PakAlumni Worldwide: The Global Social Network
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The History of South Asians in America
It was in early 1980s when I was driving through Yuba City with a couple of friends. It was lunch time and we were looking for a halal restaurant when we spotted Rasul's. At the restaurant we met a man who introduced himself as Mohammad Ali Rasul. He spoke in Mexican accented English but he told us his father came from the Punjab region now in Pakistan and his mother was of Mexican ancestry. There were 400 such marriages between Punjabi men and Mexican women by 1940, according to Professor Karen Leonard of UC Irvine. Rasul gave us a warm welcome when we told him him we are also originally from Pakistan. He offered us his "Roti Quesadilla" special without charge as a gift. The fusion dish is a variation on Queso Quesadilla made with Indian "nan"(flat bread) topped with traditional rich, melting cheese which originated in Mexico and Texas. I had forgotten all about it until memory was refreshed by a story titled "California’s Lost (and Found) Punjabi-Mexican Cuisine" by Sonia Chopra I read in Eater.com.
Early South Asians:
Currently, there are nearly 5 million people from Bangladesh, India, Pakistan and other South Asian nations in the United States. The earliest record of South Asians arriving in California is in the San Francisco Chronicle of April 6, 1899. It carried a story of the arrival of four Sikh men who were allowed to enter the United States in San Francisco, according to UC Davis Digital Archives.
Karen Leonard, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and author of "Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans", says that there were almost 2,000 Punjabi men living in California in the early 1900s, and approximately one-third of them married (or re-married) after settling in the state. Over 80% of the men were Sikh and most of the rest were Muslim. Almost all of them were from Central Punjab and came to California by ships from the then British Hong Kong via Vancouver in British Columbia in Canada. They had a choice between going to canal colonies of Lyallpur (now Faisalabad, Pakistan) and emigrating to North America. Most moved to canal colonies while the rest chose to go to the United States.
Punjabi Farmers:
While some Punjabis worked on building the transcontinental railroad along with Chinese immigrants, the vast majority of them chose farm work. While Punjabi men lived and worked on the farms with their Mexican spouses in several western states including Arizona and Texas, it was California that reminded them of their home in the Punjab, the land of five rivers. One of them described the similarity in the following words as narrated by Professor Karen Leonard:
"In my story of the Land of Five Rivers was Sacramento Valley. The river Sutlej was Feather River. The rest of the four rivers--American, Bear, Yuba, and Sacramento. My Bhaskhra (Dam), the Oroville Dam. Mu Govind Sagar, the Oroville Lake. The city of Anandpur Sahib, the nearby town of Paradise. The Shivaliks, the Sierra Foothills. There was Naina Devi, our Mount Shasta. And yes, the Ja- walamukhi, the Lassen Volcanic Park. Obviously, I was carried away by my imagination. Yet, the reality was not far behind. The water, like the water in the Punjab, had the same urge to run downward. The distant hills had the same charm. The fire in Ja- walamukhi and in the Lassen Volcano has the same way to burn."
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United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind:
South Asians, like their fellow Asians among the Chinese and the Japanese, faced widespread discrimination in the United States culminating in the Immigration Act of 1917. It was the second act, also known as the Literacy Act or the Asiatic Barred Zone Act after the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, aimed squarely at restricting immigration. An even stricter version of the US immigration law was passed in 1924 which was praised by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf, according to Daniel Okrent, author of The Guarded Gate: Bigotry, Eugenics and the Law That Kept Two Generations of Jews, Italians and Other European Immigrants Out of America.
Bhagat Singh Thind, a US Army veteran and a naturalized US citizen, was stripped of his citizenship under the Immigration Act of 1917. He sued to get his status restored. In a landmark case United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, Thind argued that as a descendent of Indian Aryans he was racially "white". The US Supreme Court unanimously rejected Thind's argument and ruled that he was not white "in accordance with the understanding of the common man".
Thind ruling was followed by a tragedy when Vaishno Das Bagai from Peshawar committed suicide in 1928 after being denaturalized as a US citizen in Los Angeles.
Post-1965 Immigration:
The population of South Asians in America remained very low due to severe immigration restrictions from non-European countries until the US Immigration Act of 1965, also known as the Hart-Celler Act. This act opened up immigration from Asia, Africa and Latin America and significantly changed the US demographics in the last half century.
