Top row, black-and-white photos from the 1982 article, L-R: The Vongprachanh family, the Noordermeer family, and the Tejwani family. Bottom, the Jakov Terk family.
In July 1982, Memphis Magazine published a cover story called “The Immigrants” (above left). Writers Margaret Sacks and Fred Groskind interviewed dozens of people who had recently come to America from elsewhere — places like the Netherlands, Laos, England, India, and the Soviet Union. “Whether they arrived by supersonic jet or rickety sailboat,” wrote Sacks and Groskind, “all share certain common experiences: The initial effort to learn English; the struggle to find a job; daily culture shock; the difficulties of reconciling the joys of a rich, free country with the grief over the loss of one’s homeland; the inevitable confrontations with ignorance, prejudice, and narrow-mindedness.”
More than four decades later, we tracked down one of the families originally spotlighted in 1982. We wanted to know how the intervening decades had treated them. We also talked to several other families whose immigrant journeys brought them to Memphis more recently.
In a cultural moment charged with nationalism and nativism, we ask the same question posed on that 1982 cover: Is America still the land of opportunity? It’s not a yes or no question, but a topographical map of endless variety and detail built of individual stories. The families we talked to, who have made their lives in Memphis, shared with us their dreams and disappointments, their hopes and heartaches. Here, then, is “The Immigrants: 2026” — a series of vignettes that show the increasingly complex experiences of newcomers to this country (and this city).
Catching up with the Terks
Sacks and Groskind profiled four immigrant families: The Vongprachanh family from Laos, the Noordermeer family from the Netherlands, the Tejwani family from India, and the Terk family from the Soviet Union. We wondered what happened to the four families in the decades since, but could find no trace of the Noordermeers or the Tejwanis. A couple of people had fond memories of Khamsene Vongprachanh, who had worked tirelessly serving his fellow immigrants for Catholic Charities, but no one knew where he or his family had ended up.
Finally, we got a lucky break with one of the families. The name Eugene Terk, which matched the name of the eight-year-old son of Jakov and Ina Terk from the original story, surfaced in a Facebook search. When we reached out to Eugene, he confirmed: Yes, that was his family. “We arrived in Memphis on November 15, 1979,” he says.
In 1982, the writers described Jakov Terk as “one of the more than 130 Russian Jewish emigrants who have arrived in Memphis during the past few years.”
“Americans don’t know how lucky they are,” Jakov told them. “Let them live one year in the Soviet Union, let them work one year there, let them stand in line for food from 6 in the morning until the store opens at 8. Then they’ll understand how lucky they are,” said Jakov. “You must understand. I had a very good job. Before I left, I was chief engineer in a huge company. It was for the children’s future. That was 80 percent of the reason we left.”
“My parents did not believe we would have the same opportunities, with the same sort of doors open for us, under communist Russia that we would have in the United States.” — Eugene Terk
“My family is Jewish, and my family essentially left the Soviet Union — or left Russia — because of the discrimination that was rampant under the communist system towards Jewish people,” says Eugene Terk today. “My parents did not believe that my brother and I would have the same opportunities with the same sort of doors open for us under communist Russia, that they would find here in the United States.”
Leningrad has a nice synagogue, Jakov Terk said, “but the government doesn’t like that people believe in God. They won’t let you grow in your job if you are religious. It’s the same for Christians.”
In the Soviet Union, both emigration and immigration were notoriously difficult. The Communist regime famously built a wall across the heart of Europe to keep their populations in, and Western Europe out. But with the help of the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society, the Terks only waited two months after Jakov resigned his position in Leningrad, now Saint Petersburg, Russia. The society placed immigrants according to where they had the resources and living space available. There was an opening in Memphis, “So we had no choice,” said Jakov in 1982. “All we knew about Memphis was Martin Luther King and Elvis.”
“My first memory is of the airplane landing in New York, where we first came,” says Eugene, who was eight at the time. “The Jewish Federation of Memphis sort of adopted our family, or at least put together a series of other families and donations so when we arrived, we had a furnished apartment. I went to school. My older brother went to high school. I think my parents spent the first three months doing English lessons because we did not speak English, other than my brother, who had taken it in school in the Soviet Union as a second language.”
While they were settling into their modest domicile, Sheldon and Orma Cohen, two volunteers from the Jewish Service Agency, helped them learn English and adapt. “It was unbelievable, how the people welcomed us,” said Jakov. “They didn’t have to do it. Memphis is very special in this respect.”
In early 1980, Jakov Terk got a job at Schering-Plough, a Memphis-based pharmaceutical company which is now a subsidiary of Merck. He said his position as a designer in the firm’s small construction department “was a big step down,” but “I take it like it is … I’m like a dog — I understand, but I cannot speak.”
