The Woman Who Made Kamala Harris — and Modern America

“I still remember my mother,” she said last week in her speech in Pittsburgh, “sitting at that yellow Formica table, late at night, a cup of tea in hand, with a pile of bills …”

“My mother,” she said a few hours later in an interview on MSNBC, “she worked hard, she saved up …”

“I grew up a middle-class kid,” she reiterated in a recent sit-down with a local television reporter from Philadelphia. “My mother …”

Kamala Harris talks a lot about Shyamala Gopalan, and she always has. Her mother, who died in 2009, is by far, she has said, her most significant, most lasting influence — “the toughest, smartest and most loving person I have ever known,” her “greatest source of inspiration,” “the most important person.” Harris is, Carole Porter, a friend of hers since early elementary school, told me, “her mother’s daughter, completely.” One simply cannot understand the woman who might be president without understanding the woman who raised her. “Mommy,” she wrote in her memoir, “you were the reason for everything.”

If anything, though, Harris has undersold her mother’s influence.

Over the years, and perhaps especially now in her sprint of a campaign against Donald Trump, Harris has placed her mother and her mother’s story mostly in an economic frame. But the story more than anything else is an immigrant story, and an extraordinary one. Harris nodded to this, of course, in her acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention this summer, alluding to the “unlikely journey” of “a brown woman with an accent” who “crossed the world alone.” But even such evocative phrasing scarcely scratches the surface of this foundational tale: an Indian woman, barely 5 feet tall and not yet 20 years old, landing in this country in 1958, seven years before the Immigration and Nationality Act eased restrictive and discriminatory and quotas, managing to maintain ties to her Indian and Tamilian heritage while at the same time bucking a series of its central conventions — rejecting an arranged marriage and instead marrying for love, marrying a Black man, divorcing that Black man, rearing primarily as a single mother her precocious daughters quite consciously as Black, all along pursuing her own cancer-researching career.

“Astonishing,” Shekar Narasimhan, the chair and founder of the AAPI Victory Fund, told me. “Remarkable,” Rep. Ro Khanna, the Indian American Democrat from the Bay Area, told me. So remarkable, in fact, that she did more than merely mold her daughters. She arrived in the United States at the very vanguard of a profound shift — a shift, ongoing and unabated, that stokes many of the most contentious debates within this bitter political time. She is, yes, an avatar of a widely relatable struggle to make ends meet, but she also was much more than some minimal symbol. By making the choices she made, by raising her daughters the ways she did, she changed the country. It might sound like a stretch. She was, admittedly, just one woman. If, though, Kamala Harris is a sort of quintessential 21st-century American — multiracial, multiethnic, the next-generation progeny of a pioneer of an immigrant — it’s also not totally wrong. Shyamala Gopalan helped shape the mindset and makeup of modern America.

“Why isn’t that front and center for the narrative of what Kamala’s talking about?” said Mike Madrid, a Sacramento-based Republican strategist, a co-founder of the anti-Trump Lincoln Project and the author of The Latino Century: How America’s Largest Minority Is Transforming Democracy.

Harris is faring in polling on the issue of immigration better than Joe Biden was, but it remains a liability. Trump literally started running for president by saying Mexico was “not sending their best” but “drugs” and “rapists” and “crime.” Anti-immigrant rhetoric is the lifeblood of his political project, and he’s done nothing but get consistently more and more blunt. In his current campaign he has referred to immigrants who are in this country illegally as “animals” who are “poisoning the blood of our country.” The GOP for years has attempted to tar Harris as the failed “border czar,” but Trump last week in a speech in Wisconsin called her “mentally disabled,” accusing her of “erasing our border” and letting in “monsters” and “killers” who will “walk into your kitchen” and “cut your throat.”

Madrid answered his own question with another question, referencing the ongoing ugliness in Springfield, Ohio. “At a time when the Republicans are talking about Haitian immigrants eating pets,” he said, “how much do you want to lean into an Indian or Black immigrant experience?”

