Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi Mexican Americans

by Karen Isaksen Leonard

Defines and changes perceptions of ethnic identity. This book invokes gender, generation, class, religion, language, and the dramatic political changes of the 1940s in South Asia and the United States to show how individual and group perceptions of ethnic identity have changed among Punjabi Mexican Americans in rural California.

Genres: Nonfiction, History

424 pages, Paperback

First published May 29, 1992

About the author

Karen Isaksen Leonard is a historian and anthropologist at the University of California, Irvine. With a PhD from the University of Wisconsin (1969) on the history of India, she has published on the social history and anthropology of India and also on Punjabi Mexican Americans, South Asian Americans, and Muslim Americans.

Reviews

[Victor]

The Punjabi-Mexican marriage pattern soon became well established. The first brides recruited other women, their relatives and friends, for marriages with Punjabi men. Sisters with small children who had been deserted or widowed were called from Mexico to marry Punjabis. The men traveled too. A Sikh from the Imperial Valley took the train to El Paso, Texas, looking for the nieces of a Mexican woman working for him. He knocked on the wrong door, and the mother and three daughters on the other side mistook him at first for a Turk because of his turban. But in a few days, he and his new bride, her mother, and sisters were on the train back to El Centro. The Sikh’s partners married the other sisters and eventually the mother also married a Punjabi Sikh. This was a typical pattern—many sets of sisters or female relatives married business partners and formed joint households along the irrigation canals and country roads.

The birth of children brought a stronger sense of community and a shift of domestic power to the women. Almost without exception, the children were given Spanish names. (Rarely, a father filed an affidavit of correction later, giving a son a Punjabi name. Some divorce cases showed that names were a source of conflict: The fathers used Punjabi names for their children, the mothers, Spanish.) Another strengthening of the women’s network came with the appropriation of the compadrazgo system of fictive kinship, which drew upon relatives and friends as religious sponsors in the Catholic church. Punjabi men stood as godfathers to each other’s children in this basically Catholic system, but it was the women who were central to it.

How were children, given names like Maria Jesusita Singh, Jose Akbar Khan, and Armando Chand, socialized, and how did they think of themselves? Contrary to Yusuf Dadabhay’s theory that the Punjabis assimilated to American culture by way of the Mexican- American subculture, the Punjabi-Mexican families did not participate in activities with Mexican-Americans nor were they well received by members of that community. Mexican men opposed these marriages, and there were some early instances of violence between Punjabis and Mexicans over them. While some Punjabi men were close to their Mexican relatives by marriage, most were not.

[Elijah Perkins · Rating 4 out of 5]

A really fascinating history of a much understudied part of South Asian History. I have very little criticism, but I only wish this book discussed relationships that the Punjabis had with other South Asians across the United States. I’m not sure if there were any, as it was not covered in this book. Leonard discusses the relationship to the Ghadar movement, but not to the South Asians living in the midwest, or in New York and the east coast.

[Br Idget · Rating 5 out of 5]

So interesting—just wish it were longer.

[Sawan Garde · Rating 4 out of 5]

for my play (peachy). very interesting and thorough. i sometimes struggle with the point of academic writing structure though…