While in recent years Arab American scholarship has taken a progressively more inclusive approach toward the study of the ethno-religious clusters that form the overarching Arab American community, an increasing number of Chaldean American community organizers and culture-makers have been adapting a contrastive approach to weave their own separatist, localized collective narrative of who Chaldean Americans are. This presentation is primarily about the burgeoning sub-field of "Chaldean American Studies" and the discursive spaces it occupies between Assyro-Chaldean-Syriac Studies and Arab American Studies. The changing relations between religion (Catholic Chaldeanness, and the Islam of Arab America, nation (Iraq and the United States) and ethnicity (Arab, Chaldean, Assyrian, and the numerous hyphenated variations) along with the sustained contact with the west, have driven segments of the Chaldean communities that have been settling in the United States over the course of a century to search after their ancient historical roots and to seek to foster a uniform, stabilized public image that relies heavily on Catholicism and monumental Mesopotamian symbolism. The fact that selective representations of folklore and antiquity are being used by U.S.-based Chaldeans to express a revived ancient-modern identity indicates the power of the politics of representation in mediating and interpreting Arab-world ethnicities in the United States. It also indicates the emergence of a Chaldean American elite class interested in heritage attractions and capable of carrying out auto-ethnographic projects successfully and on a transnational scale through which the new articulations of Chaldeanness can be exported to Iraqi Christian communities in transit and in other diasporic locales as well as back to Iraqi Christians in the originary country. While situationally negotiating the inclusion and exclusion of their Arab profile for strategic purposes, Chaldean American community organizers mainly construct an official narrative that emphasizes how Chaldeans are non-Arab, non-Arabic speaking, and non-Muslim. I endeavors to juxtapose this official narrative with the reality of daily practices, where Chaldean Americans in fact share several spaces, visions, and practices with the Arab American communities in which they are socially embedded. The framework of this presentation necessarily calls for a discussion of the liminal voices of the Chaldean counter-narrative. The latter remains on the periphery of the official Chaldean narrative, and at the crossroads between a progressively more inclusive Arab American studies and Chaldean-specific communal ethnographies.