Laws Built to Divide Couldn't Stop Punjabi-Mexican Love

Hundreds of families in California's farm country were built in defiance of the law. That's the story Northern California artist Sarabjit Singh is painting, and CBS Sacramento reported it October 30, 2026. In the early 1900s, Punjabi men came to California looking for new opportunities and started building lives and families with Mexican women. The state had a whole apparatus of statutes designed to stop exactly that.

Who Has the Power

The rules were written by people who'd never work a day in a peach orchard. U.S. laws made it difficult for Asian men to bring women and family members from their homeland. California's anti-miscegenation laws prohibited marriages between white people and people of other races. Discriminatory laws of the era also barred foreign-born men from owning land. Immigration restrictions, in the article's own words, "shaped the relationships they formed." The state drew lines around who could marry, who could settle, and who could own the ground they farmed.

Many of the Punjabi men came from farming castes in the Punjab region of South Asia, now divided between India and Pakistan, and wanted agricultural work. They got it. They didn't get a say in the paperwork that governed their lives.

Who Gets Crushed, and What They Did Anyway

Singh paints the cost on faces. "The hardships they are going through shows on their faces," she says of the people in her artwork. "Still, there is joy in their eyes." One piece is titled 'Binding Laws and Blending Cultures.' Another shows Mexican women dancing in traditional Mexican dresses alongside their Punjabi husbands and fathers on a Yuba City peach farm, the men without their traditional turbans, reflecting how some families blended their cultural identities.

Nobody handed these families a solution. They found their own. Author Karen Leonard, whose book 'Making Ethnic Choices' documents the community, says the Punjabi immigrants did not come solely for land, and that under the discriminatory laws of the time, the foreign-born men couldn't own it. Their American-born children became the landowners of the family farms. "They worked to get landownership finally, through the solution found by the Japanese immigrants. Their children born here were American citizens," Leonard said. "They were really good farmers and the system worked." The workaround was passed from one targeted community to another, a quiet piece of mutual aid across lines the law insisted on drawing.

The commonalities did the rest. Both communities had immigrant roots, both worked in agriculture, both were building new lives in California. "In the early days, the commonalities bridged divisions," Leonard says. Singh puts it plainly: "They got to know each other and they moved forward. Why can't we do that now?"

What Got Built Without Permission

The community's fingerprints are all over Yuba City. Members worked California's farms and helped establish some of the state's earliest Sikh temples. At one local gurdwara, the founders list includes a Sikh man who took the surname "Kasagrande," reflecting his Punjabi-Mexican family. Rasul's El Ranchero, now closed, opened in 1953 when Gulam and Inez Rasul brought their backgrounds together through marriage and a menu of Indian and Mexican dishes. That was 73 years ago.

The record of all this lives in memory more than in institutions. "There isn't really a third or fourth generation, but there's a memory," Leonard says. Singh is working to keep that memory from slipping away. "A picture is worth a thousand words, as they say. Our children may not read the books, but if they see the story painted when they go to a museum or any place, at least they will be curious to know what happened, why it happened," she said. Working from her home studio, she turns historical research into illustrations of the people and families who shaped the community. "My artwork might be like a capsule in time," she says. "I'm showing these stories and they will be preserved even when I'm gone."

One of her latest works, commissioned for the Sutter County History Museum, will become a permanent part of its collection. It depicts the parade celebrating Punjabi culture and traditions in Yuba City, down to the peach orchards and the free-roaming chickens and roosters often spotted around town. More than a century after those first families came together, the laws that tried to keep them apart are history. The families, the farms and the story are still here.