Making Ethnic Choices by Karen LeonardISBN: 9781439903643
Publication Date: 2010-08-17
In the early twentieth century, men from India's Punjab province came to California to work on the land. The new immigrants had few chances to marry. There were very few marriageable Indian women, and miscegenation laws and racial prejudice limited their ability to marry and own land. Discovering an unexpected compatibility, Punjabis married women of Mexican descent. Using written sources and numerous interviews, Karen Leonard 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.