Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American community fading into historyPosted in Articles, Asian Diaspora, Media Archive, United States on 2012-08-19 19:48Z by Steven |
Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American community fading into history
The Washington Post
2012-08-13
Benjamin Gottlieb
Amelia Singh Netervala points to her mother’s chicken curry enchiladas as the best metaphor for her childhood.
Born to a Punjabi Sikh father and Mexican mother, her family was full of cultural contradictions: She went to church on Sundays with her mother and three siblings while her father waited outside in the family car. She would have langar — the daily Sikh communal meal — just once a year, when her father would embark on the five-hour journey from Phoenix to the nearest gurdwara in El Centro, a Californian border town in the Imperial Valley. Her clandestine conversations with her mother were done in Spanish, a language her father never mastered.
All the while Netervala never had any doubts about her identity.
“I’m proud of my Mexican heritage and mixed ethnicity,” said Netervala, who grew up on an alfalfa and cotton farm in Casa Grande, 50 miles south of Phoenix. “But if I had to choose, I would identify as being an Indian woman.”
Now in her mid-70s, Netervala is part of the nation’s thinning Punjabi-Mexican population, an identity forged out of historical necessity and made possible by uncanny cultural parallels…
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