On a Saturday afternoon, Pioneer Boulevard smells like cardamom and frying chickpea flour. Garlands of marigolds hang in shop windows beside mannequins draped in scarlet bridal saris. Trays of orange jalebi cool on glass counters, and the window of a jeweler glows with the deep yellow of 22-karat gold. Families park three deep, weave between storefronts, and carry out bags of fenugreek and basmati. This five-block stretch in a small Los Angeles County city is the busiest South Asian shopping street in Southern California, and for half a century it has been the place the region’s Indian families come to buy a wedding, a feast, or just a box of sweets.
Artesia: The Place
Artesia is a tiny city, less than two square miles, tucked into the southeast corner of Los Angeles County where it brushes against Orange County. Pioneer Boulevard runs north to south through its middle, and the Indian commercial core sits along the stretch between 183rd and 188th streets. The 91 and 605 freeways frame the city, putting it within a half-hour drive of much of the Los Angeles basin. The surrounding blocks are modest single-story homes and postwar apartments, with the larger family neighborhoods spilling east into next-door Cerritos.
How Artesia Became Little India
Before the Indians
Long before the sari shops, Artesia smelled of milk and hay. The city took its name from the artesian wells that early settlers tapped beneath the flat coastal plain, and the village that grew up here in 1875 sat on land that had been Tongva territory and then part of a Spanish-era rancho. By the 1920s and 1930s the area was the heart of a district known as Dairy Valley, one of the most productive milk regions in Southern California.
Two immigrant groups built that dairy economy. Dutch families ran many of the herds, and Portuguese-speaking workers from the Azores, drawn west by poverty and scarce land back home, came to milk the cows in the parlors around Artesia and Bellflower. The Azoreans were Catholic, and they organized their lives around the church and around a yearly festival honoring the Holy Spirit. When the city finally incorporated in 1959, that dairy and dairy-worker heritage was its foundation, and decades later Census figures still showed Portuguese as the most common European ancestry in town.
The Indians Arrive
The change began with a law passed three thousand miles away. The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 abolished the national-origin quotas that had nearly shut the door on Asia for forty years, and a wave of Indian newcomers, many of them engineers, doctors, and merchants, began arriving in the Los Angeles and Orange County suburbs.
The retail story has a clear starting point. The region’s first Indian grocery had opened in Hollywood, but in 1970 it moved to Artesia at the urging of Indian families living in Orange County, who wanted their flour, lentils, and spices closer to home. Artesia in those years was cheap, central, and quiet, and through the 1970s more Indian shopkeepers followed. Many were Gujaratis, members of trading communities from western India with a long history of commerce, some of them arriving by way of East Africa, where Gujarati merchants had run shops for generations before postcolonial upheavals scattered them again.
One storefront begat the next. A grocery drew a sweets shop, the sweets shop drew a sari emporium, the saris drew a jeweler, and the cluster began to feed on itself, exactly the chain-migration pattern that built every Little India in America. Pioneer Cash & Carry opened as a family grocery in 1982. Rajinder Kumar Jawa, who had started India Sweets & Spices in a two-aisle storefront on Venice Boulevard in 1984, soon brought the brand east to Artesia. By 1985 and 1986, Ambala Sweets & Snacks, Surati Farsan Mart, and Loveleen Sari Palace had all opened their doors on or just off Pioneer.
Artesia at Its Peak
The growth in those years was steep. In 1986 there were roughly two dozen Indian-owned businesses on Pioneer Boulevard. By 1992 the strip had become the largest Indian commercial concentration west of Chicago, with more than fifty businesses crowded along it, including seven groceries, a row of restaurants, clothing shops, and a dozen jewelers selling 22-carat gold. By 1995 the count had climbed to about ninety stores, roughly four out of every five shops in the core. By 2003 some 120 businesses catered to Indian customers.
The numbers told only part of it. Though Indian Americans were never more than a small share of Artesia’s own population, by the mid-2000s their shops were generating around a quarter of the city’s sales-tax receipts. On weekends, families drove in from across the basin, and the autumn Diwali festival on Pioneer Boulevard grew into a street party drawing well over ten thousand people, with a stage set up in the middle of the intersection and members of Congress turning up to wish the crowd a happy new year.
The Change
The friction came over a name. In 2003, State Assemblyman Rudy Bermudez proposed putting “Little India” signs on the 91 Freeway exits to steer visitors to the district. The merchants liked the idea. The Artesia City Council did not. Four of its five members were angry that the designation had been floated without consulting them, and the council passed a resolution against the signs and even hired a lobbyist to fight the bill.
The objection was about identity. Residents gathered more than a thousand signatures, arguing that an official “Little India” label would suggest the small city belonged to one group when Indian Americans made up under five percent of its people. Some of the loudest voices belonged to the old dairy families. Paulo Menezes, who led a local Portuguese cultural center, warned that the sign would leave outsiders with a false impression of the town, and Filipino shop owners raised similar worries. The compromise was a mouthful that tried to please everyone: the area was designated the International and Cultural Shopping District, and the state passed a measure requiring local approval before any such freeway sign could go up.
The Landmarks of Little India
Pioneer Cash & Carry (18601 Pioneer Boulevard) is the grocery anchor of the strip. Family-owned since 1982, it grew from a neighborhood store into one of the largest Indian groceries in California, the kind of place where a family fills a cart with twenty-pound sacks of rice and walls of spice tins before a wedding. Its survival across four decades, while bigger chains came and went, made it a fixed point on the boulevard.
Surati Farsan Mart (11814 East 186th Street) has been frying Gujarati snacks since 1986. Its name points home: Surat is a coastal city in Gujarat, and the shop’s specialty is farsan, the savory nibbles of that region, alongside dozens of varieties of milk-based sweets stacked in glass cases. Generations of customers have measured out their festivals here, by the kilo of mithai.
