The recent rise in bias-motivated violence against Asians in the US has not only captured significant public attention, but also reignited critical questions about who “counts” as Asian and what, in turn, constitutes anti-Asian racism. This dissertation centers South Asians in the US—a demographic classified as Asian within the current racial rubric, but one that has long held an ambiguous status within the Asian category. This ambiguity is far from new but brightened after the terrorist attacks of 9/11, with growing scholarship illuminating the critical role of religion in how South Asian Muslims, Sikhs, and other religious communities are racialized—and the divergent racialization processes within the Asian category. This divergence has further brightened during the COVID-19 pandemic, inspiring questions about the contemporary boundaries within the Asian category and the challenges these boundaries pose on building pan-Asian and interracial solidarities. Drawing on theories of racial formation and intersectionality, I conducted 65 in-depth interviews with South Asian community members and organizers in Texas between 2020 and 2021 to examine how religiously diverse South Asians (with a focus on Muslims, Sikhs, and Hindus) across generations understand their racial identities, perceive the lived impacts of racism on their everyday lives, and respond to these challenges civically, politically, and in their local communities through collective action. Findings reveal some of the complexities of negotiating Asian and South Asian identities given the prevalence with which these terms are socially coded as “East Asian” and “Indian,” respectively—situating these racial and panethnic identities as sites of felt exclusion for some and ongoing contestation for others. The immense heterogeneity of lived experiences in the US and globally also renders diverse conditions under which community members embrace or distance themselves from panethnic terms, spaces, and action efforts. Together, findings amplify the need to bridge our sociological understanding of Asian racialization and the racialization of religion, and to think globally about racial schemas, identities, and politics in order to discern how South Asians negotiate their racial place in the US and understand the socio-political issues around which they mobilize.