Meanwhile, Ina, a piano teacher, found work teaching for the Jewish Community Center and Memphis State University, now the University of Memphis.
“I have a very fond memory of growing up in East Memphis, and the friends I had there,” says Eugene. “I went to Ridgeway Elementary, starting in fourth grade, and then moving on to White Station Junior High and High School, where I graduated. My brother graduated from Ridgeway High School. We were sort of the first wave of Russian families that immigrated to Memphis, and there was a continuing wave in the years to follow. I remember a lot of large meals in my household with other Russian families who had made the same transition.”
The family found success in Memphis, but they missed their home. “We had the best ballet and one of the best symphonies in the world,” said Jakov in 1982. “Leningrad [formerly Saint Petersburg] is close to Paris in its architecture. It is the most cultured city in the Soviet Union.”
“And what about American culture?” the writers asked.
He pointed to his TV: “There is the American culture.”
Eugene says his father moved on to other things after he started at Schering-Plough, working in property development for Fogelman, Burns & McDonnell before starting his own general contracting firm, JT Construction Enterprises. Toward the end of his career, he was a consultant for the World Bank and USAID, overseeing construction projects in former Russian Soviet states.
Eugene graduated from high school in 1992 and left Memphis to pursue higher education. He now lives in New Orleans. He has a law degree, but currently works in “the software space” for a company called A-Line Technologies, where he is a VP of business development and general counsel. His brother Michael graduated from Ridgeway and Vanderbilt, earned a Ph.D. in engineering, and for a time was a professor. Now, he works in the private sector.
Jakov and Ina stayed in Memphis until 2010, when they retired to South Florida. Jakov passed away in 2020.
Did the gamble they took in immigrating to the United States pay off?
“Absolutely, yes,” says Eugene. “I would say it has been a very positive experience.”
When asked if his family has experienced antisemitism in America, Eugene says, “Sure — but I think it’s mild in comparison to what would’ve been if we had stayed in Russia.”
“Russia is like a clear drinking glass, through which you see your neighbor,” said Jakov in 1982. “America is like a silver chalice, in which you only see yourself.”
photograph by laura jean hocking
Milynh and Doan Dinh
“We Are the Blessing.”
“My parents, they were born in the north of Vietnam, in different cities, but in 1945,” says Doan Dinh.
After decades of colonial rule by the French and then domination by the Empire of Japan, the Vietnamese, under the leadership of Communist revolutionary Ho Chi Minh, took advantage of the end of World War II to declare independence. When the French tried to regain power, Ho’s cadres fought them off. The 1954 peace treaty split the country into North and South Vietnam — a settlement reminiscent of the dueling dynasties which had ruled the territory along the east coast of Indochina for centuries. Ho’s communists presided in the North; a republic, supported by Western countries, formed in the South.
Almost immediately, the two countries went to war. North Vietnam was supported by the two Communist powers of Asia, the Soviet Union and China. South Vietnam was supported by the United States. By 1964, that support included American troops. The Vietnam War raged for a decade. Doan was born into it, saying, “My father was in the Army in the South government.”
After fighting in the Tet Offensive of 1968, Doan’s father moved the family to Saigon. That’s where they were when the government of South Vietnam collapsed in April 1975. “We lost the war, right?” says Doan. “Those who had the connection with the U.S. government were able to evacuate.”
But the Dinhs were not among those evacuated by the Americans. Doan was 12 years old when the war ended. “I had to live five years under the Communists,” he says. “My parents explained to me, ‘Don’t believe what they say, just see what they actually do.’ … I can compare, say, about the freedom of speech, but people were oppressed. We cannot express ourselves freely, and there’s no freedom of religion. If you want to go to church, you have to go before the working hour, before 7 o’clock. … And we had to get in line to buy food; there wasn’t enough.”
Former soldiers of the South were required to report to re-education camps. Doan’s father, a low-ranking officer, went for a week. Other family members left for much longer.
“They sprayed us with water and soap, because we looked like we had malnutrition. Dark, skinny, with lice. What is the smell of freedom? It's soap. Camay soap.” — Doan Dinh
During this period, the newly united Vietnamese went to war with neighboring Cambodia, where an even more repressive Communist government had taken over: The Khmer Rouge. “My mom is the one who made the decision for me to escape,” says Doan. “I’m the oldest in the family. Vietnam was invading Cambodia at that time, in 1978 because Pol Pot is a fanatic, you know, more extreme. When you finished your high school, if you could not make it into a university, or have a job to support the government, you would have to join the Army for three years. And my mom thought, oh, this is about your age, this is about your time now. She decided for me to escape first.”
