Because there were so few Indian women, and because of California’s miscegenation laws, which dictated that people could not marry outside of their race, many Punjabi men married Hispanic women, creating a new, hybrid community. Only a few Indian women reached the United States before the border closed, none of whom settled in the Imperial Valley. Moreover, California’s Alien Land Law of 1913 prohibited ownership or long-term leases of land to “aliens ineligible for citizenship,” which included Chinese, Japanese, Koreans, and Indians - effectively preventing them from owning property, because they could not become citizens.Īccording to Karen Leonard, a professor of anthropology at the University of California at Irvine and author of Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans, almost 2,000 Punjabi men lived in California in the early 1900s, and approximately one-third of them married (or re-married) after settling in the state.
These men earned far more money than they had been able to in India, but life in California was not all opportunity: After the Immigration Act of 1917 restricted Indians and other Asians from entering the country, many of the men found themselves stuck some had wives and children back in India, and they feared that if they left America, they would not be allowed to return. In California, they generally settled in the Imperial Valley, east of San Diego, just above the Mexican border from there, some followed farming routes north and eventually made homes in places like Yuba City and Fresno.
They landed on the West Coast, and most found jobs farming in California or logging in the Pacific Northwest some sold tamales. Between the late 1800s and 1917, men from Punjab, in northwest India, came to the United States to work.