Drive east out of Los Angeles, past the warehouses and the toll lanes of State Route 71, and the rolling hills around Chino Hills give up an improbable sight: five white pinnacles of hand-carved Italian marble rising above the chaparral. This is the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, and it is the clearest signal that the Indians in Chino Hills have built something permanent here, on the affluent western edge of San Bernardino County, in a city that barely existed a generation ago.
The Place
Chino Hills sits in the south-western corner of San Bernardino County, pressed against the Orange County and Los Angeles County lines. It was rural ranch land until the mid-1970s, then filled in fast with master-planned subdivisions through the 1980s, and it incorporated as a city only on 1 December 1991, with a starting population of around 42,000.
Today it holds about 78,000 people and a 2023 median household income of roughly $122,600, well above the California average. It is a city of cul-de-sacs, hillside views, and good schools, equidistant from the job centres of Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Inland Empire.
That combination, space, safety, and a short-ish commute in three directions, is exactly what drew a wave of Indian families who wanted a yard and a top-ranked school without paying coastal prices.
The hills give the city its character. Streets bend and climb rather than run in a grid, lots are generous, and from the higher subdivisions you can see clear across the basin on a rare clear day. It is suburbia of a particular Southern California vintage: planned, prosperous, and built late enough that almost everyone arrived as a newcomer.
How It Became Indian
There was no single founding moment. The Indian presence in Chino Hills grew the way the city itself grew, house by house, as the hills were paved over and young professional families went looking for value.
The suburban opening, 1980s to 1990s
When developers carved subdivisions like Rolling Ridge, Butterfield Ranch, and Fairfield Ranch out of the hills, they were selling a specific dream: a new house, a two-car garage, and a school district that had not yet aged. The first Indian arrivals were often engineers and physicians who had already done a stint somewhere closer to Los Angeles and wanted more room.
Chino Hills was cheaper than Irvine or the South Bay, newer than the older Indian enclaves of Artesia and Cerritos to the west, and still within reach of them. Families could attend temple, shop for groceries, and eat out in the Indian district of Artesia on Pioneer Boulevard, then drive home over the hill to a quiet street.
The Pioneer Boulevard satellite
That relationship with Artesia matters. Little India on Pioneer Boulevard had been the cultural anchor for South Asians across the Los Angeles basin since the 1980s, the place you went for saris, sweets, and a thali. Chino Hills became, in effect, a residential satellite of it: you lived in the hills and you sourced your culture from the boulevard twenty minutes away. Cerritos, with its own deep South Asian and Taiwanese roots, played a similar role, supplying jewellers, sari shops, and the kind of banquet halls a big Indian wedding requires.
The same orbit pulled in the heavily Asian suburbs nearby. Diamond Bar, Walnut, and Rowland Heights had drawn large Chinese communities for the same reasons, and Chino Hills sat among them as a quieter, greener cousin where the Asian share of the population would eventually climb past 40 per cent.
The mandir changes everything, 2012
For two decades the community was real but diffuse, scattered across subdivisions with no single landmark to call its own. That changed in 2012, when BAPS opened a traditional stone mandir on a 20-acre site off Fairfield Ranch Road.
Built from roughly 35,000 hand-carved pieces of Italian Carrara marble and Indian pink sandstone, assembled with about 1.3 million volunteer hours by some 900 workers, many of them second-generation Indian Americans, the mandir gave the region a centre of gravity. Suddenly there was a reason to drive to Chino Hills rather than away from it, and a Sunday-morning rhythm that pulled families from across the Inland Empire and the eastern Los Angeles suburbs.
The settled present
What followed was the quiet thickening that turns a scattering of families into a community. Grocers stocked toor dal and fresh curry leaves. Restaurants opened along the commercial strips on Chino Hills Parkway and Grand Avenue. Diwali stopped being a private thing done behind closed garage doors and became a public festival drawing tens of thousands.
Cricket followed the same arc. What began as informal weekend matches in city parks now connects to the professional game: the mandir’s Diwali festival has hosted players from the Los Angeles Knight Riders, the region’s Major League Cricket franchise, turning a backyard pastime into something the whole city can come and watch.
The Landmarks
BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir, 15100 Fairfield Ranch Road. The single most important Hindu landmark in Southern California, dedicated in 2012 and built entirely of hand-carved marble and sandstone shaped in India and assembled on site. It features five pinnacles, two domes, 122 pillars, and 129 archways, set beside a 91-foot lotus-shaped reflection pond, and is engineered to be earthquake-resistant on base isolators. It is open daily to visitors of all faiths.
The BAPS LA Diwali Festival of Lights, Fairfield Ranch Road. Each autumn the mandir grounds host a multi-day Diwali celebration that has become one of the largest in the western United States. There are diya lightings, rangoli, a symphony of light and sound, and in recent years a cricket experience hosted with players from the Los Angeles Knight Riders, the city’s Major League Cricket franchise.
