- Collection:
- Oral Histories of the American South: The Civil Rights Movement
- Title:
- Oral history interview with Chandrika Dalal, July 22, 1999
- Creator:
- Dalal, Chandrika
- Contributor to Resource:
- Jilani, Andrew
Southern Oral History Program - Date of Original:
- 1999-07-22
- Subject:
- East Indian American women--North Carolina
East Indian American businesspeople--North Carolina--Pittsboro
East Indian Americans--Civil rights--North Carolina
East Indian Americans--Cultural assimilation--North Carolina
Americanization - People:
- Dalal, Chandrika
- Location:
- United States, North Carolina, Chatham County, 35.70258, -79.25535
United States, North Carolina, Chatham County, Pittsboro, 35.72015, -79.17724 - Medium:
- transcripts
sound recordings
oral histories (literary works) - Type:
- Text
Sound - Format:
- text/html
text/xml
audio/mpeg - Description:
- Chandrika Dalal discusses her experiences as an Indian immigrant in the United States. Despite her husband's alcoholism and excessive gambling in India, she agreed to move with him to the United States since she saw in the move an opportunity to improve her family's life. Upon arrival in California, she moved in with her recently emigrated brother. There, Dalal worked in her brother's hotel business. She came to appreciate the diversity and economic opportunity that California offered but later relocated with her brother to rural North Carolina. She felt more secure there than she did in California but had difficulty being accepted because of cultural and language barriers. She faced other problems, too, including what she describes as police harassment and punitive city codes that she says prevented her from earning a livelihood as a restaurateur. To earn money, she found work at the University of North Carolina as a housekeeper. Despite her husband's refusal to provide financial security for their family, Dalal upheld traditional Indian gender norms. She believed her cultural beliefs to be superior to what she saw as the moral corruption in America, which she learned about largely from television shows. Even though her daughters arrived in the United States as toddlers and assumed an American identity, she says that they still experience ethnic discrimination. In turn, says Dalal, her daughters' Americanization creates a distance between them and her family in India because they know little of Indian customs, language, and traditions, a state of affairs she greatly regrets.
The Civil Rights Digital Library received support from a National Leadership Grant for Libraries awarded to the University of Georgia by the Institute of Museum and Library Services for the aggregation and enhancement of partner metadata. - Metadata URL:
- http://docsouth.unc.edu/sohp/K-0814/menu.html
- Language:
- eng
- Extent:
- Title from menu page (viewed on Nov. 10, 2008).
Interview participants: Chandrika Dalal, interviewee; Andrew Jilani, interviewer.
Duration: 01:07:21.
This electronic edition is part of the UNC-Chapel Hill digital library, Documenting the American South. It is a part of the collection Oral histories of the American South.
Text encoded by Kristin Shaffer. Sound recordings digitized by Aaron Smithers. - Contributing Institution:
- University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Documenting the American South (Project)
- Rights:
-