Doan would leave Saigon — now called Ho Chi Minh City — for a small fishing village on the coast. Eventually, he moved in with relatives on the coast and waited for his chance. After half a year, the chance came. Doan was crammed into the hold of a fishing boat where he and dozens of other refugees sat chest-deep in a toxic mixture of seawater and fuel oil for three days.
Once they made it to the international waters of the South China Sea, “We saw many commercial ships moving around, but only two ships stopped to try to rescue us.”
The first was a passenger ship, but once the captain saw that he didn’t have room for the crowds of refugees on the fishing vessel, he sailed away. The second was the Libra, an American-flagged oil tanker bound for Hong Kong. “They turned off the engine and our small fishing boat got close to them,” says Doan. “The captain ordered the sailors to lower the zigzag ladder down. One sailor stood at the end of the ladder and waited for the waves to heave our boat up and pull us out, one by one.”
About 90 refugees made it onto the decks of the Libra that day. “They sprayed us with water and soap,” says Doan, “because we looked like [we had] malnutrition: Dark, skinny, and with lice. What is the smell of freedom? It’s soap. Camay soap.”
Milynh was another of the lucky ones. “In 1978, my mother led an escape,” she recalls. “The first attempt didn’t make it, because the boat got stuck.”
On the second attempt, about 75 people dodged pirates to find a boat waiting offshore, but it was damaged and struggled through the South China Sea. A storm threatened to capsize the ship, but they stayed afloat.
Doan ended up in a refugee camp outside Nagasaki, Japan, for a year. His mother had sewn the gold from her wedding band into his shirt, so he could use the money to send a telegram to her when he was safe. Doan remembers “the most painful memory, the physical pain, or mental pain, I don’t wish anyone to experience, the pain of homesickness. The loneliness as a child from family. That time you left, you don’t know when you come back.”
Milynh ended up in Malaysia. Eventually, both were sponsored by relatives to come to the United States as refugees. “I personally was looking for the American flag and the Statue of the Liberty in the West,” Doan says. “When we got here, we learn the Statue of Liberty is in the East. It’s on the other side of the country!”
After making a perilous journey halfway around the world, the couple met in Houston, Texas. Doan got accepted into a seminary, where he was studying to be a priest. He was working as a chaplain at the MD Anderson Cancer Center when, he recalls, “She was visiting one of her parents from the parish. I almost got my master’s of theology. But one year before, I was really struggling with the pain and loneliness, the homesickness.”
His spiritual crisis came to a head, and he spent a tearful night praying in the church. He prayed for the loneliness to be taken away, and ultimately decided to leave the seminary.
In 1990, Doan accepted a job in Memphis as a social worker. “I love to work with people who hit rock bottom and no one cared for them,” he says. “No one helped them. That’s where I found my place.”
Two years later, he returned to Houston and married Milynh. They came back to Memphis where they had three children: Theresa, Pauline, and Nathan. “We work; we try to build up the good credit in order to own our own place.”
At one point, the family lived together on five mattresses in the attic. “You know, like Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs,” Doan says. “I personally really love Memphis, Tennessee. The first seven years, I really merged with the community, working with the Catholic Charites, with all the refugees and the homeless. We are very involved with the Vietnamese community at Sacred Heart Church.”
Milynh’s Vy Vy Hair Salon is a staple of the Midtown neighborhood. Their children, all grown, now work in healthcare as surgeons, nurses, and researchers. “We share with my children: What you receive, God has blessed and given us. Wherever you land, it is to serve a community, to give back. And then, we are the blessing.”
“I Am Proud of Being Vietnamese.”
Quynh Tran moved often when she was a child. “I think I’m very adaptive to new environment,” she says.
She was born in Ho Chi Minh City (formerly known as Saigon), then her parents moved to another city, only 30 kilometers away. “I went from first grade all the way to seventh grade, and then I moved back to Saigon with my grandparents,” she says. “After I finished high school, I came to the United States. My parents always envisioned sending us to a different country, even Canada or the United States, to study abroad. I was probably the most obedient child in the family.”
She flew from Vietnam to Waukesha, Wisconsin, where she would take intensive English lessons at Waukesha County Technical College. Once she was on the ground, she waited for her host family, but a miscommunication meant they never materialized. Eventually, the host family arranged a taxi ride from the airport to their home.
Tran says it was the longest 45 minutes of her life. The girl from Saigon, population 14 million, was out of her element. “Wisconsin is not like an urban city, so you don’t see a lot of buildings and cars,” she says. “Both sides, it was forest and nothing. I was so scared. Where’s this guy taking me to?”
