become the Longest Stand-off in the Country Since India Achieved Independence

For more than four months now, about 200,000 men, women, and the elderly have been camping on the roads leading to Delhi, barricaded from the nation’s capital by concrete walls, …