Rosario de la Frontera
Salta Province, Argentina
A town in northern Argentina holding the only gurdwara in South America, serving a community of a few hundred descended from railway workers and later arrivals turned away from North America.
The Sikh presence in Argentina began with British-built railways, which drew Punjabi labour to South America as they had to East Africa. A second and larger wave came in the 1970s, made up substantially of people refused entry to Canada and the United States who looked south instead.1
They settled in the north — in Salta province, in country the community is repeatedly reported as saying reminded them of Punjab. Rosario de la Frontera holds the gurdwara, which is the only one on the South American continent. The community numbers a few hundred, many of them running supermarkets and shops.1,2
It is the smallest and most isolated congregation in this atlas, and the most useful for showing what the ordinary diaspora looks like at the edges: not a large institution with a heritage designation, but a few hundred people maintaining a room with a Guru Granth Sahib in it, eight thousand miles from Amritsar, because otherwise there would be nowhere.2,3
Figures for Argentina are estimates. No South American census asks about Sikh affiliation.1
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