Kailash Parbat, 4517 Chino Hills Parkway. A branch of the celebrated Mumbai vegetarian house, serving the chaat and street-food classics, pani puri, ragda, pav bhaji, that anchor a North Indian palate. Its arrival signalled that Chino Hills had enough of an Indian customer base to support a national name, not just a corner takeaway.
Tamarind Restaurant & Catering, 4047 Grand Avenue, Chino. Just over the line in neighbouring Chino, Tamarind has long been the go-to for Indian and Pakistani cooking and large-format catering for weddings and pujas. For Chino Hills families it is the kitchen that feeds the celebrations the mandir consecrates.
The Shoppes at Chino Hills, 13920 City Center Drive. The open-air centre at Grand Avenue and Peyton Drive is the city’s living room, where Indian teenagers from Chino Hills High meet, where families eat after temple, and where the broader Asian-majority population of the city mixes on a Saturday evening.
Chino Hills High School and Ruben S. Ayala High School, Chino Valley Unified. The two comprehensive high schools serving the city’s children, both ranking in the upper tiers of California’s roughly nine thousand public schools. The district is the city’s single largest employer, and good test scores are a recurring reason Indian families cite for moving here.
Vellano Country Club, Vellano Club Drive. The gated golf community, with a course designed by Greg Norman, that embodies the upper end of Chino Hills affluence. Its rosters of homeowners now read as a quiet measure of how far first-generation professionals have climbed.
Where They Came From
The Indians of Chino Hills are not from one place. Because the community formed by internal migration within Southern California rather than by direct chain migration from a single region, it mixes Gujaratis, Punjabis, and South Indians from Tamil Nadu, Andhra, and Karnataka in roughly the proportions you find across the American tech and medical professions.
The mandir’s BAPS tradition carries a strong Gujarati lineage, and many of the volunteers who built it trace their families to Gujarat. But the engineers commuting to aerospace and defence work, and the physicians staffing Inland Empire hospitals, came from across the subcontinent.
What they shared was a path, not a hometown: graduate school or an H-1B visa, a first job near Los Angeles or Orange County, and then the decision that a new house in the hills beat an old apartment near the coast.
Chino Hills Today
Chino Hills today is one of the most Asian-majority suburbs in inland California, and Indians are a visible and growing thread within that. They are not the largest Asian group in the city, the Chinese and Filipino communities are bigger by headcount, but the mandir has given the Indian presence an outsized cultural footprint, drawing visitors from far beyond the city limits.
The community here looks less like the dense commercial strips of Indian Edison, New Jersey or the tech-money intensity of Indian Cupertino, and more like a comfortable residential diaspora that does its shopping and feasting partly at home and partly in the older enclaves of Artesia and Cerritos nearby.
That is the honest shape of it: a prosperous, second-generation suburb where the children grow up bilingual in the grammar of cricket and American high-school sport, where Diwali fills a temple parking lot and the rest of the year passes quietly in the hills. It is a place people moved to on purpose, and increasingly a place they stay.
Frequently Asked Questions
How many Indians live in Chino Hills?
Recent estimates put the Asian Indian population of Chino Hills at roughly 2,400 residents within a city of about 78,000. Indians are one of several large Asian groups in a city where Asian residents make up more than 40 per cent of the population.
Why did Indians settle in Chino Hills, California?
The Indians in Chino Hills were drawn by a combination of newer, more affordable housing than coastal Orange County, highly rated schools in the Chino Valley Unified School District, and a location within commuting distance of jobs in Los Angeles, Orange County, and the Inland Empire. Many had first lived nearer to Los Angeles before moving to the hills.
What is the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir?
It is a traditional Hindu temple on Fairfield Ranch Road, dedicated in 2012 and built from about 35,000 hand-carved pieces of Italian marble and Indian sandstone. It is one of the most significant Hindu landmarks in the western United States and the cultural anchor for the Indians in Chino Hills and the wider region.
Where do Indians in Chino Hills shop and eat?
Indian families shop at local grocers carrying South Asian staples and eat at restaurants such as Kailash Parbat on Chino Hills Parkway and Tamarind in neighbouring Chino. Many also drive a short distance west to the long-established Indian district on Pioneer Boulevard in Artesia.
How is Diwali celebrated in Chino Hills?
The BAPS mandir hosts a large multi-day Diwali Festival of Lights each autumn, with diya lighting, rangoli, light-and-sound shows, and a cricket experience. It draws tens of thousands of visitors from across Southern California and welcomes people of all faiths.
Is Chino Hills a good place for Indian families?
Chino Hills is consistently popular with Indian families for its safety, its hillside housing, and its strong public high schools. The presence of a major mandir, Indian restaurants, and grocers, combined with proximity to the established enclaves of Artesia and Cerritos, makes it an attractive base for the community.
If your family’s story passed through Chino Hills, or any of the places Indians have made home in America, Atlas of Home can trace that journey. From a village in Gujarat or Tamil Nadu, to a marble mandir rising above the San Bernardino County hills, to wherever you are now.