Bakersfieldਬੇਕਰਸਫ਼ੀਲਡ

Bakersfield is a farming and energy city near the southern end of California's San Joaquin Valley, the county seat of Kern County, and the southernmost of the valley's Punjabi centres. A 2020 derived estimate puts about 7,843 Sikhs in the city, 1.94 per cent of its 403,455 residents, because the United States census does not ask about religion.

Where is Bakersfield, and why do Punjabis live there?

Bakersfield sits near the Kern River at the southern end of the San Joaquin Valley, with the southern Sierra Nevada to the east and the Tehachapi Mountains to the south. The town grew from a traveller stop known as Baker's Field, after Colonel Thomas Baker, who arrived in 1863; Baker laid out the townsite in 1869, the city was first incorporated in 1873 and re-incorporated on 11 January 1898, and it became the county seat in 1874. The 2020 census counted 403,455 people in the city and 909,235 in Kern County, which is also the Bakersfield metropolitan area.

Punjabis live here because Kern County is one of the most productive farming counties in the United States, and its irrigated fields, orchards and packing work drew Punjabi families south down the valley, first as workers and later as farm owners, contractors and business families. Oil, transport and trucking widened the work beyond the fields. Bakersfield is one of the cities listed under Punjabi places in the United States.

What do the numbers say?

Every Sikh figure for Bakersfield is an estimate, and this page treats it that way. The 2020 derived estimate, built from census counts of people who wrote in Sikh as their ethnicity, gives 7,843 Sikhs for the city of Bakersfield, 1.94 per cent, and 8,751 for Kern County as a whole, 0.96 per cent of the county. Almost the whole county Sikh population lives in or near the city.

Punjabi language data from the American Community Survey shows where in the city the community is strongest. In the 2017 to 2021 ACS, the Bakersfield metropolitan area counted 6,610 Punjabi Americans, 0.79 per cent of its population. Within the city, the Bakersfield City West PUMA counted 4,683 Punjabis, 2.19 per cent, one of the 20 largest PUMA totals in the country. Newer DataUSA figures for the southwest Bakersfield PUMA make Punjabi the second most common non English language in households there, after Spanish. In the Central Valley as a whole, Punjabi is the third most spoken language after English and Spanish.

A later start in Kern County

Bakersfield's Punjabi story starts later than the northern valley's. The California State University, Bakersfield, Historical Research Center records that Punjabis began coming to America from Punjab province between 1899 and 1914, about 6,800 people, and that most who came to California worked in agricultural fields, growing crops such as cotton, almonds and rice in a landscape that reminded them of home. But for Kern County itself, the centre notes that naturalization records show no mention of a Sikh presence until the 1960s and 1980s, which show Punjabis in Taft and Bakersfield.

That late start makes the later growth more striking. The early Punjabi generation in California faced the Asiatic Barred Zone of 1917, the extension of the California Alien Land Law to Asian Indians in 1923, and the loss of citizenship that followed the 1923 Thind decision. After those laws were invalidated in 1952, and after family immigration reopened in 1965, communities could put down permanent roots. In Kern County, the CSUB centre records, the community funded and built the first Sikh school in the county in the 1990s, on Weedpatch Highway in the middle of a farm.

Seven gurdwaras in the south of the city

The CSUB Historical Research Center puts the present count plainly: there are now seven gurdwaras to serve the community in Bakersfield. The names recorded in the opened sources are the Sikh Temple of Bakersfield, Gurdwara Guru Angad Darbar at 8100 Stine Road, Gurdwara Guru Dashmesh Darbar at 7000 Wible Road, the Guru Nanak Mission Sikh Center, Gurdwara Nanaksar Darbar, Gurudwara Shaheed Baba Deep Singh Ji Khalsa Darbar and Gurudwara Sukh Sagar Sahib. Most stand in the south and southwest of the city, the same side of Bakersfield where the Punjabi language figures are strongest.

The gurdwaras are working community institutions, not only prayer halls. The CSUB account describes langar, free food served to everyone regardless of religion, caste, standing or gender, and records that during the pandemic Sikh Riders of America worked with local volunteers to build face shields for front line workers. A Bakersfield chapter of the Bhagat Puran Singh Health Initiative, established in 2016, runs health screenings at the city's gurdwaras and describes Kern County's Punjabi Sikh community as continuously expanding.

Farming, oil and trucking in Kern County

Kern County's farm economy explains the community's base. The county's 2020 crop report put its top five commodities, worth more than 5.5 billion dollars together, as grapes, citrus, almonds, pistachios and milk, with carrots sixth. Punjabi families in the county work across that economy as growers, labour contractors, packers and truckers, and Punjabi owned restaurants, grocery stores and clothing stores serve the community in the city, in the CSUB centre's account.

Public life shows the community's arrival as well. Manpreet Kaur serves as vice mayor of Bakersfield, and the Sikhism in the United States account lists her among notable Sikh American politicians. At county level, Jasmeet Kaur Bains, born in Delano to Punjabi Sikh immigrant parents, was elected to the California State Assembly in 2022 for a district that includes much of East Bakersfield, and is recorded as the first Sikh American elected to that body. Bakersfield is the southern counterpart to Fresno and Stockton further north in the San Joaquin Valley.

Bakersfield's Punjabi community today

Today Bakersfield's Punjabis are a young community by valley standards: no pioneers of 1906, but farm families, truckers, health workers and shopkeepers who built seven gurdwaras and a school within two generations, and who now sit on the city council of California's ninth largest city. For the full map, see Punjabi places in the United States.