KAMLA BHATT
You
drive up the narrow road on Route 99, flanked on either side by peach trees,
and enter Yuba City in Sutter
County,
about 125 miles from San Francisco. This, as you have found out, is the
heart of the 'Rice Bowl' and the
'Prune
Capital' of California. But what you didn't know and which you soon realise
after driving around in Yuba City
is:
that you are also in a veritable 'Chhotta Punjab', where a throaty Sat
Sri Akal is the preferred form of greeting;
where
you can speak Punjabi and not be the odd man out at the local gas station,
at the doctor's clinic, even at
the
farms.There are more surprises in store. You come across people strolling
around nonchalantly in pathan suits.
At
the farm of Didar Singh Bains, counted among the country's largest peach
farmers, you find his hip daughter
Daljit,
a former model, speak to the workers in fluent Punjabi. At the Freemont
Medical Centre, Dr Jasbir Singh
Kang's
nameplate, believe it or not, is in Punjabi. You drive around, you talk
to people-you are told Punjabi is
taught
in the high schools, that Sikhs constitute 9 per cent of Yuba City's total
population of 79,000, that there
are
three gurudwaras, a temple and a mosque; that the prune capital of California
reminds them of their pind
(village)
in Punjab; that every Friday, for an hour beginning 8 pm, the residents
huddle around their TV to watch
their
favourite programme, Apna Punjab.The story of the Sikh community in Yuba
City begins at the turn of the
20th
century, when early immigrants from the Punjab province in erstwhile British
India came down here. The first
Sikh
family to settle in the Yuba/Sutter area reportedly was that of Puna Singh.
The handful of immigrants, over
the
century, have burgeoned into a thriving community of thousands of prosperous
farmers, business owners and
professionals.
Even so, Sutter is still one of the poorer counties in California.Male
immigrants then faced a peculiar
problem-the
existing laws prohibited them from marrying whites. They consequently entered
into nuptial ties with
co-workers,
mostly Mexican women, as poor as they (the laws also didn't allow non-whites
to own land). To them
were
born the little-heard-of Punjabi-Mexicans. "There were only four Punjabi
women in California before 1947,"
explains
78-year-old Punjabi-Mexican Mary Singh Rai of Yuba City. Her father Bishan
Singh came to northern
California
in 1909. "My father came to Oakland, Stockton and then to Yuba City before
moving to Phoenix,
Arizona.
He worked for the railways in Yuba City in the early years before becoming
a farmer. He first married
another
woman, and then my mother Ernestina Zuniga in Phoenix. She was his third
wife since he had been
married
in India too. They had a Christian ceremony with all the trimmings," says
Rai, who married Lal Singh Rai
and
moved to Yuba City in 1947."We were called Hindoos," recollects 66-year-old
Isabel Singh Garcia, another
Mexican-Punjabi
resident of Yuba City. "We went to the church and the gurudwara. We spoke
Spanish and English
at
home. My father spoke Punjabi, English and Spanish. All the Punjabi men
learnt Spanish since the women found
it
difficult to learn Punjabi. The Mexican women became Indian women. They
learnt Punjabi cooking and made rotis
and
curry, adding a tinge of Mexican flavour to it. They mixed tomato sauce
and made Spanish rice to go with the
curry."Isabel
Singh's father Memal Singh, typically, had come to Yuba City in 1906 from
Jalandhar.A few years
down
the line, he became a rice farmer leasing property from the white people.
Memal's fortunes resembled those
of
most immigrants of the time, with its highs and lows. He lost his property
in 1924, moved to New Mexico where
he
met Isabel's mother, Genobeba Loya. The Singhs eventually returned to their
'pind' in 1939.
Hindoos
to others, the Punjabi-Mexican considered himself/herself half-Indian.
"I was also called eight annas to a
rupee
since I was only half-Indian," says Guru Deva Teja, an attorney and realtor,
without any rancour. He was
elected
the district attorney in 1963, a post he held till 1974. "Isabel and I
went to grammar and high school
together,"
reminisces Teja, sitting outside the porch of Singh Garcia's house in Yuba
City. Teja's isn't a typical
immigrant
story: his father Bachan Singh Teja didn't rough it out in the farms; instead,
he studied at the
University
of Arkansas where he met his bride, Delle Fuglaar, who was of Norwegian,
Dutch and Irish stock. They
moved
to Yuba City in the 1930s.
Between
the first decade of the 20th century and the end of World War II, the Sikh
population didn't grow rapidly.
The
reason: a 1917 law banned entry of new immigrants into the country. But
the porous frontiers to Canada and
Mexico
did allow an odd Sikh to slip through. "My father Lal Singh Rai came in
illegally from Mexico," discloses Leela
Rai,
42, president/ceo of the Yuba-Sutter chamber of commerce. "They left India
in 1928 but it took them five
years
to reach California. A group of them walked up from Panama and came to
California via Mexico."