When she arrived at her host family’s house, she was greeted warmly and began to learn a bit more English.
Her next stop was the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she flourished in math and computer engineering. There, she met her future husband, Vinhthuy Phan, who was completing his doctoral program when he got a job offer from the University of Memphis. Tran followed him here and completed her graduate work at the U of M, where she earned two master’s degrees and a Ph.D.
Today, Tran is a senior bioinformatics researcher at St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, combining biostatistics, computer science, and biology to analyze data having to do with genetics and more.
“I am proud of being Vietnamese. It took me a while to understand, to put myself in their shoes. I left behind my friends, my family. But it’s my choice. I can always go back. Now, it’s easy to go back. But back then, it was the end of it. It was starting from zero.” —
In October 2022, she became the head of the Vietnamese American Community of West Tennessee. She is quick to note that she is just one success story from Memphis’ thriving Vietnamese community.
“In Memphis, the Vietnamese Community was formed by a generation of people that came in 1975. They just wanted to create a small community so that they can help all of the Vietnamese immigrants coming in.”
— Quynh Tran
Relations can be complex between her generation of immigrants, which Tran calls “generation 1.5,” who grew up in the postwar period, and the older generation, whose formative experiences were during the long conflict.
“I am proud of being Vietnamese. It took me a while to understand, to put myself in their shoes. I left behind my friends, my family. But it’s my choice. I can always go back. Now, it’s easy to go back. But back then, it was the end of it. It was starting from zero.
“They came as adults, when it’s harder to learn the language,” she continues. “Most of their jobs [here] were like restaurant, nail salon — things that don’t require you to have a higher level of writing and reading. But in Vietnam a lot of them had been doctors and lawyers. It was too hard for them to study again, to get the license. It was a lot of sacrifice for the older generation to come here and support their family.”
For years, the Vietnamese American Community hosted an annual celebration in Memphis, with free food and community activities. Today, she says, “It’s only a hundred people or so attending, not many people. Now, the people want something new, more energy.”
Tran was instrumental in expanding the annual celebration into the Asian Night Market. The event has grown explosively each year since 2023, with last year’s celebration filling the Agricenter with thousands of people.
“In 1975, 1980, when people came here, they didn’t want the Americans to know that they were not born here,” she says. “They felt embarrassed that they were Asian and didn’t speak good English, that they had accents. But nowadays the kids are different. They are so proud that they are Asians. I want us to be proud of being us.”
photograph by laura jean hocking
Roumen and Snejina Denkov
“There Is Nothing Like America.”
“I am born in a small village called Senokos, which is in the northeast corner of Bulgaria,” says Roumen Denkov. After the end of World War II, Bulgaria was a part of the Soviet sphere of influence. “Stalin wanted to have a buffer zone between Soviet Union and Western Europe.”
Roumen learned to play trombone and got accepted into a high school that specialized in music, which was run by the Bulgarian military. After he graduated, he spent 10 years in the Navy band. During this time, he arranged and recorded two albums, which were released in Bulgaria. But he wasn’t satisfied.
“I love jazz music,” he says. “I wanted to learn, but of course, that was impossible. Many years later, we made a big band within the Navy band. We did four concerts during Communist time [around 1988]. The second-highest-ranking officer of the Communist Party Department of the Bulgarian Navy came to me after four concerts which people loved. ‘You want to play American music? Who do you think you are? If I hear one more time about you playing this American music, you’re going to jail.’”
It was a wake-up call for Roumen. “That was not a threat to me,” he says. “That was a threat to my family. I don’t care about politics. Music is just music; it’s beautiful. My job is to make it as beautiful as possible, to make the audience happy.”
There was a growing discontent with the 40-year-old regime. “Everything was controlled by the Communist Party. It was a slow process of rotting.”
The communist system ended in Bulgaria on November 10, 1989. “The first year or two, people didn’t know what to do,” he says. “Because the regime disappeared, including the Bulgarian version of KGB, which is the secret apparatus that kept total control of the country.”
When Roumen’s stint in the Navy was over, he took a job at one of the new resorts springing up along the Black Sea. His new boss, Tzany Nikolov, became a mentor. “This guy, I want to build a huge monument for him. He changed my life. He gave me the fundamentals for business.”
He met and married Snejina in 1993. In 1996, Roumen found seasonal work on a cruise ship. He got his first taste of America when he and his co-workers stayed at a Miami Beach hotel waiting to board the ship. “It was amazing,” he says.
