Below is a fascinating story about the Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American Community. It's also a reminder that not all multiracial people are black and white!
Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American community fading into history
By Benjamin Gottlieb, Published: August 13
Amelia Singh Netervala points to her mother’s chicken curry enchiladas as the best metaphor for her childhood.
Born to a Punjabi Sikh father and Mexican mother, her family was
full of cultural contradictions: She went to church on Sundays with her
mother and three siblings while her father waited outside in the family
car. She would have langar — the daily Sikh communal meal —
just once a year, when her father would embark on the five-hour journey
from Phoenix to the nearest Gudwara in El Centro, a Californian border
town in Imperial Valley. Her clandestine conversations with her mother
were done in Spanish, a language her father never mastered.
All the while Netervala never had any doubts about her identity.
“I’m
proud of my Mexican heritage and mixed ethnicity,” said Netervala, who
grew up on an alfalfa and cotton farm in Casa Grande, 50 miles south of
Phoenix. “But if I had to choose, I would identify as being an Indian
woman.”
Now in her mid 70s, Netervala is part of the nation’s
thinning Punjabi-Mexican population, an identity forged out of
historical necessity and made possible by uncanny cultural parallels.
“The
children of these unions did not marry into that community, and so now
they are dying off,” explained Karen Leonard, a professor of
anthropology at the UC Irvine who authored a book on California’s
Punjabi-Mexican population. “So their numbers are diminishing.”
The
first marriages between Punjabis and Mexican Americans occurred in the
early 1900s, after waves of men from Punjab — a geographic region
straddling the Indian-Pakistani border — immigrated to the United States
by way of Canada.
Although their numbers were initially small,
estimated in the few thousands, the Punjabis, who were mostly Sikh,
quickly adapted to life in the farming communities of the United States,
particularly in California’s Central and Imperial Valleys. Drawing on
their extensive agricultural knowledge, the Punjabis planted troves of
peach and prune orchards, which today produce 95 percent of the peaches
and 60 percent the prunes that
grow in Yuba-Sutter County, an fertile agricultural hub California’s Central Valley.
Despite
their contributions to California’s farming industry, early Punjabi
immigrants were heavily discriminated against both economically and
socially, said Vinay Lal, a professor of history at UCLA.
The
California Alien Land Act of 1913 prevented all “aliens ineligible for
citizenship” in the state to own agricultural land. And although the act
primarily targeted wealthy Japanese landowners in California, the
Punjabis were not considered citizens and were victimized, Leonard said.
Strict
immigrant laws also prevented Punjabis living in the United States from
bringing wives from India, creating a distinct problem for the
community.
“They would have gone to India to find brides and
brought them back,” Lal said. “But when they passed the Asian Exclusion
laws, it became impossible for them to leave.”
Traditionally,
Punjabis had marriages arranged by their families. But facing strict
immigrant quota laws, the then-newly immigrated Punjabis — overwhelming
majorities of whom, according to Leonard, were Sikh, at nearly 85
percent — were forced to turn elsewhere.
“Many Punjabis married
the Mexican women that worked on their land because of their cultural
similarities and proximity,” Leonard explained. “And when they’d show up
at the county record office, they could both check ‘brown.’ No one knew
the difference.”
The Punjabi men chose Mexican women for a host
of other reasons: Physically, Mexican women at the time were thought to
resemble Punjabis, Leonard said. Both communities also shared a rural
way of life, cooked similar types of food and had a similar material
culture.
Perhaps the most important reason, however, was that
Mexican women were accessible in the border cities of the United States,
Leonard said.
“Most of these women came across the border after
the Mexican Civil War,” she added. “They supported themselves by working
in the cotton fields of places like California, doing hard physical
labor… so if they could marry the boss, hey. It was a leg up.”
According to Leonard’s book,
Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi-Mexican-Americans
, country records show that some 378 marriages, mostly bi-ethnic
Punjabi-Mexican couples, were carried out in California, a nexus of the
Punjabi-Mexican community.
Although official numbers for the population do not exist, these families averaged between 5 to 6 children apiece.
Many
of those children, however, did not decide to marry within the newly
formed community. Netervala, who has lived in California for more than
50 years, is happily married to an Indian Parsi, and her children were
raised as Zoroastrians with very little Mexican influence.
That’s not to say that the community has completely disappeared. For example, the former Mayor of El Centro, California,
David Singh Dhillon, was a third-generation Punjabi-Mexican.
But
the vast majority of children born to Punjabi fathers and Mexican
mothers in the early 20th century have assimilated with the greater
Indian community now thriving in California, explained Jasbir Singh
Kang, founder of the
Becoming American Museum in Yuba City, which celebrates Punjabi history in California.
“It’s
true that most of the community has assimilated, but that’s not saying
we are ethnocentric,” said Kang, whose family hails from India’s Punjab
state. “We cherish that history – the connection between Punjabis and
Mexicans – and we are very proud of it.”
Kang, a physician and
Sikh leader in Yuba City, considered the first Punjabi city in America,
said the passage of the Luce-Celler Bill of 1946 – which granted
citizenship to people of Asian and Indian origin – permanently altered
the Punjabi-Mexican Diaspora. The act allowed Punjabi landowners to
bring wives back from India, thus negating the necessity to marrying
outside their community.
And when Punjabi women began coming to the United States, the Punjabi-Mexican community confounded them, Leonard said.
“They even kicked out the Mexican women from the Gudwara, even though those Mexican women helped fund it,” Leonard said.
Today,
the Punjabi community in California is one of the largest in the world,
estimated at nearly 250,000. For the descendants of the nation’s
Punjabi-Mexican couples, many have decided to identify themselves as
either Mexican or India, Netervala explained, because it provides a more
concrete identity. Her two brothers and sole sister all have Mexican
spouses.
“Looking back – when you’re young, you don’t appreciate
or realize the wealth that the two cultures brought together,” Netervala
said. “But, if you’d ask me, I’d say the [Punjabi-Mexican] community is
distinctly American.”
Source:
The Washington Post