Consultants across party and ideological lines suggest what Harris says about her mother’s story, and what she doesn’t, is a function of a prudent political calculation. “Her family’s story is unusual,” Amanda Renteria, an Oakland-based Democratic strategist, told me. Immigration and the economy, though, are “intertwined,” she said, and she’s “been very careful to talk about these experiences in a way that connects to anyone that’s trying to make it in America,” Renteria added. “You’re going for swing voters in five states, and if they look at her closely from an immigration standpoint, I don’t think it will play favorably with those voters,” Sean Walsh, an Oakland-based Republican strategist, told me. “She doesn’t want an immigration debate,” he said, “because it’s a loser for her.” Said Democratic strategist Chuck Rocha: “It’s just smart politics.”

It’s not unlike the way Harris, the most diverse person at the top of a presidential ticket in the history of this nation, has made her case these last couple months in assiduously non-identity-based terms. She’s positioned herself much more as a tough-talking, gun-having former prosecutor than some personification of a new-era paean to “give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses, yearning to breathe free …”

But short of the color of her skin and the country from which she came, I said the other day on the phone with Madrid, Shyamala Gopalan is precisely what those even way to the right on the spectrum of the most stringent immigration debate point to as the model. She was one of a small number of people coming in — low and slow. She was high-achieving. She started a family. She endeavored to assimilate. She contributed to this country — didn’t just “take” from it. “She,” I said to Madrid, “is what they say they want.”

“That’s easy to say when you’re 90-percent white. When you’re not, do we still say that? Well, no — half of us are saying, ‘Fuck no.’ It’s the primary political glue that’s holding one of our political parties together,” he said.

“My mother … came and changed America?” said Madrid. “That ain’t gonna play in Erie County.”

And so Harris talks about her mother in the manner that she does, sanding down compelling differences, highlighting the ways she was typical while screening the ways she was not.

“Like many of the people listening,” she told Stephanie Himonidis, the podcast host who goes by “Chiquibaby,” “I was raised by a working mother …”

“Only when I was a teenager,” she said in a video feature with Wired, “was she able to buy our first home …”

“It’s an audience-tailoring thing, and there’s nothing wrong with that,” said Neil Makhija, a Montgomery County commissioner in Pennsylvania, the president of Indian American Impact and a longtime Harris ally who established an award named for her mother. “It’s just part of connecting with people.” A person inside the Harris campaign who agreed to talk about this only if identified in that limited way told me the words the would-be president has used to talk about her mother stand on their own and speak for themselves but that generally she aims to portray her and her story as “uniquely American” — itself an interesting melding because it labors to express distinctiveness and sameness at the same time. It’s understandable — and still sort of a shame. Because the story of Shyamala Gopalan is a testament to something that’s made this country, and made it great, for going on 250 years.

“You travel to the new land to break with the past, to escape conditions and expectations, and to create something entirely new. That’s the story of all immigrants, and she leaves a lot behind, a culture that had expectations of her — who she would marry, where she would be — and she broke all of those rules and paved the path for her daughter to do the same,” Gil Duran, who was for five months the communications director for Harris when she was California’s attorney general, told me.

I was a little surprised to hear this from him. Duran has been a public critic of Harris, citing what he considered a penchant for indecision and a demanding management style that could sap staff morale. “But I think the goodness that I see in Kamala Harris comes from her background, comes from what she represents,” he told me.

“I’m not just voting for Kamala. I’m voting for Shyamala, too.”

She landed in a Pan American plane on Sept. 15, 1958, in Honolulu. “ADMITTED,” an Immigration and Naturalization Service agent stamped. Three days later, she registered for classes at the University of California at Berkeley — a graduate student in the Department of Nutrition with a $1,600 scholarship and “sufficient scholastic preparation and knowledge of the English language,” according to her immigration papers, “to enable me to undertake my intended course.” She was 19. “There was not a soul I knew,” she would say.

Her father was an Indian diplomat in the wake of their country’s 1947 independence from British rule. Her mother, betrothed to her father at 12, nonetheless was fiercely feminist, taking to the streets in later years to educate women about birth control. Shyamala was the oldest of four. She was fluent in three languages — Tamil, Hindi and English. She graduated at the top of her college class in New Delhi. And when she arrived in Berkeley she was an utter oddity — “very, very unusual,” said Sangay Mishra, a professor of political science at Drew University in New Jersey and the author of Desis Divided: The Political Lives of South Asian Americans.

