{"id":9069,"date":"2010-09-22T16:20:32","date_gmt":"2010-09-22T16:20:32","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mixedracestudies.org\/wordpress\/?p=9069"},"modified":"2017-09-08T13:36:44","modified_gmt":"2017-09-08T13:36:44","slug":"making-ethnic-choices-californias-punjabi-mexican-americans","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mixedracestudies.org\/wp\/?p=9069","title":{"rendered":"Making Ethnic Choices: California\u2019s Punjabi Mexican Americans"},"content":{"rendered":"

Making Ethnic Choices: California\u2019s Punjabi Mexican Americans<\/a><\/em><\/strong><\/p>\n

Temple University Press<\/a>
\nMay 1992
\n352 page
\n6×9
\nPaper EAN: 978-1-56639-202-0, ISBN: 1-56639-202-0
\nCloth EAN: 978-0-87722-890-5, ISBN: 0-87722-890-6
\nElectronic Book: EAN: 978-1-43990-364-3<\/p>\n

Karen Isaksen Leonard<\/a><\/strong>, Professor of Anthropology
\nUniversity of California, Irvine<\/em><\/p>\n

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This is a study of the flexibility of ethnic identity. In the early twentieth century, men from India\u2019s Punjab province<\/a> came to California<\/a> to work on the land. The new immigrants had few chances to marry. There were very few marriageable Indian<\/a> women, and miscegenation<\/a> laws and racial prejudice limited their ability to find white Americans. Discovering an unexpected compatibility, Punjabis<\/a> married women of Mexican<\/a> descent and these alliances inspired others as the men introduced their bachelor friends to the sisters and friends of their wives. These biethnic families developed an identity as \u201cHindus\u201d but also as Americans. Karen Leonard has related theories linking state policies and ethnicity to those applied at the level of marriage and family life. Using written sources and numerous interviews, she invokes gender, generation, class, religion, language, and the dramatic political changes of the 1940s in South Asia<\/a> and the United States to show how individual and group perceptions of ethnic identity have changed among Punjabi Mexican Americans<\/a> in rural California.<\/p>\n

Read chapter 1 here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Table of Contents<\/strong><\/p>\n