A newsletter by and for New Jersey South Asians serves the state's sprawling Desi communities

"In high school, most of my friends were also South Asian or other kids of color. I never had to explain my religious holidays or cultural foods to anyone. We watched newly released Bollywood movies in theaters that served samosas and chai. The county park had two cricket pitches that were always full of players on the weekends. In a school district with a 51% Asian population, many of us at the radio station were of South Asian descent."

"She was living in a lively Desi - a catch-all term for people of South Asian heritage - community that wasn't reflected in local media. She had previously covered politics for CQ Roll Call and written about business and tech, but as a freelancer she was drawn to telling stories about immigrant communities in New Jersey. At that time, there were more than two million foreign-born residents in New Jersey, making up more than one-fifth of the state's population."

""I was reading the Star-Ledger or New Jersey Monthly, and was really surprised at the absence of nonwhite voices and thought, surely this is just a mistake," Ali said. "I pitched a story, and [the editor] wrote me back, and it rubbed me the wrong way. He was like, 'we've already written about a story like this,' which they really hadn't, but it was more like, 'oh, we've already written about these people.'""

A Central New Jersey suburb near New York City and Philadelphia hosted a vibrant South Asian community where students watched Bollywood films, drank chai, and played cricket. The high school radio station produced daily news broadcasts, yet local mainstream outlets rarely covered South Asian communities. Pakistani American journalist Ambreen Ali moved to Central Jersey in 2017 and encountered the same absence of nonwhite voices and dismissive editorial responses. That experience motivated the 2022 launch of Central Desi, a free email newsletter about the South Asian American experience. New Jersey had over two million foreign-born residents and the nation's highest concentration of South Asians.

Read at Nieman Lab