Gurudwara Shooting: How Sikhs Migrated To US, Fought Prejudice And Built A Community

[caption id="attachment_7780" align="alignleft" width="300"] Mexican Wives And Daughters Of Early Sikh Immigrants[/caption]

Kehar Singh Gill went to El Paso to look for a bride. A Mexican woman who worked in the cotton fields that he farmed in California's Imperial Valley had told him that she had eligible nieces there. Gill got the address wrong but the girl who opened the door, Matilde Sandoval, was pretty and, after some hesitation she invited him in. It helped that he was tall and handsome, though because of his turban she first thought he was a Turk.

Their story was not unusual. In the early 1900s, thousands of Punjabi laborers — most of them Sikh — arrived on America's West Coast to work the farms of California's Imperial Valley and the lumber mills of the Pacific Northwest. Exclusionary immigration laws barred them from bringing wives from India, and California's Alien Land Law of 1913 forbade them from owning farmland.

So they adapted. Many leased land in others' names. And many married Mexican women — fellow field workers with whom they shared long days in the cotton and cantaloupe fields. Anthropologist Karen Leonard, who documented these families in her book Making Ethnic Choices, found a community where Punjabi and Mexican cultures blended: children with names like Maria Singh, households where tortillas and dal shared the table.

The community they built endured. Yuba City, California became the heart of Sikh America, home to one of the country's oldest gurudwaras and an annual Sikh parade that draws tens of thousands. Over the 20th century, the community grew into farmers, truckers, doctors, and engineers — the model of the American immigrant story.

But prejudice traveled with them. After the September 11 attacks, Sikhs — with their turbans and beards — became targets of mistaken-identity hate crimes. Balbir Singh Sodhi, a Sikh gas station owner in Mesa, Arizona, was murdered four days after 9/11 by a man who called himself a patriot. In the decade that followed, Sikh advocacy groups documented hundreds of attacks, workplace discrimination cases, and school bullying incidents.

Then came Oak Creek. On August 5, 2012, a white supremacist walked into a gurudwara in Wisconsin and murdered six worshippers — the deadliest attack on Sikhs in American history.

The early immigrants' story and the Oak Creek tragedy are two chapters of the same book: a community that built itself up from field labor under discriminatory laws, blended families across cultures, and still — a century later — finds itself explaining to fellow Americans who Sikhs are.