The so-called Mexican-Hindus of California have a unique story, which is split between California’s Sacramento Valley in the north and the Imperial Valley in the south. Their community began in the 1910s, with migrant workers originally from the Indian province of Punjab.
“These men did not marry until years after arriving in America, until the immigration laws made it impossible to bring their families from India,” explain LaBrack and Leonard. Thus, these Punjabi agricultural laborers—already in their thirties or forties and organized into tightly-knit social groups of two-to-five men—had to turn to the local population to find wives.
Their brides could be much younger—in their teens or twenties. Hailing from Mexico and the American Southwest, the women came from families that had originally come to California in search of farm work or to escape the Mexican Revolution and the unstable situation in border regions.
“Frequently, eligible women were picking cotton in the fields farmed by the men and legal barriers to marriage were not raised. The women offered domesticity, a housekeeper and cook for the husband and his [business] partners,” LaBrack and Leonard report.
The intermarriage transformed Punjabi bachelor enclaves into a much more womanly space.
“In contrast to the common stereotype of the patriarchal Mexican family, these Hispanic female-centered kinship groups presented challenges to the Punjabi men,” write LaBrack and Leonard.
Notably, Punjabi men from the same group of partners tended to marry sets of sisters or female relatives, so “[k]inship and economic ties reinforced each other” in the community. Since many brides “were without male supporters”—for example, as daughters of single parents or widows themselves—they would bring their own sisters and mothers into their new households.
On the other hand, Punjabi men who remained single might also stay with their married partners “for years, helping with the cooking and telling the children stories about the Punjab.”