First-Generation Indian-American (FGIA) students and educators remain largely invisible in music education scholarship, often subsumed under monolithic Asian American categories that obscure their racialization, cultural hybridity, and transnational realities (Cayari, 2021; Palkki et al., 2024). Music education research continues to privilege whiteness and Western classical traditions, erasing diasporic perspectives and undervaluing the cultural wealth FGIA communities bring to music learning (Hess, 2021; Sánchez-Gatt et al., 2025; Yosso, 2005). In this study, I addressed these absences by centering FGIA voices and theorizing the conditions that supported their persistence in music education using DesiCrit for Education (DCE). DCE is a theoretical lens I developed that extends DesiCrit (Harpalani, 2013) and Critical Race Theory (Delgado & Stefancic, 2023) to account for caste, hybridity, and anti-colonial resistance.The purpose of this qualitative case study (Yin, 2018) was to examine how FGIA music educators navigate educational and professional trajectories in a field that often marginalizes their identities. Guided by research questions, I explored (1) how participants recalled their K-12 music experiences, (2) how family and community contexts shaped their participation, (3) how higher education influenced career decisions, and (4) what factors supported persistence in the profession. Data sources included semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and researcher reflexive journaling (Krueger, 2014; Merriam & Tisdell, 2016; Roulston, 2010). Guided by the tenets of DCE, my analysis employed constant comparison (Strauss & Corbin, 2014). Reflexivity served as an ethical anchor, allowing me to interrogate my “inbetweener” positionality (Milligan, 2016) and resist imposing external frameworks onto participants’ narratives.Findings revealed that FGIA educators experienced music education as a site of both belonging and marginalization. Participants reported their pathways into music education were nonlinear and shaped by negotiations of hybridity, intergenerational tension, and racialization in predominantly white spaces. Persistence emerged as relational and collective, sustained through mentors, identity-affirming communities, and moments of reframing success. From these narratives, I developed a conceptual model of FGIA persistence delineating five interrelated domains: affirming hybridity as pedagogical resource, fostering social belonging, redefining success beyond assimilationist logics, developing critical consciousness, and creating identity-affirming spaces.Theoretically, this work advances DCE as a framework for representing the racialized and diasporic realities of FGIA educators. Practically, it calls on PK-12 teachers, teacher educators, and researchers to foster anti-colonial, identity-affirming practices that sustain rather than tokenize. Ultimately, FGIA persistence emerges as a collective, culturally situated process grounded in relationships, identity affirmation, and resistance to systemic erasure.