Most of the nearly 5 million South Asians in the United States today owe their presence in this country to the passage of this 1965 law passed by Democrats. A large number of South Asians are engineers and technologists and many live in Silicon Valley. Over 500,000 Pakistani immigrants and their children live in the United States as of 2013, according to a report compiled by Migration Policy Institute. Of these, 273,000 were born in Pakistan and the remaining 180,000 are US-born. Pakistani-American population has more than doubled in the last decade due to increased immigration, according to US 2010 Census data. Pakistani-Americans (pop: 450,000) are the seventh largest community among Asian-Americans, behind Chinese (3.8 million), Filipinos (3.4 million), Indians (3.2 million), Vietnamese (1.74 million), Koreans (1.7 million) and Japanese (1.3 million), according to Asian-American Center For Advancing Justice . They are still a minuscule fraction of the overall US population.
Trump's Anti-Immigration Policy:
The demographic changes since 1965 have angered many Republican white Americans who support immigration restrictions and voted for President Donald J. Trump in 2016 general election. Trump has called Mexicans "criminals and rapists", complained about letting in people from "shit-hole" countries and imposed ban on entry of Muslims from several countries. His efforts to further restrict overall immigration have met with significant resistance from Congressional Democrats.
Here's a brief video clip of the documentary Roots in the Sand on Punjabi Mexicans:
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Comment by Riaz Haq on June 9, 2021 at 5:13pm
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Social Realities of Indian Americans: Results From the 2020 Indian American Attitudes Survey
https://carnegieendowment.org/2021/06/09/social-realities-of-indian...
Religious affiliation too correlates with one’s feelings toward their Indian identity. Eighty-eight percent of Hindus say being Indian is very or somewhat important to them, compared to 79 percent of Christians and 66 percent of Muslims. This is possibly a reflection of India’s current political climate. The February 2021 IAAS paper found that almost seven in ten Hindus approve of Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s performance, while just one in five Muslims feel the same.34 However, without longitudinal data, it is unclear to what extent the religious divide reflects the specificities of the current context—in which Muslims in India feel especially marginalized and discriminated against—or is instead a product of longer-term trends.
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Self-identification also varies by religion. While 86 percent of Hindus report identifying with some kind of “Indian” identity, 71 percent of Christians and 52 percent of Muslims do the same. Relative to Muslims, Christians and Hindus are equally likely to self-identify as “Indian American” (47 percent each versus 32 percent for Muslims), and Hindus are substantially more likely to self-identify as “Indian” (32 percent versus 17 percent for Christians and 12 percent for Muslims). On the other hand, Muslims are much more likely to self-identify as “South Asian” (27 percent compared to 7 percent of Christians and 5 percent of Hindus). Finally, Christians are more likely to self-identify as “American” without any hyphenation (9 percent versus 6 percent for Muslim and 4 percent for Hindus).
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First, Hindus are more likely to report that most or all of their Indian friends are also Hindus, underscoring a greater degree of religious homogeneity in their social networks. Fifty-eight percent of Hindus respond in this way, while 48 and 46 percent of Muslims and Christians, respectively, report that their networks are comprised of those of the same religion. Second, around one-third of Christians and Hindus and two-fifths of Muslims are situated in the middle, reporting that some of their Indian American networks are made up of friends of the same religion. Third, Christians are much more likely to report that hardly any or none of their Indian friends share their religion. Nearly one in five (19 percent) identify this way, compared to 10 percent of Muslims and only 6 percent of Hindus.
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#Sikh #Farmers: ‘I Can’t See Myself Doing Anything Else’. In #California, a young generation of Sikh farmers has #agricultural roots that stretch back 900 years. Since September 2020, farmers in #India have been protesting #Modi's new agricultural laws. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/07/11/us/sikh-american-farmers.html?sm...
KERMAN, Calif. — Simranjit Singh is a second-generation American farmer, but his agricultural roots go back 900 years.
Before his father moved to California from India in 1991, before India gained independence from Britain in 1947, before his Sikh culture took root in 1469, the civilizations of Northern India worked various agricultural lands, and Mr. Singh, 28, is part that unbroken lineage.
On a secluded 100-acre farm in the San Joaquin Valley of California, he and his father tend the family’s raisin and almond orchards, determined to keep their heritage vital.
“Whatever is passed to me from my father is so valuable that I would be a fool to throw it away,” he says. “Farming will always be at the core of who I am.”
