Intermarriage
Punjabi men married Mexican women laborers and there were eventually almost four hundred of these biethnic couples clustered in California’s agricultural valley. Husbands and wives spoke to each other in rudimentary English or Spanish. The men tended to be older, in their late thirties or forties, and the women in their early twenties. Punjabi men learned Spanish to deal with Mexican agricultural laborers and to speak to their wives. Some Punjabi men adopted Spanish names or nicknames: Miguel for Maghar, Andrés for Inder, Mondo for Mahinder.
The fathers transmitted little of Punjabi culture to their wives and children, save in the domains of food and funeral practices. Cooking in the home drew from both Mexican and Punjabi cuisine and the men taught their wives to cook chicken curry, roti, and various vegetable curries. Today, for example, the Rasul family in Yuba City runs the only Mexican restaurant in California that features chicken curry and roti. Another important retention of Punjabi culture was the disposition of the body upon death. The Hindus and Sikhs insisted upon cremation, then uncommon in North America, and Muslims carried out orthodox burial ceremonies for each other (though the plots in which they are buried in rural California have since been misnamed “Hindu plots”). The wives, however, were buried in the Mexican Catholic section of local cemeteries, as were the children.
Read more about this topic: Punjabi Mexican American