This little-known American community is fading into history

Every winter Amelia Singh Netervala prepared for an hours-long trek with her three siblings and parents from Phoenix, Ariz. to the Sikh gurdwara, or temple, in Stockton, Calif. Though lengthy, the annual journey was a rare chance to experience Punjabi tradition in early twentieth century America.

Netervala, now in her 80s, is one of few remaining first-generation Punjab Mexican Americans. Her father, from the Punjab region of Northern India, and Mexican mother were brought together in the early 1900s as a result of restrictive immigration policies. Today, that community is fading into history.

Under the Immigration Act of 1917 and the 1924 National Origins Quota Act, Punjabi men in the U.S. faced a difficult choice: keep their status in the U.S., or go back to the British-occupied India to return to or start their own families. Many of them, like Netervala's father, decided to give up their homeland, remaining in the U.S. to raise a family.

The Stockton Sikh Temple, now called Gurdwara Sahib Stockton, was the first ever Sikh place of worship built in the U.S.

"The dilemma with immigration restriction at this time is, a lot of these men, even if they have wives at home can't go home because the idea is if you leave, you're probably not going to be able to secure re-entry," said Hardeep Dhillon, a historian and doctoral candidate at Harvard.

It wasn't an easy transition for Punjabi men, who were not well received in the U.S, said Karen Leonard, a former UC Irvine anthropology professor and expert on the community. In a 1909 statement from the federal Immigration Commission, cited in Leonard's "Making Ethnic Choices," Indian immigrants were described as "the least desirable, or, better, the most undesirable, of all the eastern Asiatic races which have come to share our soil."

And while there are dozens of success stories about Punjabi immigrants from this time, most of them struggled. Many of the men were constantly on the move to find seasonal jobs, like railroad construction and farm work, Dhillon explained.

"We tend to forget that the majority of these labor migrants actually engaged in [seasonal] work, which isn't the kind of success story that we often think about when we're thinking about Indians succeeding in today's agribusiness economy," Dhillon said. The men were "prone to have hiccups in their work when it came to the season being off in crop production one year, or the railroads not needing maintenance."

When it came to jobs in agriculture, the Punjabi men commonly looked to relatives and friends to find work, she said.

"There are men who owned the land. There are men who worked the land of other Indian men, which could be their cousins'. It could be their brothers'. It could be someone's from their village that they knew," Dhillon said. "So they had some sort of kith and kin network that they often relied on for employment."

Some Punjabi men, like Amelia's father, settled in other states, motivated by opportunities to grow in the agriculture industry, Leonard wrote in "Making Ethnic Choices." "Some moved from California to Texas, Arizona, New Mexico, Utah and Colorado. Agricultural developments were the key to these moves."

A handful of Punjabi men ended up settling in Mexico, usually in Baja California, either after finding financial growth there or after being denied access to the U.S. or Canada, Dhillon said.

Around the same time, the Mexican Revolutionary War was taking place. Some Mexican women, widowed by the war, began working on the same U.S. farms as the Punjabi men. Other Mexican women who met and found companions in Indian immigrant men were already routinely traveling across the border for work.

"The [Mexican] women, often sets of sisters or mothers and daughters, married Punjabi partners. The women were working usually for boss men who could be Punjabi Sikhs or Punjabi Muslims or Hindus," Leonard said. But, "the women were really in charge of these relationships. They learned to cook a little bit of Punjabi food. The men liked Mexican food too. They socialized with other families on weekends, went for picnics together in the park. It was a comfortable relationship."

The men and women developed relationships, creating a vibrant new community--a little known blended immigrant community lost in the wider ebbs and flows of American newcomers. Like other diverse groups, they encountered racism and discrimination. But their resilience allowed them to rise above the hostilities and carve out a home for their families in a country that didn't always welcome them, while leaving behind their relationships in India and Mexico.

"In addition to the sort of organic 'you meet someone on the farm' story, there is this alternative larger backdrop of the fact that people are losing ties to their families, which includes men who are already married," Dhillon said. "The ability to maintain transnational family dynamics became very difficult in the face of growing and expanding legal restrictions."

Netervala's father, Jiwan Singh, arrived in San Francisco in 1907. He worked in agriculture for several years before moving to a farm in a suburb of El Paso, Texas where he met his wife Rosa.

"My mother used to come and visit her cousins in Texas," Netervala said. "And that's where they met across the border."

Many Punjabi Mexican families blended cuisine and culture at home. Netervala remembers eating Indian Daal and Mexican-style pinto beans often as a child.