Roumen spent the next few months on the high seas. “My last week on the ship, I was waiting tables in the dining room. There was a table for two, this couple, husband and wife; we became friends.”
After the cruise, he kept in touch with Skip and Linda Davis, exchanging postcards and pictures of his and Snejina’s growing family. By then, they had two children, Vassil and Sissy. The family was about to get a big surprise. While preparing for a cruise, Roumen and his co-workers went to the U.S. Embassy to secure a transit visa. “One of the guys saw this brochure for the Green Card lottery,” he recalls. On a lark, they entered the lottery — then Roumen forgot about it. Back home in Bulgaria, he promised Snejina he travel for work again. Then, a strange envelope arrived. He had won.
“I dreamed about coming to America, but I knew that it’s impossible,” says Roumen. “And I would never come here illegally. But this U.S. government decision to play this lottery is probably the second-best thing in my life after my wife and my kids. Because it gave me a chance to come here.”
But with opportunity came responsibility. “If you’re by yourself, you’ll figure out how to survive,” he says. “Wife and two kids? You barely speak a few words of the language. You have absolutely no idea how the hell this works. How to find work, how to buy something, how to feed your family — you have no idea. What do you do? Look for help. Who do I know? Only one family that I briefly met for a week on a seven-day cruise from New York to Bermuda. Lucky day, Mr. and Mrs. Skip and Linda Davis.”
“I can work 14 to 16 hours a day with the same motivation and drive anywhere in the world, but it is this country that gave me the opportunity. There’s nothing like America.” — Roumen Denkov
He reached out to his friends in the States, who promised to help. Skip Davis was a FedEx pilot who lived in Bartlett. Roumen says he owes the Davis family a profound debt. “You met somebody on your vacation that was a waiter for a few days. And this guy wants to come here [to live]. He’s asking for help and you say, ‘Yeah, come to my house. Be a guest in my house.’ Would you do that? How many people will do that?”
Once Roumen arrived in the States, he had three months to prepare before Snejina and the children followed. Skip Davis helped him apply for a job at the FedEx hub, but he couldn’t start until he had a Social Security number. So Roumen found a seasonal job driving an ice-cream truck. “I’m good at maps, he says. “I’ve been in a military!”
Roumen learned the lay of the land and discovered a talent for sales. “I found a construction place. I go there, they ask me for cigarettes, ask me for soda. Next day, I got all this.”
Soon, Roumen was working at FedEx by night and driving the ice-cream truck by day. He found an apartment in Bartlett just days before Snejina and the children arrived. When he went to enroll daughter Sissy in her new school, he was amazed at how well-appointed the classrooms were. Sissy’s teacher was Metra Reid, “a short, feisty lady, like a hurricane.”
Tears well from Roumen’s eyes when he remembers what happened next. “The teacher said, ‘We got this little girl that came from Bulgaria, and she doesn’t speak English. We start school at 8:30 every day, so I need somebody to come here from 7:30 to 8:15 every morning and teach Sissy how to speak English.’ Parents came and taught my kid English on their own time.” By the end of her first year in American schools, Sissy’s English improved so much that she won a county-wide essay writing contest.
Less than four years later, Roumen and the family were able to buy their own house. As new Bulgarian immigrants trickled into Memphis, the Denkov family helped them the same way they had been helped. Eventually, Roumen and a business partner started his own transportation and logistics company, RDX, which continues to expand to this day. His son Vassil joined the Air Force.
Sissy went to school in New York, and after working on the Memphis film production Brian Banks, worked with producer Amy Baer in Hollywood. She returned to Memphis, got married, and wrote, produced, and directed a film based on her family’s experience as immigrants.
In Scent of Linden, Bulgarian actor Ivan Barnev plays Stefan, a Bulgarian who comes to America with nothing but a dream. He gets a job driving an ice-cream truck, and faces the choice of how much of his former identity to keep, versus how much he wants to assimilate into American. It is the choice faced by all immigrants from all countries. Their answers have shaped and created our culture.
“A lot of people are telling me that I’ve accomplished a lot,” he says, “with a nice house, nice car, and growing a successful business. Well, it’s not me. It’s America. I can work 14 to 16 hours a day with the same motivation and drive anywhere in the world, but it is this country that gave me the opportunity. There’s nothing like America.”
photograph courtesy latino memphis
Mauricio Calvio
“A Mutual Leap of Faith”
Mauricio Calvo’s life was changed by a fax.
When he was a teenager, he had lived in Ohio for a year as an exchange student. Afterward, he returned to his native Mexico City for his senior year of high school. One day, his principal called him into the office and asked him to read a fax for him. It was in English, a language the principal didn’t speak, and it was from Christian Brothers University in Memphis, informing the principal of a new scholarship opportunity the school was offering to international students.
