NRI Sikhs in California

• Sikhs have been immigrating to California for more than 100 years: An April 6, 1899, Chronicle story reports four Sikhs arriving on the Nippon Maru. Sikhs helped build the transcontinental railroad.
  
  
• Many settled in Yuba City and Marysville in the Sacramento Valley. That area has five gurdwaras to the Bay Area's six. Today, Sikh farmers account for 95 percent of the peach farming, 60 percent of prune farming and 20 percent of almond and walnut production in that region.
  
  
• Didar Singh Bains, who came to the United States with $8 in his pocket in 1958 to join his father and grandfather who were working orchards, is now the biggest peach grower in the state and one of the richest people in Northern California.
  
  
• Dalip Singh Saund was the first Asian American member of Congress -- and still the only Indian American ever elected to federal office. He represented parts of Riverside and Imperial counties from 1956 until he was incapacitated by a stroke in 1964.
  
  
• The first major wave of Sikh immigrants to the Bay Area came in the 1960s and 1970s, when people arrived to study at its universities and work in the nascent high tech industry. Unrest in Punjab fueled another wave of immigration California in the late 1980s.
  
  
• San Jose's temple, slated to grow to more than 90,000 square feet, already fills 20,000 square feet with a prayer room, a dining room and a visitors center. Construction is to start next year and end by 2008. The congregation financed the original
  structure's construction with the money made buying a nearby parcel for $2 million and selling it six years later for $10 million.
  
  
• Bay Area gurdwaras raised money for tsunami victims, and already, San Jose's gurdwara has sent about $22,000 to victims of the Oct. 8 earthquake in northern Pakistan

Any comments on this article or you have any news: Click here

Disclaimer
NRIinternet.com will put up as many of your comments as possible but we cannot guarantee that all e-mails will be published. We reserve the right to edit comments that are published.