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Punjabis in California: Then and Now

Prof. Karen Leonard, Department of Anthropology, UC Irvine

Monday, February 11, 2013
12:00 PM - 1:00 PM
10383 Bunche Hall

Abstract: Leonard here updates her 1992 book, Making Ethnic Choices: California’s Punjabi Mexican Americans. She reviews the early history of the Punjabi pioneers who came to the American West at the turn of the twentieth century and married Mexican and Mexican American women, creating a cosmopolitan biethnic community based in southern California. She argues that, more recently, Punjabi Sikhs have redefined that diaspora as a Sikh one, narrowing their personal and political identity to a transnational, not cosmopolitan, one.

Bio: Karen Leonard's latest book, Locating Home: India's Hyderabad is Abroad, is a multisite ethnography of the diaspora from Hyderabad to Pakistan, the UK, Australia, Canada, the US, and the Gulf states of the Middle East (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2007; Delhi: Oxford University Press, 2008). Her 2003 book, Muslims in the United States: the State of Research (N.Y.: Russell Sage Foundation) led to many speaking engagements and consultations. Leonard has published on the history and culture of India, especially the former Hyderabad State, and on Asian American and Muslim American history and culture. She currently chairs the Anthropology department at the University of California, Irvine.