“One thing led to another,” says Calvo, “and I don’t know if nobody else wanted to come or how that happened, but somehow, I ended up getting that scholarship.”
A year later, he arrived in Memphis as a CBU freshman. “I remember it to the day: August 18th, 1993. It smelled like mulch. I still remember that smell every time in the summer when all the mulch in Memphis is out.”
Calvo graduated with a degree in business and went to work for Sysco, the restaurant supply company. A few years later, he started his own business, saying, “It’s a typical story of the immigrant, right? Hustling here and there. … We had our struggles, but it was manageable.”
He recalls one time a few years ago, when he was driving with his teenage daughters. “There’s this industrial park on the corner of Macon and Jackson. When I had my business, I rented a small warehouse in the back. I was telling them stories about something that happened late in the night. One of my kids said, ‘Wait, why were you working so late?’ I’m like, ‘I wasn’t working that late. I actually lived here. I had lost my house, and I was literally living in the warehouse.’ When my kids said, ‘Wait, were you, like, homeless?’ I never thought about it that way. I said, ‘I wasn’t homeless! I lived in my office!’”
“Memphis is no longer just a Black and white town. In fact, the only two communities in Memphis that are significantly growing are the Asian and Hispanic communities.” — Mauricio Calvo
Despite the hardships, Calvo stayed in the United States. “I grew up in Mexico City in an upper-middle-class family, so I’m sure I could have found something there,” he says. “But I kept not only betting on Memphis, but betting on myself, and on the idea that this would work.”
One of his vendors told him about Latino Memphis. “At the time, we were an organization that was part of MIFA. That’s how we got started. The Latino used to hold meetings at the library on Peabody.”
Calvo volunteered for a while, then became a board member. In 2008, as the Great Recession was gathering, the board offered him the position of executive director. “The organization didn’t really have any money, and I didn’t have any money either,” he says. “It was a good match, I guess! And a mutual leap of faith.”
The organization grew under Calvo, and in 2025, Latino Memphis celebrated its 30th anniversary. “What I like to tell people is that we are creating opportunities for Latinos and Latinas,” he says. “We do that through advocacy, through direct social and legal services. I think what is also an important part is that while we are working with the Latinx community, we are sincerely doing this for the benefit of the larger community. “Memphis is no longer just a Black and white town, he continues. “In fact, the only two communities in Memphis that are significantly growing are the Asian and Hispanic communities. Latino communities are growing by 43 percent to be about 9 percent of the population today. Asians [are growing] about 34 percent to be maybe 4 or 5 percent of the population.”
Calvo became an American citizen in 2018, but even today it’s not an easy process. “The line does exist for those who have one or two things: a bunch of money or a bunch of education,” he says. “So if you are in academia, if you are in science, if you are in what they call ‘high-skill’ degrees, that pathway does exist. It’s limited, and certainly this current administration is making it harder with new rules. Like, you have to pay a hundred thousand dollars to apply for this visa.”
photograph by cari griffith
Dulce Maria Salcedo
“You Still Have Value.”
Dulce Maria Salcedo was born in Mexico City. “My family came to the U.S. back in 2001, when I was about a year old,” she says. “Mexico at the time was struggling through economic hardship. I think, in the early 2000s, it was really difficult for business owners to maintain a stream of income.”
Everyone in her family was originally from Mexico, so they didn’t really want to leave. “I know my mom shares that a lot,” she says. “She didn’t want to leave her community or her family members and go into a foreign country.”
Her parents held down different jobs in Mexico. “My mom worked a lot of modeling jobs,” says Salcedo. “She was very much in the entertainment industry. My dad was a business owner and worked in the chandelier business. But he unfortunately passed here in the United States. He was diagnosed with colon cancer in 2003. I don’t remember him at all.”
The family, which included Salcedo’s older sister, settled in Jackson, Tennessee, where her mother supported the family by cleaning houses. “When my dad was dying, she promised him that she would stay in the United States for me and my sister to grow up. I think she wanted to go back many, many times, but it was just that loyalty to my dad that kept her here.”
Salcedo always knew she was undocumented growing up. “My mom never shielded me from that reality,” she says. “I think a lot of parents who are in that situation want to shield their children. I know a lot of Mexican friends who were undocumented as well, but they didn’t realize they were undocumented growing up. They didn’t find out until later on in life as adults when their parents were like, ‘Oh, you can’t go to college because you don’t have a legal status.’
