¹ Mahdi, A.A., “Ethnic Identity among Second-generation Iranians in the United States,” Iranian Studies 31, no. 1 (1998): 77–95CrossRefGoogle Scholar; McAuliffe, C., “Visible Minorities: Constructing and Deconstructing Muslim Iranian Diaspora,” in Geographies of Muslim Identities: Diaspora, Gender and Belonging, edited by Carmichael Aitchison, C., Hopkins, P. E., and Kwan, M. (Hampshire, 2007)Google Scholar; Maghbouleh, N., “Inherited Nostalgia among Second-generation Iranian Americans: A Case Study at a Southern California University,” Journal of Intercultural Studies 31, no. 2 (2010): 199–218CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

² For a critique of the ethnocentrism of this terminology see F. Ginsburg, “Rethinking the Digital Age” (working paper EASA E-seminar series, May 2007).

³ Naficy, H., “Framing Exile: From Homeland to Homepage,” Home, Exile, Homeland: Film, Media, and the Politics of Place (New York and London, 1998)Google Scholar.

⁴ Morley, D., Home Territories: Media, Mobility and Identity (London, 2000)Google Scholar.

⁵ The value of what I shorthand here as the “homeland in homepages” thesis is that it highlights how internet media can be used to maintain ties of “long distance nationalism,” in line with Benedict Anderson's notion. This is what Thomas Eriksen's work on the impact of electronic media on the nation-state shows (“Nations in cyberspace”, short version of the 2006 Ernest Geller Lecture, London School of Economics, (27 March)). Khosravi has made a comparable case for Iranian diaspora in particular (“www.iranian.com. An Ethnographic Approach to an Online Diaspora,” ISIM Newsletter, 6, no. 1 (2000): 13, https://openaccess.leidenuniv.nl/bitstream/handle/1887/17452/ISIM_6_www-iranian-com-An_Ethnographic_Approach_to_an_Online_Diaspora.pdf?sequence=1). Part of what Eriksen argues about “surrogate nationhood” overlaps with Basu's argument that “the virtual space comes to act as a surrogate for the physical place” (2006: 105). This perspective seems to take the step of equating internet media's possibilities for long distance communication to a deterritorialization of nations. This contrasts with work that highlights the layered meanings of internet media usage in everyday transnational practices that shift modes of sociality (see Madianou, M. and Miller, D., Migration and New Media: Transnational Families and Polymedia (New York, 2012)Google Scholar) rather than dislocate people or nations. Basu, P. Highland Homecomings Genealogy and Heritage Tourism in the Scottish Diaspora (New York, 2006)Google Scholar; Mallapragada, M. “Home, Homeland, Homepage: Belonging and the Indian-American Web,” New Media and Society 8, no. 2 (2006): 207–27CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁶ Gupta, A. and Ferguson, J., Culture, Power, Place: Explorations in Critical Anthropology (New York, 1997)Google Scholar; Malkki, L.H., Purity and Exile: Violence, Memory, and National Cosmology among Hutu Refugees in Tanzania (Chicago, 1995)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁷ Ghorashi, H., Ways to Survive, Battles to Win: Iranian Women Exiles in the Netherlands and United States (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

⁸ Gorman-Murray, A. and Dowling, R., “Home,” M/C Journal. A Journal of Media and Culture 10, no. 4 (2007)Google Scholar.

⁹ Rapport, N. and Dawson, A., “Home and Movement: A Polemic,” Migrants of Identity: Perceptions of Home in a World of Movement (Oxford, 1998)Google Scholar.

¹⁰ Ahmed, S., Castañeda, C., and Fortie, A., Uprootings/Regroundings: Questions of Home and Migration (London and New York, 2003)Google Scholar.

¹¹ My respondents are not intended to be representative of the second generation of Iranian Americans nationally or even in LA. They were selected for their involvement with cultural production, organizations, and innovative internet usage around being Iranian American. While their practices may not be generalizable, the processes I discuss and analyze are likely to have played a role to differing degrees and in similar ways in the lives of a great many of the second generation. While “generation” is notoriously slippery to define—whether migrational or in terms of age cohorts—I delineated my selection of respondents on the basis of them having lived most of their lives outside Iran as a result of their parents' migration, including being born outside Iran as well as having accompanied their parents as minors rather than having made a decision to migrate themselves.

¹² Ginsburg, “Rethinking the Digital Age.”

¹³ Miller, D. and Slater, D., The Internet: an Ethnographic Approach (London, 2000)Google Scholar; Horst, H. and Miller, D., Digital Anthropology (London, 2012)Google Scholar.

¹⁴ I treat fixing as a process of making identities seem certain, solid and unchanging. In this sense I do not suggest a view of identities as somehow becoming eternally fixed. Rather, my approach allows for the consideration of processes of fixing as part of identity formation without assuming continuity to be absolute. I heed Sara Ahmed et al's reminder that ‘being grounded is not necessarily about being fixed; and being mobile is not necessarily about being detached’ (Uprootings/Regroundings, p. 1).