The
trickle, however, turned into a flood after immigration laws were relaxed
post-WW II. Immigrants from Punjab
arrived
in droves in the Fifties, gradually changing the demography of the area.
More important, they were also
allowed
to bring their Punjabi wives, consequently spawning a culture in which
the Punjabi element dominated the
hybrid
variety of the earlier generation.
The
new denizens of Yuba City called themselves Indians or East Indians. "As
we grew up, we saw more Indians
coming
into Yuba City," says Alicia Singh Hitzfeld, 64, and younger sister of
Singh Garcia. Adds Leela Rai, who
studied
at Yuba City High School and California State University, Sacramento, "I
remember it was a close-knit
community
in the 1960s. I was raised in three cultures-the strongest was the Punjabi
culture-and we called
ourselves
Indians. We used to celebrate Republic Day and Independence Day. These
were huge celebrations and
people
would come from all over to Yuba City. We even got movies from Canada."
These
new immigrants too weren't well off, and had to work as farmhands in the
orchards that dot the area. Even
the
biggest of the peach farmers, Didar Singh Bains, 63, began as a manual
labourer. "I came in 1958 from Nangal
in
Hoshiarpur. I worked for different people doing manual labour and bought
my first farm with my father in 1962.
We
planted apples the first year," recollects Bains, sitting in his office.
Bains Farms now grows prunes, walnuts,
almonds,
grapes and winegrapes.
Today,
Bains and many others own palatial houses and drive flashy German cars.
But they endured tremendous
hardship
to realise their American Dream. "My father, Gurbachan Singh Tatla, shared
a room with Bains when they
were
at the labour camp," says Satnam Singh Tatla, 43, a farmer and orchard
owner who came here as an
eight-year-old.
"The farm labour camp had about 50-60 people and there was one cook and
one
foreman.Sometimes
there were 10 beds to a room. I started at 70 cents an hour," recalls Bains
who, like many
early
immigrants, took off his pagri (turban) and became mauna (clean-shaven),
but started wearing the turban
again
in 1980, perhaps because of the echo the Khalistan movement had here.
In
the early years, the community boasted of very few professionals. Hari
Singh Everest, 85, a Stanford University
alumnus
who came to Yuba City to teach in 1961, remembers, "In 1961, most of the
people from the community
were
farmers. Dave Teja's family and Dr Gulzar Singh Johl, an ophthalmologist,
were the only two professionals
that
I knew of at the time. At the elementary school where I taught there were
no Punjabi kids, only kids from
mixed
families. Today, about 10 per cent of the students in Yuba City Unified
District are Sikhs."
It
was tough in the early years, we could not find a job and we felt awkward.
Now, it's different, we have many
people
who are professionals," recollects Sukhjit Kaur Kang, 39, married to Dr
Jasbir S. Kang, 38, a physician. Dr
Kang
is a relatively new immigrant who finished his medical studies in Patiala
before migrating to the US in the late
1970s.
He moved from Chicago to Yuba City and says, "I felt right at home when
I came to Yuba City and decided
to
stay here. We are different but we are also part of the American community."
Leela Rai comments, "I think
there
is an effort now to integrate and yet not. It is their intention to integrate
but people still wear traditional
clothes
and appear to maintain strong cultural ties with India. Earlier, everybody
wore American clothes."
It
was in 1969, on the 500th birth anniversary of Guru Nanak, that Yuba got
its first gurudwara. Two more have
been
subsequently built.
There
are also moves to integrate, one of which is the Punjabi-American Heritage
Society, founded in 1993 by Dr
Kang.
Every May, they organise the Punjabi-American Festival. "It helps to build
bridges and minimise
misconceptions,"
Kang points out.
Yuba
City has become an ersatz 'pind' which pulls back those who venture out.
Perhaps it is the ambience,
perhaps
people don't feel culturally alienated, perhaps it's the small-town charm.
For instance, Leela Rai moved
away
from Yuba City and worked in southern California, San Francisco and Sacramento
before returning in 1988. "I
am
happy back in my little rural area although I had said once that I'll never
come back. My mother knew better.
She
always said, 'You'll come back'," says Rai.
Similarly,
Daljit Bains, 32, daughter of Didar Singh Bains, returned to her family
business in Yuba City after getting
two
degrees (in business and planning and development) at the University of
Southern California and working in
Los
Angeles for a while. "Yuba City is conservative and it has a small village
feeling. Everyone knows everybody.
People
are old-fashioned and people keep their old traditions," she says.
As
their numbers grow, the community has tended to diversify. In recent years,
many Punjabis have turned
entrepreneurs,
venturing into the trucking, commercial property and development businesses.
"There are 60 small
stores
in this area and 56 are owned by people of Indian descent," says Dr Kang.
But
farming remains the core business. "Farming is in our blood. There is something
about Punjabis and farming,"
says
Singh Garcia. "Our fathers paved the way for everybody else," adds Singh
Hitzfeld proudly. You can doff your
hat
to that memory.