Jayapal lives in Seattle with her husband Steve Williamson.
Indian American Representative Pramila Jayapal on Monday said her life as an Indian immigrant was instrumental in molding her political career and success. Jayapal was speaking at Georgetown University during a discussion in the Intercultural Center Auditorium.
A representative of WA 7th District, Jayapal, is the first Indian American woman to be elected to the US House of Representatives.
Jayapal, who immigrated to the US from Chennai, India, attended Georgetown University as an undergraduate student of English literature.
She started her political career through campaigns for the rights of immigrants, women, and workers. She led one of the largest voter registration efforts in Washington State, helping over 23,000 new Americans to register to vote.
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Jayapal lives in Seattle with her husband Steve Williamson, an officer, and director of UFCW 21. Their son Janak is pursuing his studies at Wesleyan University. Pramila’s step-son, Michael, lives in Colorado.
The Georgetown University College Democrats, the Office of D.C. and Federal Relations, the Baker Scholars, the South Asian Society, the Georgetown Women’s Alliance, the LGBTQ Resource Center and the Institute of Politics and Public Service co-sponsored the event.
“That English literature major and the liberal arts education that I got here at Georgetown is the basis for everything that I do today,” Jayapal said during the event. “It is the basis for how I think about issues, about rational perspectives that are part of my conversations. It’s about how I communicate, about how I write.”
After the terrorist attacks on September 11, 2001, Jayapal founded ‘Hate Free Zone’ as an advocacy group for Arab, Muslim, and South Asian Americans targeted in the wake of the attacks. The group went on to become a political force in the state of Washington, registering new American citizens to vote and lobbying lawmakers on immigration reform and related issues.
“Doing the jobs that you don’t want to do is actually just as important as doing the jobs that you do want to do because it teaches you something about yourself and what is important to you,” Jayapal said.
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“The diversity of our experiences and our backgrounds and our voices mean that we do things differently,” Jayapal said. “We chair hearings differently, we craft different legislation, we tell different stories, we elevate different voices, we have connections to different communities. We expand our democracy because we allow people to see themselves in us.”
Jayapal also said she is deeply indebted to her parents for all her achievements as they showed the courage to send her to the US.
“It is that sacrifice that my parents made in allowing me to come here to Georgetown that is really the reason I’ve spent the rest of my life, the last 25 years of my life, fighting for other people to have opportunity,” Jayapal said. “If I learned one thing at Georgetown, it was that we human beings are in service to a greater good.”