Punjabi Sikh-Mexican American community fading into history

*These things are true: Latinos are leading the American transformation to a multi-racial society. This is because Latinos are multi-racial to begin with, and because Latinos are marrying non-Latinos in great numbers. But this isn’t new. This story  tells a wonderful story about how the past is merely prologue. VL

By Benjamin Gottlieb, The Washington Post

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.

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[Photo from Karen Leonard’s Punjabi Mexican American Papers/Courtesy of Dept. of Special Collections, Stanford University Libraries]