Punjabis reached California from about 1899, working the orchards and the railroads of the Sacramento and Imperial valleys. The gurdwara at Stockton, founded in 1912, is the oldest in the United States and was the organising centre of the Ghadar Party. The oldest still standing anywhere in North America is the Gur Sikh Temple at Abbotsford in British Columbia, opened on 26 February 1911.
The 1913 California Alien Land Law barred aliens ineligible for citizenship from owning land. In 1923, in United States v. Bhagat Singh Thind, the Supreme Court held that Indians were not white within the meaning of the naturalisation statute, and citizenships already granted were revoked.
Because Punjabi men could not bring wives and could not marry white women under anti-miscegenation law, several hundred married Mexican and Mexican-American women in the Imperial Valley. Their descendants, the Punjabi-Mexican families, carry names like Rodriguez Singh. It is one of the most unusual communities in American history and it exists because of two racial statutes interacting.
The Luce-Celler Act of 1946 restored naturalisation rights. Dalip Singh Saund of Chhajjalwadi in Amritsar district was elected to Congress in 1956, the first Asian American and the first Sikh to sit in it.
The Yuba City Nagar Kirtan each November draws over a hundred thousand people and is among the largest Sikh gatherings in North America.
The Sacramento valley settlement is one of the oldest Sikh communities in the United States, and the men who began it came for orchard and railroad work rather than to settle. Vancouver, across the border, is older still.
The Yuba City area is peach and prune country and Punjabi families own a substantial share of the orchards, having moved from working them to owning them across three generations.
The Stockton minute books and the Ghadar correspondence held in California archives are the primary record of the first Punjabi generation in America, and almost none of it has been read by anybody in Punjab.