Over the past century, ethnic diasporas from all over the world have labored in these fields, as people from Armenia, Mexico, Southeast Asia, China and many other places have built lives and families rooted in Central California’s fertile soil. It’s a place whose economy and lifeblood are defined by the land and the people who work it. Punjabi Sikhs are among the most recent migrants to try their luck.
The Sran farm, where Mr. Singh works with his father, Sarbjit Sran, is a small full-time operation with just the two men running most day-to-day operations. Mr. Singh’s mother, Jaswinder Sran, 55, sometimes joins them in the fields. Only during the late-summer harvest does the family hire contract laborers to reap the ripened crops.
Mr. Singh and other younger Sikh farmers in the region are already a shrinking group. Economic mobility has pushed recent generations into more traditionally white-collar occupations, even as the remaining farmers feel duty bound to continue.
“Around here, you don’t have as many Punjabi workers as we used to have in the ’80s and ’90s, because the kids are now doing professional things,” said Simon Sihota, a prominent Punjabi Sikh farmer in the area.
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The first person in Sheridan, Wyoming, to learn that Hot Tamale Louie had been knifed to death was William Henry Harrison, Jr. The news came by telegram, the day after the murder. Harrison was the son of a member of Congress, the great-grandson of one President, the great-great-great-grandson of another President, and the great-great-great-great-grandson of one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence. Hot Tamale Louie was the son of nobody knows who, the grandson of nobody knows who, and the great-great-grandson of nobody knows who. He had been selling tamales in Sheridan since Buffalo Bill rode in the town parade, sold them when President Taft came to visit, was still selling them when the Russians sent Sputnik into space and the British sent the Beatles to America.
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/06/06/zarif-khans-tamales-a...
By then, Louie was a local legend, and his murder shocked everyone. It was front-page, above-the-fold news in Sheridan, and made headlines throughout Wyoming, Colorado, and South Dakota. It travelled by word of mouth across the state to Yellowstone, and by post to California, where former Sheridan residents opened their mailboxes to find letters from home-town friends mourning Louie’s death.
That was in 1964. Two years later, the killer was tried, found guilty, hanged, removed from the gallows, then hanged again. Within a few years after that, Louie, his tamales, his murder, and everything else about him had faded from the headlines. A half century passed. Then, late last year, he wound up back in the news.
The events that propelled him there took place in the town of Gillette, ninety minutes southeast of Sheridan. Situated in the stark center of Wyoming’s energy-rich but otherwise empty Powder River Basin, Gillette grew up around wildcat wells and coal mines—dry as a bone except in its saloons, prone to spontaneous combustion from the underground fires burning perpetually beneath it. Because its economy is tied to the energy industry, it is subject to an endless cycle of boom and bust, and to a ballooning population during the good years. The pattern of social problems that attend that kind of rapid population growth—increased crime, higher divorce rates, lower school attendance, more mental-health issues—has been known, since the nineteen-seventies, as Gillette Syndrome. Today, the town consists of three interstate exits’ worth of tract housing and fast food, surrounded by open-pit mines and pinned to the map by oil rigs. Signs on the highway warn about the fifty-mile-per-hour winds.
A couple of hundred Muslims live in northeastern Wyoming, and last fall some of them pooled their money to buy a one-story house at the end of Gillette’s Country Club Road, just outside a development called Country Club Estates, in one of the nicer neighborhoods in town. They placed a sign at the end of the driveway, laid prayer rugs on top of the wall-to-wall carpeting, and began meeting there for Friday worship—making it, in function if not in form, the third mosque in the state.
Most locals reacted to this development with indifference or neighborly interest, if they reacted at all. But a small number formed a group called Stop Islam in Gillette to protest the mosque; to them, the Muslims it served were unwelcome newcomers to Wyoming, at best a menace to the state’s cultural traditions and at worst incipient jihadis. When those protests darkened into threats, the local police got involved, as did the F.B.I.
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Pakistan pioneers in Wyoming
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The Khans of Wyoming: WyoFile interviews writer Kathryn Schulz
The New Yorker magazine writer Kathryn Schulz’s remarkable story, “Citizen Khan” (June 6), about Wyoming’s one-hundred-year-old Muslim community began modestly as reporting on a tawdry flap over a new mosque in Gillette.https://wyofile.com/khans-wyoming-wyofile-interviews-writer-kathryn...
