For a time that is long Sylvia and Yolanda Singh wondered about their heritage.
Raised in a Catholic house in Santa Ana where they talked Spanish and English, the siblings had been usually inquired about their final title, one common to all the male people in the Sikh faith from India’s Punjab province.
Yet not until Yolanda ended up being doing study that is graduate training at Stanford and opted for her father as an interest for the ethnographic task did the household history started to unfold, and she discovered the 67-year-old construction worker is really a Mexican-Hindu.
Mexican-Hindu? Although the combination may appear odd, the storyline of this Singhs of Santa Ana and many thousand people like them for the American Southwest represents an anomaly of America’s melting cooking pot. Additionally, it is an almost forgotten tale about how precisely history and culture made strange bedfellows, combining two immigrant teams in fairly brief marriages of convenience.
Today, with intermarriage away from their circle that is small Mexican-Hindus are growing more indistinct with every generation, quickly reducing them up to a footnote of Ca history. But as a result of Karen Leonard, a UC Irvine professor of anthropology who’s got written almost a dozen articles about the subject and it is doing work with a book, Sylvia and Yolanda are in possession of a thorough household tree and understand a lot more about their history.
Into the very early several years of this century, relating to Leonard, between 2,000 and 6,000 Sikh, Muslim and Hindu agricultural workers had been brought in to Ca and Arizona from Northwest Asia. Continue reading