Though Punjabis and Mexicans did not have many choices for partners at this time--and were from opposite sides of the world--cultural commonalities made both groups compatible.

"We would have daal (Indian lentils) and also Mexican beans. My father taught [my mother] to make Indian food. So she would buy the different whole spices and grind them and make masala out of that," Netervala recalled. "Growing up like that you just accept it. Later on, you realize that that was quite a unique culture."

In addition to the shared flavors and cuisines, the Punjabi and Spanish languages have similar roots, Leonard said.

"They're both Indo-European languages: Spanish and Punjabi. And the men were bossing crews of Mexican workers, so they learned serviceable Spanish pretty fast. And they knew a little bit of English having worked under British Indian rulers," she said. "So it was a mixture of languages, but Spanish was the language of the mothers and the children."

Like with language, Punjabi men deferred to their wives when it came to the cultural traditions and religion that the children learned. From what experts can gather through archival records, a majority of the Punjabi men who came to the States practiced Sikhism, though there were many Muslim and Hindu men who arrived as well, Leonard said.

Netervala said Mexican traditions and Catholicism dominated in her home.

"I always thought my father was Catholic because he used to drive us to church and wait in the car," she said. "Sometimes he would go into the church and sit in the way back by himself, in the last pew."

Her Sikh father accepted her Catholic upbringing since there were no gurdwaras around, Netervala added. Though, her mother fell away from the church because a priest objected to the interfaith marriage.

"I'm not a practicing Catholic, and I guess I got that from my mother," she said. "She always believed in the saints and the church, but she was shunned by them."

Despite the heavy influence of Mexican culture on Netervala's childhood, she said her interactions with her father and his friends and family influenced her a great deal. Today, she identifies more with her Indian roots because of those relationships with her father's side.

Amelia and her husband attend a wedding in Bombay, India in 1958.

"I was very close to my mother, but I always wanted to go to India. I received newsreels and movies at that time before television, and I was fascinated when they had something about India. It was just really ingrained in me," she said. "I remember--it was quite touching--a couple of [my father's] Punjabi friends bought a red coat for me for Christmas. And I was the only one that got a present."

Netervala shares fond memories of her childhood, but she remembers tough times, too. Punjabi Mexican children had trouble fitting in with the two communities of their parents. Indian women who arrived many years later were unfriendly to Mexican women married to Punjabi men. And members of the Mexican community did not like to socialize with the mixed families.

"We were just sort of outsiders to some of the people. I remember in the third or fourth grade, some of these Mexican girls would sort of bully me. They would make fun of my last name 'Singh' with their Spanish words," she explained. "And later on, when Indian women came, they kicked out the Mexican women. They wouldn't allow them in the [gurdwara] kitchen."

So, they found company and community with other Punjabi Mexican families.

"Our friends were my father's Indian friends who were also married to Mexican women," Netervala said. "As kids, as teenagers, we used to have barbecues and we would visit each other."

Many mixed families also endured acts of racism and restrictive government policies—a rhetoric echoed in some U.S. laws and programs today. Netervala's father cut his hair and removed his turban, which are typically maintained as part of the Sikh faith, because of the intolerance he faced when he arrived in California.

"In the early 20th century, there was prejudice against [Punjabis], partly because they started out wearing turbans," Leonard said. "They were called rag heads. Mexicans coming across the border were channeled into field labor, and they had a harder time moving up."

As more and more Punjabi immigrants came to the U.S. in the early 1900s, the U.S. put policies in place to decrease the number admitted.

"There was a rising rejection rate of Asian Indian applicants by the Bureau of Immigration and Naturalization. Before 1907, fewer than 10 percent of applicants for admission were rejected; in 1907, 28 percent were rejected; and in 1909, 1911, and 1913, 50 percent or more were rejected," Leonard wrote in her book.

Leonard said she's noticed a similar negative rhetoric being expressed towards immigrants today.

"Right now under our current president, whom I think is terrible, we have horrible prejudices being publicly stated against immigrants," she said.

President Trump ran much of his 2016 campaign on similar proposed immigration limits and reform, and delivered with the 2017 executive order, Protecting the Nation from Foreign Terrorist Entry into the United States, also known as the "Muslim Ban." The order stops citizens from seven predominantly Muslim countries and refugees from visiting the U.S.

Later that year, the administration also began separating and locking up migrant families at the U.S.-Mexico border.

Netervala said her parents and other immigrants worked hard and made contributions to this country that should not be forgotten, especially now as restrictive policies are enforced.

"There's been a lot of obstacles for people from that time bringing up their families. But they persevered," she said. "Immigrants are very important, in spite of what the [Trump] administration says."