Unemployed oil field mechanic and Wyomingite Bret Colvin, 49, had raised an ill-informed stink — mostly through social media tirades — about the Queresha mosque near the Gillette golf course.
“I don’t want Jihadis in my neighborhood,” he told Wyoming Public Radio reporter Miles Bryan in December.
Colvin, a Roman Catholic and ex-Marine, created the Facebook group “Stop Islam in Gillette” that recently listed 389 members. Some of his followers posted attacks on Islam and threatened to disrupt the mosque by — among other defiling acts — throwing bacon at the mosque walls.
Some in Wyoming’s Muslim community calmly responded, notably Aftab Khan, a University of Wyoming molecular biology graduate and regional hotel chain operator who was born in Sheridan. Aftab Khan attempted to engage the xenophobes, noting that his family had been in Wyoming almost as long as Colvin’s and were solid citizens.
“My entire family participated in some kind of sport or debate team; school councils; public boards,” Aftab Khan, 41, said in a recent interview. “We’ve participated in a lot of different arenas. This one particular guy (Colvin) is just stirring up a lot of crap.”
Acting to defuse the situation, Gillette Mayor Louise Carter-King earlier this year called in the FBI to investigate the “Stop Islam” movement and things have calmed down since.
“I’ve been asked what are you going to do about the mosque and the Muslims,” Carter-King told WPR. “Well, I feel we are here to protect them just as we do anyone else.”
Using the mosque controversy as the entry point into her story, Schulz dug deeply into the early Muslim presence in Wyoming and found the astonishing, exhilarating yet often troubling tale of Afghan immigrant Zarif Khan. Others had touched on this story, notably Montana radio reporter Clay Scott, a former foreign correspondent who captured a piece of this history in an April 2012 report, “The Legacy of Zarif Khan” for his series Voices of the Mountain West.
While acknowledging Scott’s contribution and that of the Sheridan Press newspaper, which reported key points in the Khan saga, Schulz took the tale to an entirely different level. Given the rising pitch of Islamophobia in Donald Trump’s campaign rhetoric, her story has special resonance today.
Kathryn Shultz who brought the remarkable story of Zarif Khan to light, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. (Photo by InkWell Management Literary Agency)
Kathryn Shulz who brought the remarkable story of Zarif Khan to light, won the 2015 Pulitzer Prize for feature writing. (Photo by InkWell Management Literary Agency)
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Ghadar Party at the city's Finnish Socialist Hall in 1913. The Ghardar Party was an organization founded by Punjabi Indians, in the United States and Canada with the aim to liberate India from British rule. The movement began with a group of immigrants known as the Hindustani Workers of the Pacific Coast. This is an important site for members of the Astoria community, tourists from India and Indian communities across the United States.
The Ghadar Party Plaque is located at Maritime Memorial Park walkway, next to Shively's Historic Fresh Water Fountain. Park amenities include benches and group gathering spaces.
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A #kidnapped family of 4 #Indian-#American #Sikhs, including an 8-month old baby, has been found dead in #Merced, #California, authorities say. A suspect in custody was convicted in 2005 in a case involving armed robbery and false imprisonment. https://www.cnn.com/2022/10/05/us/california-family-missing-wednesday
The search for a family of four kidnapped in California ended Wednesday with authorities recovering their bodies from a rural farm area days after being abducted at gunpoint.
“Tonight, our worst fears have been confirmed,” Merced County Sheriff Vern Warnke said during a news conference Wednesday night. “Horribly, horribly senseless what happened here.”
The body of 8-month-old Aroohi Dheri was found in the same general area as her parents Jasleen Kaur and Jasdeep Singh, along with the body of the child’s uncle Amandeep Singh, Warnke said. Authorities received a call to the area Wednesday afternoon, he said.
The family had been missing since Monday, when authorities said they were kidnapped by a man armed with a gun and forced into a truck.
Police have taken into custody a man they consider a person of interest in the case. The man is speaking with authorities and a motive remains unclear at this time, the sheriff said.
Before the bodies were found, family members were imploring the public for any information related to the case.
“Every store, gas stations, everybody who has cameras please check the cameras,” Sukhdeep Singh, a brother of one of the victims, told reporters Wednesday. “We need the public’s help right now. Please help us … so my family comes home safe.”
Another relative, identified only as Balvinder, described the family as “peace loving” and said they own a small business and are longtime residents of the area.
“We are devastated. We are shocked. We are dying every moment not finding any clues,” Balvinder said.
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