It was quite the opposite experience for Salcedo. “My mom was very intentional in telling us, you’re undocumented, but you have every right to be here, just as much as anyone else. Being undocumented doesn’t make you any less of a person. You still have value. You still have goals that you can achieve. And so I think that is what shaped me as a person.”
She admits she was never embarrassed by that situation. “Maybe I shared this openly with way too many people, but that was my identity, and I was just like, ‘Hi, my name is Dolce Maria. I’m undocumented.’ I was very open about this, but it directly impacted our quality of life in the United States. The level of poverty that undocumented immigrants live in is astronomical. I grew up with close to nothing.”
She finishes saying this through tears. “When you’re undocumented, you don’t have access to anything in the country. You pay taxes, you work very, very hard, but you’re subjected to job opportunities that are so exploitative. I saw my mom cleaning houses, doing all these things that didn’t provide any source of stability in our lives, and that was very difficult growing up.
“One thing my mom always instilled in me was to focus on my studies and to succeed in school,” she continues. “Because that was going to be one of the ways that I would be able to succeed in life. And that would really be one of the only ways that people could respect me, given our situation as not only Mexican undocumented immigrants, but as a woman as well.”
“When you’re undocumented, you don’t have access to anything. You pay taxes, you work very, very hard, but you”re subjected to job opportunities that are so exploitative.” — Dulce Maria Salcedo
Salcedo says school was a place where she felt safe. But afterwards it would present a challenge. “When I was applying for college, I realized that it was going to be so difficult because I did not have a permanent legal status that would allow me to obtain scholarships or even federal student aid. I remember taking the ACT, doing well on that, having a high GPA, and all my peers were so excited to apply for college.”
For her, she just felt “this impending sense of doom that I was not going to be able to go, despite all of my hard work in school, because I didn’t have a permanent resident card that would qualify me for federal student aid. School counselors helped as much as they could, but they didn’t understand truly how complex my situation was.”
Salcedo took it upon herself to find financial assistance, and finally got it, thanks to a program called Golden Door Scholars, which provided a four-year scholarship for undocumented students. “It was a very competitive scholarship,” she says. “I think only about 80 students got it per year, and thousands of undocumented students apply. So everything just aligned for me to apply for the scholarship at this time. I did apply, and I got it. Then I applied for admission to Rhodes College because it was one of their partner schools, and it was the closest school to Jackson. (The Golden Door Scholarship is now closed to students in Tennessee.)
“Looking back on everything in my life, I think Rhodes is 100 percent the highlight of my existence,” she says. “I think being in college opened so many doors for me, and it taught me so many valuable lessons, and I was able to meet so many people that truly inspired me.”
Taking a history course from Professor Michael LaRosa at Rhodes inspired her to change her major from pre-med to international studies. “I obtained permanent legal status my sophomore year in college,” she says. “That lifted a lot of burden from me and allowed me to open my views of the world because I was like, okay, I can graduate. I can get a job, and then I can even go to law school if I want to.”
Salcedo is now a law student at the University of Memphis. When she’s not studying, she works at a Jackson nonprofit as an accredited legal representative for immigrants. Her group is the only nonprofit between Nashville and Memphis to provide legal services for immigrants, focusing on survivors of crime, survivors of domestic violence, and special immigrant juveniles who have been in the United States without their parents, or one or both of their parents have abandoned, abused, or neglected them.
“We need immigration reform, and we need it now. I think we needed it like 20 years ago,” says Salcedo. “Our immigration system operates under the Immigration and Nationality Act, and that has not been updated since the Sixties. So we are operating on an extremely outdated system when conditions have changed.
“I often hear Americans say, ‘You have to do it the right way and you have to get in line because we have to have a system. The line does not exist in immigration law. We have somehow made up this imaginary line, and that is not real.
In her work, Salcedo knows there are very narrow avenues that you have to be eligible for.
“And then if you are eligible, you have to wait 20, 30 years for something to be available,” she says. “We need to provide permanent legal pathways for individuals who are already here so we can avoid having this huge undocumented population.”
Salcedo says the current administration’s crackdown on immigration has caused much pain in the immigrant communities she serves. “Friends reach out to me because their family members have been detained and they don’t know where they are. A lot of these family members had legal status or had something pending before the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, yet they were still detained.”
This creates a lot of fear. “A lot of my clients are so scared right now because they have a legal status, but this doesn’t protect them from being detained by ICE because ICE is engaging in racial profiling and tactics to detain immigrants and immigrants that look Mexican or look Latin American. So a lot of clients have expressed their fears, and I’ve been able to hear that firsthand.”
Salcedo still has faith in her country. “America is a really good country. America has people who are good people, and we have to be able to stand up when we see injustice happening to our neighbors. And I do still have hope that Americans are going to do that.”