Before the passage of the landmark immigration law of 1965, after all, the population of the country was pushing 90 percent white. The non-white portion of the population was almost entirely Black. In the entirety of the 1950s, according to the INS, 1,973 people from India were allowed in — not even 200 a year. At Berkeley, less than 2 percent of the students were not white, and Gopalan was all the more rare because she was not a man. Only 40 percent of the student body was female, and just a quarter of the graduate students. And female professors? Fewer than 5 percent of the faculty. In spite of this, though, and perhaps partly because of it, Gopalan entered a burgeoning counterculture hot spot — an epicenter of student-led protests, from antiwar and feminist sentiments to the Free Speech and Civil Rights movements. She was an eager participant. “She was small,” Lenore Pomerance, a psychotherapist and social worker who was one of her best friends starting in those days, told me, “but she had a huge personality.” She marched in marches, she sat in sit-ins, and she was part of a social circle that discussed ways to achieve Black liberation — the only non-Black member of a group that helped fuel the field of Black studies. “She stood out,” another friend once said — and yet “fit right in.” It’s how she met Donald Harris.

She married him in the summer of 1963 — 15 years after California’s Supreme Court held that the state’s anti-miscegenation law was unconstitutional and four years before the U.S. Supreme Court in Loving v. Virginia made interracial marriage across the land legal. She had finished her master’s degree in 1961, and her Ph.D. in 1964, and she gave birth to her first daughter the fall of that year, on Oct. 20, 1964 — Kamala, a common Tamil name, meaning lotus flower — and to her second daughter 2½ years later. She and her daughters moved in 1965 to Illinois and in 1967 to Wisconsin on account of her husband’s positions as a professor of economics, and then came back to California in 1969 after they split. The divorce was final in 1973. Except for every other weekend and two months in the summer she was in essence a single parent — “Shyamala and the girls,” as their friends often said.

Unwavering with love but stingy with praise, as Harris has made plain over the years and detailed in her memoir, The Truths We Hold, Gopalan sewed clothes for their Barbies and made homemade candies and “Special K” cookies — the K being for Kamala. An allowance, though, for chores, as Nina Martin recently recounted for Mother Jones? “I give you rent!” For doing the dishes? “You ate from the damn dishes!” And for … getting good grades? “It says, ‘You know, I really thought you were stupid. Oh, you surprised Mommy!’ No.” Some sort of problem with school? “What did you do?” She had them watch Walter Cronkite every night. When watching TV, though, Cronkite or not, they had to needlepoint or knit. “Never sit still,” she said. “If you can do something, do something,” she said. “She was a very serious person, but she was very bubbly and effervescent,” said Aaron Peskin, president of the San Francisco Board of Supervisors and a current mayoral candidate, who’s been friends with Harris since the first grade. “Demanding, but not in a punitive way — in a very encouraging way.” And in their diverse community, in the less white part of red-lined Berkeley, she raised them as Black girls and to be Black women because “it doesn’t make a damn bit of difference if your color comes from India or African Americans,” she would say, “because this country is racist based on color” — but not to the exclusion of their Indian heritage. They went to a Black Baptist church, and a Hindu temple. They celebrated Diwali, and Thanksgiving. They ate idli, vada and sambar, and Pop-Tarts, too. And she took them back to Chennai and environs every two or so years. “Don’t let anybody tell you who you are. You tell them who you are,” she told them. “Focus on what’s right in front of you, and the next thing, whatever that’s meant to be, will come,” she said. And … “don’t do anything half-assed.”

And she did all of that, of course, while pursuing her own work-related ambitions — earning extensions and adjustments to her immigrant status, starting as a “nonimmigrant student,” ending as a “lawful permanent resident.” After she got her Ph.D, she was a post-doctorate researcher in the physiology department at Cal. For four years in the late ’60s when her husband’s work took her to the Midwest, she kept doing hers — a visiting scientist, a researcher, a senior research fellow, at the University of Illinois, at the University of Chicago, at the University of Wisconsin. After the marital split, she went back to Cal, where she was an assistant research biochemist from September of 1969 to June of 1974 and then an associate research biologist from June of 1974 to December of 1975. She took her daughters to her lab. They helped clean pipettes and test tubes. They saw how little changes could make big differences in the systems she studied. And when she stalled at Cal because of hiring decisions she viewed as sexist — a former female colleague recalled a promotion to a professorship Gopalan was promised but that went to a man — she didn’t stew. She moved — to Canada — where she worked at the Lady Davis Institute for Medical Research at Jewish General Hospital and in the Department of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal. She basically never stopped, going back to Cal from 1982 to 1984, back to Montreal from 1985 to 1989, back to Cal after that — working at the Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory as a cancer researcher for the next 20 years, guiding up-and-comers in her field and in particular those of color. “She was a wonderful mentor,” said Pomerance, her friend from their days as graduate students at Cal. “She championed her postdocs.”

