Font Resize
ANEESA KHAN, a 16-year-old high school senior, had butterflies in her stomach as the airplane raced toward Karachi, Pakistan. The trip had been planned since she was 5. As her hometown, Lodi, and the Central Valley landscape faded below, she says, her mind flashed between ideas about how her prospective husband would be — handsome, a good listener, intelligent? "I wanted an educated guy," Khan says. "But instead I got an uneducated one."
Six years later, Aneesa, 22, is raising three small children.
Her husband has learned some English and drives a flatbed truck. They share a two-bedroom, ranch-style home with Aneesa's aunt and uncle, in a predominately Pakistani neighborhood in central Lodi, alongside rows of aging fruit canneries. A one-room mosque that used to be a Jehovah's Witness meeting hall is on the corner.
» MULTIMEDIA SLIDESLOW: Between two cultures: Muslim women in Lodi are cut off from the outside world.
Aneesa is among many girls who went to Lodi schools who have been sent back to their northwestern Pakistani village for an arranged marriage with a cousin to keep family bonds strong.
If navigating two disparate cultures wasn't difficult enough, a terrorism investigation
"They are all scared. People aren't leaving their houses now," says Razia Farooq, a Lodi fabric storeowner. Her unmarked familyowned storefront, beneath their home on a quiet leafy street, often serves as an informal meeting place for immigrant women who come to Lodi through arranged marriages.
"Sometimes they just come to sit with me," Farooq says.
Since the investigation began, teachers say, some women have stopped attending English-as-a-second-language classes at the neighborhood adult school.
Many families no longer are allowing local Pashto-speaking social workers to do home visits, says Nagina Akbar, health care outreach worker with Community Partnership for Families.
Attendance at the local mosque has dropped to less than half what it once was, according to mosque members. And some men reportedly have quit their jobs after being harassed at work.
"People are going into a shell right now," says Taj Khan, a community leader and local columnist.
A four-year FBI investigation in the Pakistani community resulted in the voluntary deportation of two imams and the arrests of Umer Hayat and his son, Hamid, 25, for lying about participating in terrorist training camps in Pakistan.
"What happened in the community is breaking us apart," says 31-year-old Safdar Afzal, a nephew of Umer Hayat, as he stands outside the mosque kitchen.
"See that plane?" says Afzal, pointing skyward, "That's the FBI."
Community members are still paranoid they are being followed. Last year during the arrests, community members were openly tailgated by unmarked FBI cars, and were questioned outside supermarkets and private homes. Two small planes, believed to be part of the FBI surveillance, flew above Lodi for weeks.
"They (the community) feel Americans aren't to be trusted anymore," says Asif Shahzad, Aneesa's uncle, sitting on the floor eating goat curry and flatbread with his hands during a Sunday meal.
Family members and friends of Umer and Hamid Hayat firmly believe the two are innocent.
Because of the way an FBI informant had befriended the community and secretly recorded hours of conversations, Taj Khan says, people don't know whom to trust.
They are afraid that if they talk to the wrong person, whatever they say could be twisted and used against them. Umer Hayat's prison sentence was largely based on a confession he gave during an 11-hour FBI interrogation.
What this means for women such as Aneesa is a greater sense of isolation.
Community leaders had planned to build an educational center for women and children. But when the terrorism investigation began, plans to build The Farooqia Islamic Center were abandoned due to suspicion it would support extremist training and because of division among leadership.
"We have been derailed in bringing women into the mainstream," says Taj Khan.
Alongside other progressive mosque members, he has been fighting to keep the Farooqia Islamic Center alive.
Back in Pakistan, Aneesa Khan couldn't sit still at her wedding. Right before she left, a family dispute broke out and her father tried to marry her off to a different cousin. She protested.
"I'm not a piece of furniture you can take out of one room and put into another," says Aneesa, with long black hair and blackrimmed glasses.
She was able to persuade her father to allow her to wed the original cousin.
To fit her American upbringing, her family even bent the rules and allowed her to go on a walk with her fiance before the wedding.
Upon returning to Lodi they clashed.
"I told him he has to learn English to get a job," she says. "But he said he wouldn't need it."
Her husband did eventually learn English at work.
"He has come a long way," says Aneesa, sitting on the floor next to her aunt.
