The Sikh religion is native to northwestern India. However, due to various historical factors they have been a migrant community. This has encouraged a spread of Sikhism in new geographical and cultural spaces. The general objective of this paper is to understand the social insertion mechanisms that have shaped Indian Sikhs settled in Madrid and Mexico City. Through fieldwork in Madrid, Mexico City and Punjab; semi-structured interviews and case studies, the motivations, migratory routes, as well as the divergences and convergences between both communities will be analyzed.
We will see how each group has generated various strategies for integrating into the receiving culture. The Sikhs in Madrid are characterized by being a group made up of Indian migrants and their families, which is why they organize their celebrations internally. While in Mexico, Mexican converts or followers of Sikh Dharma coexist with Indian Sikhs. Both have been interested in making their religion known through events in public spaces or at the Indian Embassy, as a tactic of visibility and integration into the receiving society.
With reference to the above, this research seeks to answer the following questions: How and why did the Indian Sikhs arrive in Mexico City and Madrid? What reasons have led them to settle in these cities? What are their migratory routes? What do they do? And what types of relationships do they establish with their places of origin?
The multisite ethnography proposed by George Marcus was used as a methodological resource, who emphasizes that multisite ethnography is extensive, analyzes and understands several related communities in the same context and establishes their relationship based on direct ethnographic research. The object of study is therefore mobile and its multiple situation. A life story that from the individual and multi-sited discourse, calls it “following the plot, life or biography”.
