Selmaਸੈਲਮਾ

Selma is a city in Fresno County, California, United States, with 24,674 residents in the 2020 census, known around the world as the Raisin Capital of the World and home in the San Joaquin Valley to a long-settled Punjabi Sikh community centred on the Sikh Center of the Pacific Coast, whose annual Nagar Kirtan draws thousands of Sikhs from across California.

Where is Selma, and why do Punjabis live there?

Selma stands in the southern San Joaquin Valley, 16 miles southeast of Fresno on Highway 99, at an elevation of 308 feet. The city covers 5.81 square miles of flat valley farmland in Fresno County, and it was incorporated on 15 March 1893, which made it the second city in the county.

The community began with the railroad. In 1880 residents founded the Valley View School District and the first post office opened, and a decade later four farmers, Jacob E. Whitson, Egbert H. Tucker, George Otis and Monroe Snyder, formed a partnership, laid out a townsite along the Southern Pacific line and auctioned lots. The name Selma was most probably submitted by railroad employee Sanford Kingsbury for his wife, Selma Michelsen Kingsbury, and chosen from a railroad list by George Otis and other local businessmen, despite a persistent local legend crediting Governor Leland Stanford and a photograph of another Selma.

Punjabis live here for the same reason they live all along the valley floor: the raisin, peach and grape country needed farm labour, and Punjabi Sikhs, in California since the early 1900s, came to work it and then to farm it themselves. Growers became owners, a gurdwara gave the community a centre, and families followed families from Punjab to a small city where Punjabi is now one of the languages of everyday life. Selma is listed under Punjabi places in the United States.

What do the numbers say?

Selma counted 24,674 people in the 2020 census, up from 23,219 in 2010. It is a majority Latino city, 81.2 per cent Hispanic or Latino in 2020, with 1,134 Asian residents, 4.6 per cent, counted in the census racial tables, and the Census Bureau's QuickFacts puts foreign-born residents at 25.7 per cent of the population in the 2020 to 2024 survey period.

The United States census does not ask about religion, so Selma's Sikh figure is an estimate and is labelled that way. The 2020 census counted Sikh as an ethnicity for the first time: 131 Selma residents recorded Sikh alone, 0.53 per cent, and the standard derived estimate built from those counts puts the city's total Sikh population at about 760, or 3.08 per cent. Fresno County as a whole holds one of the largest Sikh populations of any American county, a derived estimate of about 21,004 people, 2.08 per cent, in the same 2020 tables.

Punjabi language data fills out the picture. In the American Community Survey for 2017 to 2021, the Fresno, Madera and Hanford combined area, which includes Selma, counted 16,559 Punjabi Americans, 1.36 per cent of its population. At the smaller area level used by DataUSA, covering Selma, Kerman and Coalinga, Punjabi is the second most common non-English language spoken at home, in 2,609 households, behind only Spanish, and India is the third most common birthplace of foreign-born residents.

From wheat to peaches to the Raisin Capital of the World

Wheat was Selma's first economic engine, but irrigation changed everything. Farmers found that peaches, plums and grapes thrived in the sandy soil watered by snowmelt canals from the Sierra Nevada, and Selma called itself the Home of the Peach, and a Peach of a City, while the Libby's peach cannery packed fruit as a major seasonal employer into the 1960s. Groundwater irrigation itself began here, when William De La Grange of Selma, tired of losing canal water, drilled an open-bottom well and pumped the valley's underground reservoir for the first time.

Raisins then took over the acres around the city. With 90 per cent of United States raisins produced within eight miles of Selma, the city adopted the slogan Raisin Capital of the World in 1963, and area vineyards still produce table grapes alongside raisin grapes. Harris Ranch, the large beef producer, is based in Selma. Punjabi farming families share this economy with the city's Latino majority, working and owning land in the same raisin and orchard country.

The Sikh Center of the Pacific Coast and the Nagar Kirtan

The heart of Punjabi Selma is the Sikh Center of the Pacific Coast on Highland Avenue, run by the Pacific Coast Khalsa Diwan Society. The centre is the city's gathering place for worship, langar, the free communal meal, and the community's biggest day of the year, and the city also has a second gurdwara, Gurdwara Guru Ravidass Sabha, serving its Ravidassia families.

Once a year the centre fills the streets. For the Vaisakhi Nagar Kirtan, the procession marking the founding of the Khalsa by Guru Gobind Singh Ji in 1699, the Sikh Council of Central California has estimated 8,000 to 10,000 Sikhs attending from throughout California, walking a three-mile route behind the lead float for more than three hours, with free food and drink handed to neighbours along the way. By the time of one SikhNet report the parade was already in its 14th year in Selma, with about ten floats and a three-day programme of continuous prayer for the well-being of all.

Seva in Selma

The community's instinct to serve its neighbours became a story of its own in January 2014, when young Sikhs of the Jakara Movement, working from the Selma gurdwara, spent four days on a project they called Seva in Selma: baking 120 pizzas and delivering them, with flyers and smiles, to the houses around the gurdwara, then holding an open house so neighbours could ask questions and learn about the Sikh faith. The project was a deliberate act of thanks and bridge-building, showing, in the words of its student organiser, not just telling, that Punjabi Sikhs are part of the town.

Today Selma's Punjabis are raisin growers and farm workers, shopkeepers and students, a small share of a small city but one of its oldest immigrant communities, visible every spring when the Nagar Kirtan turns Highland Avenue saffron and white. North along Highway 99 the same valley story runs through Fresno and, further north still, through Livingston, the most proportionally Punjabi town in America. For the full map, see Punjabi places in the United States.