News and Reviews

Roots in the Sand

A one-hour PBS documentary about surviving the politics of race in America.


In the early years of this century, a desert valley  in Southern California called Imperial welcomed farmworkers from the Punjab region of India. 

In time, the men became tenant farmers.  Their homes needed home-makers, but in 1917, all Asians including women from India were barred from entering the U.S.

Interracial marriage was not legal either, but the men were allowed to marry women of the same color as themselves --Mexican women who worked in their fields.

Antonia Alvarez & Rullia Singh (1917)

First U. S. Congressman from Asia

Hand With Reflecting Sphere
Marian Kosa 
& Dalip Singh Saund 
(1956)

In 1956 Dalip Singh Saund, a native of Chhajalwadi village in Punjab, India was elected to the U.S. Congress from the California District of Imperial and Riverside.

He was the first Indian--and the first Asian to be elected to U.S. Congress.

Soon after he arrived in the U.S. in 1921, the people of India were declared ineligible for U.S. citizenship. When Saund married American-born Marian Kosa in 1928, she too had to give up her U.S. citizenship.

To get it back she waited thirty years--until the laws changed and her husband could become a citizen.

Saund's controversial rise to Justice of Peace and then Congressman:
CONGRESSMAN  FROM  INDIA  by  Dalip Singh Saund
(E.P. Dutton, 1960) 
"Triumph & Tragedy of Dalip Singh Saund"  
by  Tom Patterson  
(California Historian, June 1992)

More about pioneers from Punjab 
http://www.lib.ucdavis.edu/punjab

DISTRIBUTOR
Center for Asian American Media
http://www.asianamericanmedia.org/distrib

Home Video
1-800-343-5540

Educational Screening Funds 
California Council for the Humanities can partially fund educational screenings of this film
http://www.calhum.org/

Please contact one of the Program Officers

THE FILM CREW

Writer:
William Hart has published poems and short stories and had two screenplays produced.  Two poetry collections Monsoon (1991) and Paris (1996) are in print and a third will be out soon.  The first novel is also complete.
Director of Photography:
Peter Bonilla, ATAS, SOC, IATSE Local 600 is a cinematographer and videographer of both documentary and dramatic programs for domestic and European TV.  His work has won him Emmy, Cine Eagle, and Peabody awards.  He recently shot a documentary on HDTV about New Mexico vaqueros.
Academic Advisor:
Karen I. Leonard, professor of social anthropology at U.C. Irvine, is author of  Making Ethnic Choices: California's Punjabi-Mexican-Americans (1992)
Music:
Bronwen Jones was principal clarinet with Adelaide Symphony Orchestra before studying Film Composition at UCLA & Jazz Composition in New York.
Jaspal Singh, whose song opens the film, is a Sikh cantor with an international reputation.