“She was very focused,” Stephen Ullrich, who collaborated with her on work for the National Institutes of Health.

“Her passion was contagious,” Michael Pollak, a Montreal colleague, told me. “The biggest thing that excites many scientists is the idea of it’s an international fight for knowledge or a fight against disease. It’s kind of like humanity against cancer rather than one country against another country. It’s all people united against an enemy like a disease,” he said. “That’s how her mother was operating.”

She spoke to a reporter from the Montreal Gazette in 1985 for a story about the still paltry number of women in scientific fields. “When a position is open the male is still automatically favored as being more competent,” she said. “There’s an assumption that women don’t want the big jobs.”

Her daughter — after she graduated from Howard University in Washington, after she graduated from law school from what was then called Hastings at the University of California, after a decade-plus as a prosecutor on both sides of the bay — wanted the big jobs.

Kamala Harris started her political rise by running in 2003 to be the district attorney of San Francisco. Her mother, as Harris would put it, was her “first campaign staffer.” Gopalan was somebody who understood, because of where she’d come from, and because of where she’d moved to, the long history of oppression. But she didn’t play the victim. Bold but not rash, she was progressive but pragmatic. “You have not met a more practical person in your life. She was a fighter, and she was practical,” her daughter would say. Do something. At campaign headquarters she not only stuffed envelopes but showed others what she considered proper envelope-stuffing form. Former interns of hers now came to volunteer for her daughter.

“Can you imagine you’re going in there to lick envelopes and you’re there with the candidate’s mother?” Peskin told me.

“Shyamala would work the room. She would talk to people,” Rebecca Prozan, Harris’ campaign manager in that race, told me. “She had a way — and Kamala has definitely inherited this trait —of sizing people up and she knew if you were full of shit or if you were the real deal within two seconds of meeting you. She would pull me aside. She would be, like, don’t send that person to that neighborhood, don’t send that person out, or find a way to make use of that person but don’t send them to an important area,” she said. “She was quite a force.”

And in the first week of November 2003, at 39 years old and running against two much older white men, Harris finished a surprising second to force a runoff — a result that augured a change. At the jazz club that hosted her party the night of the election, according to reporting at the time in AsianWeek, she worked her way through the crowd. People clamored to give her handshakes and hugs. She shouted excitedly for the one person she most wanted to see.

“Where’s my mother?”

Shyamala Gopalan Harris died of colon cancer on Feb. 11, 2009. With a “passion for science,” “a fervent commitment to social justice” and “a deep appreciation for cultural diversity and egalitarianism,” her obituary said, she was “an independent, confident and curious spirit,” “a mentor, an activist, a mother.” She was 70.

But she’s not gone. She’s still here. “Kamala is walking with Shyamala through all of this,” said Carole Porter, her friend from early elementary school. “Shyamala is right there with her.”

“She carries her mom with her in all of these spaces that she’s in,” said Gevin Reynolds, a former speechwriter for Harris as vice president, “no matter what podium she steps up to.”

People who know Harris and knew her mother see in the former the mannerisms of the latter. Those stern looks. That big laugh. Fellow children of immigrants of all sorts, those who’ve worked with Harris and those who’ve watched from afar, recognize in her the epitome of a second-generation immigrant story — the face of a changing America.

She was elected district attorney only a few years after the Census even started letting people identify as multiple races — and her oath-of-office ceremony included both the National Anthem and the National Black Anthem (“Lift Every Voice and Sing”), both an invocation by a Christian priest and a ritual blessing and Sanskrit verses from a priest from a Hindu temple. She started her speech with her mother. “One individual here,” Harris said, “deserves a special tribute.”