“The Immigrants” [July 1982]
Editor’s Note: The following is excerpted from a cover story by Margaret Sacks and Fred Groskind that ran in Memphis Magazine over four decades ago. Then as now, our goal was to show the human experiences of immigrants striving to make their way in this city — and making our community more abundant by their presence.
When Julio Siguier, a young Cuban refugee, first entered a Memphis supermarket and was told he could buy whatever he liked, he wept. In Cuba, he explained, even when he’d had money, the shelves had been bare.
Shortly after a Russian Jewish immigrant in his mid-fifties had found a job at a local meat-packing plant, his employer called the coordinating program here with a problem: The man was toting around 300-pound carcasses, and his boss was worried that he’d injure himself.
Khaeng Lim, a 24-year-old Cambodian, got his first Memphis job doing landscaping work, but he came down sick from the cold winter weather which is so different from that in his native country. His father, a professional cook, can speak no English and has no job. The 12 people in the Lim family have been forced to leave their rented house to live in a dilapidated two-room apartment.
On first arriving in Memphis, Angela Harper, a secretary from Bournemouth, England, wondered whether Memphians lived in their cars.
“No one here walks anywhere,” she says. “I used to walk my daughter in her stroller every morning to buy a newspaper. If I saw one person, I was lucky. Sometimes I’d see a street vendor and he’d ask me, ‘Are you okay? Did your car break down?’”
In 1860, over one-third of the white Memphis population was of foreign birth. Most numerous at the time were the 4,000 Irish workers, whose numbers were severely depleted in the yellow fever epidemics of the 1870s.
Few Memphis employers will hire workers with whom they cannot directly communicate, so for most of the foreign-born in Memphis, the various language-class offerings here, which are said to be among the best in the country, are a necessity.
The second-largest immigrant group (numbering 1,500) was the Germans, who generally enjoyed wealth and status in Memphis and had the means to flee elsewhere during the epidemics, few to return.
Only after the turn of the century was there a resurgence of immigration to Memphis. This time, most foreign-born Memphians were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, many of whom were traveling tradesmen whose market was the rural Mid-South population. The other large immigrant group was the Italians, many of them visible as market gardeners who sold fruit and vegetables from roadside wagons.
Since the First World War, Memphis, like other U.S. cities, has enjoyed a steady influx of foreign-born residents from all over the world. The most recent large migration to Memphis has been from Southeast Asia; today, there are more than 1,500 Indo-Chinese in the city.
The perceptions and problems of new immigrants to Memphis are as diverse as their countries of origin. But whether they arrived from the Netherlands by supersonic jet or from Cuba or Laos via rickety sailboat, all share certain common experiences: the initial effort to learn English; the struggle to find a job; daily culture shock; the difficulties of reconciling the joys of a rich, free country with the grief over the loss of one’s homeland; the inevitable confrontations with ignorance, prejudice, and narrowmindedness.
“I always tell my people, ‘Your first job is English,’” says Khamsene Vongprachanh, a leader of Memphis’ Laotian community. “I tell them to watch TV not only for cowboy [movies] but to learn English from Channel 10. I also ask them to listen to the radio, not for the music but for the intonation of American English, even if they don’t understand the words.”
Most Memphis immigrants could sympathize with the Russian woman, just learning the language, who asked the butcher how “language” and “tongue” are the same word; or with her children, who thought that the opposite of “nobody” was “yesbody.” Few Memphis employers will hire workers with whom they cannot directly communicate, so for most of the foreign-born in Memphis, the various language-class offerings here, which are said to be among the best in the country, are a necessity.
Even when they have overcome the language problem, the immigrants have no guarantee that they will find jobs in Memphis, especially during a recession. “My people want to stay in Memphis and are willing to take any job to support their families,” says Vongprachanh. Adds Paulette Coburn, coordinator of the Indo-Chinese refugee resettlement program at Catholic Charities: “These people do not take jobs away from the local population, because they do work that no one else wants, like janitorial or yard work.”
This willingness to work which most immigrants display sometimes confounds their American sponsors. “We had a welder who worked on the barges in summer,” recalls Cindy Soloway, coordinator of the Russian refugee program of the Memphis Jewish Federation.
“He would get up at 4 a.m. and work till 12 at night.”
But willingness is not always enough. Cold winters and a cool economy are not the only difficulties foreign-born Memphians must face in the job market. Jacov Terk, for example, was a well-placed engineer in a large plant in his native Leningrad but was forced to take a minor position at Plough here.
“It was a big step down,” he says, laughing about it now. “But I understand.”
