Lakshmy Parameswaran arrived in the U.S. in 1973, when she was 24 years old from Chennai, India. Her story is preserved in the First Days Project, SAADA’s archive of immigrants’ and refugees’ experiences of arrival in the U.S. In her interview, she describes her initial excitement and the reality of exhaustion on her first day in New York. Lakshmy is also one of the founders of Daya, Inc., established in 1996 to serve South Asian victims of family violence–one of the things that she’s done as an immigrant that she’s “very, very proud of.”
Lakshmy’s Story in SAADA’s First Days Project.