Houstonਹਿਊਸਟਨ

Houston is the largest city in Texas and the fourth most populous city in the United States, in the southeast of the state near Galveston Bay, with 2,304,580 residents in the 2020 census and more than 7.1 million people in Greater Houston. Its Punjabi and Sikh community is one of the youngest big diaspora stories in America: it began only in 1971 with the oil and medical boom, and it built the first gurdwara in Texas within two years.

Where is Houston, and why do Punjabis live there?

Houston stands on the flat Gulf coastal plain of southeast Texas, near Galveston Bay and the Gulf of Mexico, primarily in Harris County, whose county seat it is, with portions extending into Fort Bend and Montgomery counties. Founded in 1836 at the meeting of Buffalo Bayou and White Oak Bayou and named for Sam Houston, it was incorporated on 5 June 1837 and grew on shipping, rail and then oil into the energy capital of the United States.

Punjabis live here because of work that arrived with the energy age. In the early 1970s the boom in the oil, gas and energy industries opened jobs across Houston at the same time as the Texas Medical Center, the largest medical centre in the world, drew doctors from everywhere. Sikh engineers, doctors, agriculturists and other professionals came from Punjab, from American universities and from other United States cities, and a professional community became a settled one as gurdwaras, businesses and families followed. Houston is listed under Punjabi places in the United States.

What do the numbers say?

The American Community Survey for 2017 to 2021 counted 4,135 Punjabi Americans in the Houston and The Woodlands combined statistical area, and 9,795 across Texas. The Houston figure is smaller than the great Californian and New York concentrations, which fits the community's history: this is a post 1971 settlement, still growing into its second and third generations.

The United States census does not ask about religion, so every Sikh figure here is an estimate and is labelled that way. In 2020 the census counted Sikh as an ethnicity for the first time: 606 Harris County residents recorded Sikh alone, and the standard derived estimate built from those counts puts the county's total Sikh population at about 3,315. For Texas as a whole, 1,918 residents recorded Sikh alone and the derived estimate is about 10,777. Community organisations put the real number higher: the Sikh National Center in Houston says more than 50,000 Sikhs live in Texas. The census derived estimate and the community claim are both reported here for what they are, and neither should be read as a headcount.

The first Sikhs and the oil and medical boom

The very first Sikhs arrived in Houston in 1971, and at the beginning there were about a dozen Sikh families in the whole city. The first religious gathering was held on 1 August 1971 in an apartment on Bellaire Boulevard, with the Guru Granth Sahib Ji brought from the Dallas home of Iqbal Singh Sekhon. Five families founded the Sikh Center of the Gulf Coast Area in 1972 to serve the Gulf coast community, bought two acres on Prairie Drive, and opened the centre in November 1973: the first gurdwara in the state of Texas, and, in the centre's own words, the first of its kind in the southwest United States.

Growth since then has followed the city itself. Houston's Punjabis are spread across a vast metropolitan area rather than gathered in one neighbourhood, working in energy, medicine, technology, trucking and business, and the institutions have multiplied with them across the suburbs and the freeways.

Gurdwaras across a sprawling city

The Sikh Center of Houston, at 8819 Prairie Drive, remains the community's foundation stone, the oldest and longest serving Sikh worship centre in the region, approved for a Texas Historical Marker as the state's first gurdwara. By the turn of the century the growing sangat had outgrown it, and the Sikh National Center officially came into existence on 12 March 2003, born, in its own account, out of the rapid increase of the Sikh population in Greater Houston. Its gurdwara stands at 7500 North Sam Houston Parkway West.

In the southwest of the city, the Gurdwara Sahib of Southwest Houston, at 14811 Lindita Drive, builds community in that part of the sprawl and runs a Punjabi School teaching the Punjabi language and the Sikh religion to the next generation. Together the temples mark the community's geography: a northwest foundation from 1973, a national centre on the Sam Houston Parkway, and neighbourhood gurdwaras where the families actually live.

The Gandhi District and a deputy who changed Texas

Houston's best known South Asian address is the Mahatma Gandhi District, along Hillcroft Avenue and Harwin Drive in the southwest of the city, officially named on 16 January 2010. It is an ethnic enclave of predominantly Indian and Pakistani restaurants and shops with a large South Asian population, Punjabi businesses among them, though the district belongs to all of South Asia and not to Punjabis alone. Its roots are commercial: an Indian American grocery moved to Hillcroft in 1983 and Raja Sweets opened in 1985, and Hillcroft is the main entrance to the district for the large South Asian population of Sugar Land and Missouri City to the southwest.

Houston also gave Sikh America one of its most honoured and saddest stories. In 2015 Sandeep Dhaliwal became the first deputy sheriff in Texas to wear a turban on duty, with the Harris County Sheriff's Office. In 2019 he was shot and killed from behind while conducting a routine traffic stop in the Copperbrook subdivision of Houston. The same year, the Houston Police Department changed its rules to allow beards and turbans, a change his service had made imaginable across Texas law enforcement.

Today Houston's Punjabis are a young, professional diaspora still building its institutions, a generation behind the coastal heartlands but growing with one of America's fastest growing big cities. Its northern counterpart in this series is Chicago, the Midwest centre. For the full map, see Punjabi places in the United States.