Prof. Karen Leonard is the author of  ”Making Ethnic Choices,” a fascinating book about the small, tight-knit Punjabi community of California. The Punjabis were some of the earliest immigrants who came from what was then British India into the USA. In the early phase of the immigration they settled down in California and the neighboring states of Arizona and Orgeon starting in the late 19thc.

In her book Prof. Leonard looks at the early Punjabi immigrants in Imperial County of California that borders Mexico. While Imperial Valley was a major hub for the early Punjabi immigrants, there was a secondary hub at Yuba City in Sutter County in Northern California.

“Hindus” was how this group of early immigrants were referred regardless of their religion. In the early years most were men, who came to the west coast lured by stories of vast, open land and a promise to own a piece of the land. Since there were no women in this new group, many Punjabi men married Mexican women. As Prof. Leonard points out in her book, the men found an “unexpected compatibility” with the Mexican women.

Prof. Leonard teaches at University of California, Irvine (UCI). Her latest book is “Locating Home: India’s Hyderabadis Abroad,” published by Stanford University Press in 2007.

I recently spoke with Prof. Leonard about her research and work on the Punjabi community in Imperial Valley. Here is a Q&A with Prof. Leonard on Desis in California – Early Punjabis.

Q:How did you decide to write this book on the Mexican-Punjabi community of California?

I was invited by one of our UCI graduate students who had gotten a job in Yuba City Community College to give a talk there about Indian culture – she was in the counseling office, and they were puzzled about why the Sikh girls in the college would not come in for career counselling. When I went, I met Bob Singh, in the Political Science department, who told me these girls were being sent back to the Punjab for marriage, so why should they seek American career counselling? He also said that in my “backyard,” the Imperial Valley (I live in LA), there was “a handful of men who had married Mexican women, and that would be an interesting study.” So I went on down, and there were two to three hundred such couples

Q: The early immigrants from Punjab were referred to as Hindus regardless of their religious affiliations. How did that come about?

“Hindu” simply meant “from India,” in those days, and not only here but in Australia and New Zealand and Mexico too; in Spanish, Hindu still means “from India.” The men wre perfectly fine with this, they understood it, and they actually identified more as Punjabis, as Punjabi-speakers, than by religious markers, in those days.

Q: What was the definition of “Punjabi” in the late 19th and early 20thc?  The early immigrants came from British India, when India was a colony. Punjab was a huge province under the British Raj and after independence in 1947 Punjab was divided into East and West Punjab. Today, when we think of Punjab we identify it with the Indian state of Punjab that was created in the 1950s.

Punjabi meant speakers of Punjabi, and if the immigrants were at all educated it was in Urdu, in the early 20th century. They knew some English because they were under British rule and many had come via Hong Kong or Singapore, working for the British there, so they had some idea of Anglo-Indian and British laws and language.

Q: What drew the Punjabis to the USA? We are talking about the last quarter of the 19thc, when Britain was the most powerful nation, and America was a young nation on the rise and on the mend and recovering from the ravages of its civil war. Plus, America is a long way from India and an unfamiliar territory to Indians in the late 19th and early 20thc, right?

They came in the early 20th century, when pressure on the land meant younger sons had to go out to work, and those who went east, to Singapore and Hong Kong, heard about good jobs in California and Canadian agriculture and railroad and timber industries too. So they kept moving, and early good reports encouraged this.

Q: How did the early Punjabi immigrants arrive on the west coast? Was Angel Island their entry point? Did some of them come via Mexico?

Some came through San Francisco, some through Mexico, and some moved down from Canada.

Q: What were some of the interesting things you discovered about the early Punjabi community in California?

They formed partnerships across religious lines, Sikhs and Muslims together, and the very few Hindus did the same. And when they married Mexican or Mexican-American women, again they were brothers-in-law and sometimes compradazgos (godparents) across those same lines. Being Punjabi was the thing then.

Q: How do the members of the community preserve the stories about how their forefathers? Has there been any change in the narrative in recent years?

The children and grandchildren tell stories about the men and women, the ways they related to each other, the way the women learned Indian cooking and the men learned Spanish. For awhile the Punjabi Mexicans (earlier called Mexican Hindus) resented the way newer immigrants did not recognize them, did not want to acknowledge this intermarried community, but now they take pride in their American identity and assume that the newcomers also will slowly become more American. And they are right, the children of the newer immigrants, raised in America, are also not quite like their parents, and its not because of the mothers being different but because of the context, the socialization in the new country, being different.

Q: In your book you look at how the early Punjabis making ethnic choices and you discuss about the “unexpected compatibility” between the Punjabis and Mexicans. What were they? How did they manage to combine an Indian identity with a Catholic, Mexican identity? In the case of Punjabis there were Sikhs, Hindus and Muslims.

Well, “making ethnic choices” was really an ironic title, they had little choice, they had to marry women whom the county record clerks considered racially the same….they had to get a marriage license with a blank for “race” that could be filled in as “brown/brown” or “white/white” or “black/black” and Mexican Hindu couples had all three assignments here and there.Their food was similar, their material culture was similar,same kinds of beds, cooking utensils and practices, and their language were Indo-European and similar. And most came from farming or peasant backgrounds, both men and women.

Q: Because of legal restrictions Asians were not allowed to own land, but Mexican women were allowed to own land. It was quite a common practice for the Punjabi menfolk to buy land and register in their wife or off-spring’s name. Did that create any legal complications?

No, this is wrong, Mexican women could not own land, only US citizens could own land, and for some years American citizen women who married “foreigner” lost their citizenship too (1922-31). Those who could own land were the children, born here and citizens, so the men bought land in the names of their children (after they lost the right to citizenship in 1923, the Thind decision). And there were some problems when the sons grew up and wanted the land that had been in their names for years, because after 1946 with the Luce-Celler Bill the men could (though few did) bring their “real” or “Indian” sons from India and that was a problem for the Mexican Hindu sons who had worked for their fathers all their lives. And a few daughters married older Punjabis who tried to get “her”land away from their Punjabi fellows!

Q: How successful were the Punjabi farmers in California in the early part of the 20thc?

Some were very successful, there are millionaire Punjabi farmers inall three major regions, the Imperial Valley, Fresno and the central Valley, and Sacramento/Yuba City. Some were not successful, they are at all levels of the class system in California agriculture.

Q: Today, when you look at the old Punjabi communities in California how has the definition of Punjabi evolved? The early immigrants came during the British Raj, when India was a colony.

In 1947, with Partition, some Punjabis here suddenly became “Spanish Pakistani” instead of “Mexican Hindu,” but I believe they all still related to the Punjab and Punjabi heritage because that is there in both the new nations, India and Pakistan. The Punjabis here identified with the movement for Indian independence and were pretty much taken by surprise with the sudden division in South Asia.

Photo credit: UCI

Related Links:

Desis in California: Our Pind in Punjab

Podcast Interview with David Rai of Yuba City