Gurudwara shooting: How Sikhs migrated to US, fought prejudice and built a community
Gurudwara shooting: How Sikhs migrated to US, fought prejudice and built a community
- August 12, 2012
- Research by Karen Leonard, anthropology professor, is featured in the Economic Times August 12, 2012
From the Economic Times:
Kehar Singh Gill went to El Paso to look for a bride... In a few days they married
and went to the house that Gill shared with Sucha Singh Garewal, his partner in the
farm. Four months later Matilde's younger sister Lala agreed to marry Garewal (perhaps
as part of the deal he removed his turban and shaved his beard). A third sister, married
to a Mexican, soon moved there too and in time one of her daughters married a Sikh.
And finally the twice-widowed mother of the three sisters joined them and a Sikh man
persuaded her to take him on as her third husband. If this multi-generational, multi-ethnic
marriage saga sounds surprising, consider too that the year Gill made his journey
was 1917. Nor was this an isolated story. Karen Leonard, an anthropologist at the
University of California, Irvine whose book Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi
Mexican Americans is one of the most fascinating documents of the South Asian diaspora,
estimated that there were almost 400 such couples in that era, most of them living
in the Imperial Valley.
For the full story, please visit http://articles.economictimes.indiatimes.com/2012-08-12/news/33154079_1_....
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