¹⁵ Tumblr is a blogging application that supports the posting of photographic, video material and textual material that appears in short form on the homepage. A particular feature of Tumblr is that it facilitates posting material from other “tumbleblogs” to one's own, adding a social networking dimension.

¹⁶ http://asasoltanrahmati.tumblr.com/page/3. The first posting of the Tumblr, captioned “Welcome to my brain,” is dated March 2011.

¹⁷ Tehrangeles is also the name of a web series created for Bebin TV. The comedy show features everyday life situations in which young Iranians in LA find themselves. Its creator originally envisioned the series as targeting the second-generation audience outside Iran, but the audience turned out to be larger inside Iran.

¹⁸ Massey, D. and Jess, P., “Places and Cultures in an Uneven World,” in A Place in World?: Places, Cultures and Globalization, edited by Massey, D. and Jess, P. (Milton Keynes, 1995)Google Scholar.

¹⁹ Easthope, H., “Fixed Identities in a Mobile World? The Relationships Between Mobility, Place, and Identity,” Identities 16, no. 1 (2009): 61–82CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

²⁰ Bahrampour is the author of To See and See Again: A Life in Iran and America, a memoir about her childhood experiences of leaving Iran with her parents at the age of 11 due to the Islamic revolution, moving to California to set up a new life, and then returning to visit Iran again as a young adult.

²¹ http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2003/11/10/031110fa_fact (first accessed 2009).

²² The establishment also sells its products at other stores in the LA area.

²³ Under the “Lives” rubric of the New York Times from November 2010, Firouzeh Dumas writes about The Real Supermarkets of Orange County. Dumas is a second-generation Iranian American author whose award-winning first book, Funny in Farsi: A Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America (New York, 2004)Google Scholar, gained the author much attention. Duma's NYT piece describes her experience shopping at a “Persian supermarket” in Orange County with three generations of her family (her parents and small children), primarily the act of standing in a long line to wait for Sangak bread. If not the specifics, the practice of shopping at the “Persian supermarket” is uniformly recognizable across Iranians in LA, as is the inter-generational element her piece includes.

²⁴ A recent book that centralizes the role of food and cooking in inter-generational Iranian American relations within a family is Maman's Homesick Pie: A Persian Heart in an American Kitchen (Chapel Hill, 2011) by Donia Bijan. The author is a Paris-trained chef who presents her recipes within a memoir about her mother's cooking, her parents' escape from the Islamic Republic, her move to and from Paris, and her life in the Bay Area of San Francisco.

²⁵ Casey, E., “Body, Self and Landscape: A Geophilosophical Inquiry into the Place-World,” in Textures of Place: Exploring Humanist Geographies, edited by Adams, P.C., Hoeschler, S., and Till, K.E. (Minneapolis, 2001)Google Scholar.

²⁶ http://blogs.laweekly.com/squidink/2009/10/underrated_neighborhood_westwo.php (accessed October 24, 2009).

²⁷ Brah, A., Cartographies of Diaspora: Contesting Identities (London, 1996)Google Scholar.

²⁸ Levitt, P. and Waters, M.C., The Changing Face of Home: The Transnational Lives of the Second Generation (New York, 2002)Google Scholar.

²⁹ Ginsburg, F., Abu-Lughod, L., and arkin, B., “Introduction,” in Media Worlds. Anthropology on New Terrain, edited by Ginsburg, F., Abu-Lughod, L., and Larkin, B. (Los Angeles, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁰ Gorman-Murray and Dowling, “Home.”

³¹ Meaning a house to live in, rather than the way “home” has been used as a concept in etic terms so far in this paper.

³² http://www.watchmeroam.net/ (accessed June 2010).

³³ In addition to the issue of Shiva's family not being “phone people,” as she explains, she also mentions that phone charges with inter-state roaming fees are higher than the cost of staying in touch via twitter through the setup she chose, suggesting that cost was another important consideration when taking on this practice.

³⁴ Communicating with someone via social media while in the same space as them was not uncommon among the students I spent time with.

³⁵ Blunt, A., “Cultural Geography: Cultural Geographies of Home,” Progress in Human Geography 29, no. 4 (2005): 505–15CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

³⁶ Easthope, “Fixed Identities in a Mobile World?”

³⁷ Ibid.

³⁸ See Maghbouleh, “Inherited Nostalgia,” for valuable discussion among second-generation Iranian Americans with regard to this musical genre.

³⁹ Tsing, A., “The Global Situation,” Cultural Anthropology 15, no. 3 (2000): 327–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

⁴⁰ Massey, D., “A Global Sense of Place,” in Space, Place, and Gender (Minneapolis, 1994)Google Scholar.

⁴¹ Somerville, K., “Transnational Belonging among Second Generation Youth: Identity in a Globalized World,” Journal of Social Sciences 10, no. 10 (2001): 23–33Google Scholar.