India Sweets & Spices arrived on Pioneer Boulevard as an offshoot of the small Venice Boulevard shop Rajinder Kumar Jawa and his father opened in 1984. What began as two aisles and a food counter grew into a Southern California chain, and the Artesia branch put a familiar name on the street where the region’s Indian families already did their shopping.
Loveleen Sari Palace (18507 Pioneer Boulevard) has dressed brides since 1986. Inside, bolts of silk and racks of heavily embroidered lehengas run in rich reds and golds, and the staff are known for the patient work of assembling a matching wedding outfit piece by piece. For a daughter’s marriage, families come here first.
Bhindi Jewelers (18508 Pioneer Boulevard) is one of the gold houses that give the street its glow. Like its neighbors, it deals in the high-purity 22-karat gold that South Asian weddings demand, the bangles and necklaces that double as celebration and savings. The dozen or so jewelers clustered here turned a few blocks of a dairy town into a destination for bridal gold.
Ambala Sweets & Snacks (18433 Pioneer Boulevard) opened around 1985 and remains a fixture for halwai-style sweets and quick vegetarian plates. On festival weekends the line spills onto the sidewalk, customers waiting for boxes of barfi and ladoo to carry to family gatherings across the county.
Rajdhani and Curry Lounge represent the two poles of the strip’s kitchens. Rajdhani serves Gujarati food the traditional way, an all-you-can-eat thali brought out in small steel bowls, while Curry Lounge cooks the heartier Punjabi dishes of northern India. Between them they map the range of who settled here, from the Gujarati merchants who came first to the Punjabi families who followed.
Where the Artesia Indians Came From
The boulevard’s first builders were largely Gujaratis, from the western Indian state whose communities have specialized in trade for centuries. Some came straight from cities like Surat and the towns of Gujarat, and some arrived after a generation or two in East Africa, where Gujarati shopkeepers had been a commercial backbone until the political upheavals of the 1960s and 1970s pushed many of them out toward Britain, Canada, and the United States. Their instinct for retail is written into the street they made.
Over time the mix broadened. Punjabis from northern India opened restaurants and shops, South Indian businesses added their own flavors, and Pakistani and Bangladeshi neighbors set up nearby, so that the wider district came to serve South Asians of many backgrounds. The cooking tells the story plainly, with Gujarati thalis and Punjabi curries sold a few doors apart.
Artesia Today
Pioneer Boulevard is still the sari-and-gold street of the Southland. On weekends the parking is tight and the sidewalks are full, and when a wedding season or a festival comes around the whole strip lights up. The Indian population that anchors it now spreads well beyond Artesia’s borders, with thousands of families settled in adjacent Cerritos, drawn in part by its well-regarded public schools, treating the boulevard as their commercial and cultural downtown.
The street has its pressures. Indian groceries and clothing shops have opened in other corners of the Los Angeles area, and online ordering now competes for the rice-and-spice trade that the boulevard once held alone. Some longtime owners have closed, and storefronts turn over more often than they used to.
Yet a second generation is taking the counters now, refreshing the storefronts and the menus while keeping the wedding trade that built the place. Artesia’s old dairy families and its Indian merchants never fully agreed on what to call these five blocks. The crowds that keep coming, decade after decade, settled the question their own way. This is Little India, and it is still where the region comes to celebrate.
Frequently Asked Questions
Why did Indians settle in Artesia, California?
The first Indian grocery moved from Hollywood to Artesia in 1970 to serve families in nearby Orange County, and the town was inexpensive and centrally located between Los Angeles and Orange Counties. Other merchants followed through the 1970s and 1980s, and the cluster of shops drew Indian families to settle in and around the city. The Indians in Artesia built the boulevard one storefront at a time.
Is Artesia still an Indian neighborhood today?
Pioneer Boulevard between 183rd and 188th streets remains the largest South Asian shopping district in Southern California, busy with sari shops, gold jewelers, groceries, and sweets houses. Competition from online sellers and Indian shops elsewhere has thinned some storefronts, but weekend crowds and a second generation of owners keep it vital. Most of the Indian community now lives in surrounding cities like Cerritos and treats the boulevard as its downtown.
What are the most famous landmarks of Little India in Artesia?
Pioneer Cash & Carry, the grocery anchor open since 1982, and Surati Farsan Mart, frying Gujarati snacks since 1986, are among the best known. Loveleen Sari Palace has dressed brides since 1986, and a row of jewelers such as Bhindi Jewelers deals in the 22-karat gold that South Asian weddings require. India Sweets & Spices and Ambala Sweets & Snacks round out the strip’s longtime fixtures.
Where did the Indians in Artesia come from?
The boulevard’s first merchants were largely Gujaratis from western India, a region with deep trading traditions, including the city of Surat that gives Surati Farsan Mart its name. Some came directly from India and some by way of East Africa, where Gujarati shopkeepers had long lived before mid-century political upheavals dispersed them. Punjabis, South Indians, and other South Asian families joined later.
When did Indians first arrive in Artesia?
The 1965 Immigration and Nationality Act opened the door to large-scale Indian immigration, and the area’s first Indian grocery relocated to Artesia in 1970. The commercial district took shape through the 1970s and grew quickly in the early 1980s. By 1992 the Indians in Artesia had built the largest Indian commercial concentration west of Chicago.
If your family’s story passed through the dairy lots or the sari shops of Pioneer Boulevard, the small details are worth saving while the people who remember them are still here to tell you. You can read more about the country’s other Indian enclaves in our pieces on the Indians of Jackson Heights, Queens, the Indians of Devon Avenue in Chicago, and the Indians of Edison, New Jersey.