“Mirkan na jaeen ve” sang Ravinder Dhillon, as a small chorus joined her on the refrain. It’s what Punjabi women once sang to husbands leaving for the West: “Don’t go to America.”
Dhillon sang the folk song to open a Nov. 6 screening of Safar at EastSide Arts Alliance in East Oakland. The short documentary, whose title means “journey,” explores the largely forgotten history of South Asians at Angel Island, the largest immigration port on the West Coast from 1910 to 1940.
In the film, Oakland choreographer Joti Singh retraces the immigration path of her great-grandfather, Bhagwan Singh Gyanee, in the early 1900s.
“I have talked to people who said he would definitely come through Angel Island, but I don’t have a record,” Singh says in the film.
The screening came during a season when South Asian culture is especially visible in the Bay Area, from Karwa Chauth and Golu to Diwali and Bandi Chhor Divas. It also came amid a documented rise in hostility toward South Asians. For many in the audience, a century-old story raised a present-day question: How much has changed?
For Dhillon, that history is personal. She grew up hearing songs like this from the women around her. Her own grandfather left Punjab for the West around 1907.
“There was not much community, and he always wanted to come back,” she said.
Many South Asians who made the journey were turned away. Edward Tepporn, executive director of the Angel Island Immigration Station Foundation, estimates about 8,000 South Asians came through the station, and about half were sent back. The foundation found that South Asians had the highest rejection rate of any group in the station’s 30 years.
Compared with European immigrants, Tepporn said, South Asians and other Asians “faced much longer periods of detention, more invasive medical examinations, as well as longer and more intensive interrogations, as the immigration officials sought to find reasons to keep our communities from entering the U.S.”
He calls it “a double injustice”: first the treatment, then the fact that the history is rarely taught.
He also sees a pattern. “Unfortunately, a lot of the histories connected to Angel Island are repeating themselves,” he said, pointing to the backlash after 9/11 and anti-Asian hate during the COVID-19 pandemic. “Those are not new instances.”
Recent data points the same way. A September report from the Center for the Study of Organized Hate found that monthly anti-South Asian posts on X rose 240% from January 2024 to June 2026.
A few months back, attendee Gunvir Singh Ranu said a stranger yelled at him in a restaurant. He has often felt like an outsider here, but the film changed that.
“It’s very interesting to see that far before my time here, there has been a community, and it’s up to me to sort of engage with it,” Ranu said.
That search for belonging is also what drove filmmaker Priyanka Suryaneni to make the documentary. She recently moved to the U.S. and struggled to find community, but this history showed her she wasn’t alone. She sees the same hurdles to immigrating today that existed 100 years ago. Early South Asian immigrants, she said, were turned away in part because officials saw them as people who could not assimilate.
“What is the idea of assimilation itself is something I grapple with often,” she said. “Being invisible or giving up your culture, is that assimilation? Or me being present here, me contributing to civic life, while retaining my language, while visibly retaining my identity, is that assimilation?”
For many in the audience, holding on to that identity was part of the night itself. Many of the early South Asian immigrants who passed through Angel Island were Sikhs from Punjab, and for them, this time of year is also a time to honor Bandi Chhor Divas — a story in which a guru agreed to leave prison only if he could free the other prisoners with him.
Gyanee carried that idea with him as he made his way from Angel Island and settled in the Bay Area. Today, his great-granddaughter Singh says that Bandi Chhor tells what immigration movements still fight for: “You’re not free until everybody is free, and your liberation is tied up in everyone’s liberation.”