In 2010, a year in which the Census showed the white portion of the population no longer at nearly 90 percent but heading toward 70 and the minority population more and more mixed, she was elected as the attorney general of California — the first woman, the first Black person, the first Asian person, the first “desi,” as India Abroad pointed out. Prominent on her desk as AG was a picture of her mother. She worked for a larger settlement in the fallout of the foreclosure crisis with her mother in mind. “Kamala’s awareness of the struggles, the trials and finally the triumphs of Shyamala in reaching that summit of home ownership,” Mark Leno, a close friend and former state legislator, “I’m sure it brought her mother’s voice back to her immediately.” She approached her work in a data-driven, almost scientific method, said longtime adviser and friend Debbie Mesloh and others, and that, too, they thought, was because of her mother. And she mentored the ways that her mother did. “She says her mother used to say to her, ‘You’re going to be the first to do a lot of things, but make sure you’re not the last.’ She said it in meetings frequently,” Maggy Krell, one of her deputies in the office, told me. “She says, ‘I want you to be my chief of staff.’ And I looked at her, and I said, ‘Me?’ And she looked back at me and said, ‘Why not you?’” Venus Johnson, currently California’s chief deputy attorney general, told me. “Her mother’s fingerprints are all over all of us.”

“Kamala is what she is today because of her mother,” one of her aunts told India Abroad after she was elected to the Senate in 2016. “The credit doesn’t go to any other person. It is my sister, her mother, who brought her up like this.” The first Black woman elected to the Senate, the first Indian American elected to the Senate, she made one of her first speeches in essence a defense of immigrants and immigration in the face of the actions of the early Trump administration. “This starts,” she said, “with my mother.” That July, in a citizenship ceremony on a ship off the coast of California, she gazed out at the 41 young people from 14 countries — now Americans. “Looking at this group,” she said, “I can’t help but think of a young woman roughly the age of many of you. She was born in Chennai, in the south of India …”

“After she got the vice presidency,” said Lovely Dhillon, a friend and fellow prosecutor with Harris in the late ’90s in San Francisco who also had an Indian immigrant mother, “my mother and I called her, and I videoed my mother sending Kamala a message that said, ‘Just imagine I’m your mom, and I’m giving you a hug, and I’m saying, ‘I’m so proud of you.’”

“My mother,” Harris said in an event at the White House with the Indian prime minster. “The reason that I stand before you today …”

Now, going on three-quarters of a century after her mother landed in that Pan Am plane, some 145,000 people a year emigrate from India to the U.S. — second only to Mexico — and the population of Indian Americans numbers roughly 5 million. The population identifying as multiracial has gone from 6.8 million people in 2000 to 9 million people in 2010 to 33.8 million people in 2020 — just over 10 percent of all Americans. And Kamala Harris is on the precipice of the presidency. “So, America, the path that led me here in recent weeks was, no doubt, unexpected. But I’m not a stranger to unlikely journeys,” she said in August in Chicago. “My mother was 19 when she crossed the world alone …”

“She would be the first of many firsts,” Varun Nikore, the executive director of the AAPI Victory Alliance, said of a potential President Kamala Harris. “First black female, first Indian, first South Asian, first AAPI — but also the first mixed race. And so I think there’s something to be said,” he told me, “with her being aligned with where the country is moving.”

“Kamala is the America we want to be,” said Shekar Narasimhan, the AAPI Victory Fund boss, “because of Shyamala.”

“Does Kamala Harris add her strand to the cable of American history without Shyamala Harris?” an early top aide of hers told me. “No,” said the aide. “It’s her story. But it’s the story of Shyamala as well.”

And yet last week in a speech her campaign billed as an immigration speech, in Douglas, Arizona, southeast of Tucson and down by the border with Mexico, she said “there are consequential issues at stake in this election, and one is the security of our border.” She said there are “rules.” She said as attorney general of California she “prosecuted transnational criminal organizations.” She said she “brought a bipartisan group of American attorneys general and led that group to travel to Mexico City to meet with Mexican attorneys general to address this issue.” She said immigrants “who cross our borders unlawfully will be apprehended and removed and barred from reentering for five years.” She also said we “need clear, legal pathways for people seeking to coming into our country.” She said we are “a nation of immigrants.” And the woman about whom some not small portion of the population say they still need to know more said “the United States has been enriched by generations of people who have come from every corner of the world to contribute to our country and to become part of the American story.”

She did not mention her mother.