Crayon drawings color the dingy white walls, and a prayer schedule is taped askew underneath the clock. Outside, Spanishspeaking neighbors work on cars in the driveway.
In a community where illiteracy rates are high among even U.S.-born Pakistani girls, Aneesa values her education more than anything.
"Nobody can take that away from you," she says.
Most girls in this community are pulled from school before they reach puberty.
When Aneesa isn't cooking lasagna - which she discovered as a practical way to utilize all the cans of tomato paste her uncle brings home from his job at the Campbell's Soup factory - she is translating doctor appointments and supermarket labels for the women in her family who don't speak English. The Khans speak Hinko, one of up to four languages spoken in northwest Pakistan.
The father and son accused of participating in terrorist activities, Umer and Hamid Hayat, are also from northwest Pakistan. Hamid Hayat has a sixth-grade education, which is not uncommon.
Aneesa Khan was allowed to attend public high school, while most girls in her Pakistani neighborhood are home-schooled. After being left with her more liberal Aunt Bibi and Uncle Walidad when her father returned to Pakistan to marry a 14-year-old girl, she was allowed to go to school, but only in traditional clothing.
Parents home-school their daughters to keep boys and girls separate and to protect their traditions and spiritual life. But girls fall through the cracks when their parents lack the education to teach them.
As an alternative, parents send their girls to an independent study program. But more could be done to reach out to families, says Roberta Wall, a Lodi School administrator.
"It's a dilemma for us," Wall says.
In order to qualify for independent study, students must at least attend their first year of high school. But many Pakistani parents don't even want their girls to spend one year in an environment where they may feel pressure to date, party or do drugs.
On the same block, Aneesa's cousin, Gulshan Din, 28, never learned to read or write. She came to Lodi with her parents when she was 9 and was pulled out of school as a teenager.
Resentful that her cousin was allowed to go to school and she wasn't, Gulshan says, "If it were up to me, I would've done everything I could."
Like Aneesa, Gulshan had an arranged marriage at 16 that was off to a rocky start.
"When he came from his own country he was really different," Gulshan explains.
He only let her out at night.
After arguing with her husband when he wouldn't let her sit in the front seat of the car, Gulshan pleaded with her husband's uncle to intervene.
"He told my husband This is the United States, you have to change yourself, this is not Pakistan,' " she says.
Others weren't so successful. Aneesa has one cousin in a domestic violence shelter and another who ran away from home.
"Their husbands weren't letting them out of the house," Aneesa says.
Another woman, who doesn't want to be identified out of fear of being perceived as immodest, also grew up in Lodi and returned to Pakistan for an arranged marriage. Her husband paces the house in a long white traditional gown, staring intensely at her as she speaks in English - a language he doesn't understand.
"They feel out of control, so they control their wives," she says.
At a livestock auction near Lodi, one of the few places where Muslim men and local landowners share a common activity, the air is tense.
Mohammed Shoaib and his brother who goes by "Jim" bid on goats every Saturday. They say they get suspicious looks, people ask them why they came to the United States and gossip about whether they are related to "terrorists."
"We are here because the American Congress made it possible for people like us to come here," says Jim, waving flies away from his face as the auctioneer rattles on.
The Shoaibs came to the United States with their parents, who worked in on a Lodi farm and eventually received citizenship.
"We are hard-working people," Mohammed says.
The first Pakistani immigrants came to the San Joaquin Valley in the 1920s to work in the cherry orchards and fruit canneries, according to mosque members. The lifestyle and the climate were similar to what they had known as subsistence wheat and corn farmers near the Indus River.
Unskilled Pakistani workers still work in the aging fruit canneries, industrial bakeries and grain mills, sending money back to Pakistan. Families from Shinka in Pakistan say their dirt-paved village now has indoor plumbing and satellite television.
Even the second generation of Pakistani immigrants continues to hold tightly to its culture and traditions, weaving its way to Pakistan and back for weddings, Ramadan and retirement. It's clear their faith rests in Pakistan, but Lodi is home.
As the dust settles around the terrorism investigation, Aneesa and her female cousins brace themselves while the cultural cocoon tightens.
Mohammed Shoaib wonders: "Once you are stamped a terrorist, how do you remove that?"
