The night of next Tuesday, November 5th, Kamala Harris She can go to bed knowing that she will be the next president of USA. It would be something historic, not only because the polls and polls do not show a clear favorite between her and donald trumpbut because she would become the first woman to be elected the top leader of the North American country. Even so, For Harris it would not be the first time that, pardon the redundancy, she is “the first” in something.
As the journalist María Ramírez pointed out in her book Kamala Harris, the firstthe current Democratic candidate for the White House was the first female attorney general of the state of California—also breaking the barriers of being the first woman, the first African American, and the first person of Indian origin in that position—something that was followed by the being the first Indian-American senator and the first woman to hold the position of vice president of the Government, right in the mandate of Joe Biden.
Basically, because the political and work career of Kamala, born in Oakland in October 1964, is rooted in the origins of her ancestors, who have marked her work. Not only those of his father, Donald Harris, professor of economics at Stanford University, who emigrated from Jamaica in 1964, but, and above all, those of his mother, Shyamala Gopalan, Indian by birth—of Tamil ethnicity—who arrived alone in the United States in 1960 at the age of 19 to study Biochemistry, which led her to become a prestigious scientist specializing in breast cancer.
Shyamala has been the great reference for both Kamala and her little sister, Maya, both Sanskrit names. In fact, her grandfather, PV Gopalan, to whom she was very close, was an Indian diplomat and was raised in the faith in both an African-American Baptist church and a Hindu temple. Besides, one of her paternal great-grandmothers is descended from a former slave plantation owner, possibly the result of a rape, something that, however, has served his opponents to attack him.
Kamala hardly has any relationship with her father, mainly because when he and Shyamala divorced, she was still a child and, a few years later, the three of them moved to Montreal, Canada, although it would end graduating in Political Science and Economics at Howard University, in Washington DCalthough until then he had been educated in schools with a majority of white students. In 1989 he returned to the West Coast, having completed his training at the Hastings School of Law, attached to the University of California.
After working as a deputy district attorney in Alameda County from 1990 to 1998, she was recruited in 2000 by San Francisco City Attorney Louise Renne. three years later she would be elected district attorney of the city and county of San Francisco, a stage in which one of its biggest scandals occurred, which came to light in 2004.
However, the story had taken place years ago, when she was 29 and he was 60: She had a relationship with Willie Nelson, who would end up being mayor of San Francisco when the news broke. Despite the fact that this had lasted only two months – she left him for being a womanizer – and that she promised that if there were signs of corruption she would investigate him – something that finally happened – Kamala has always affirmed that the fact that he was removed then and that he still Today they are reminded of it in debates and in the campaign against it it is due to the implicit machismo in society.
Harris would end up overcoming this and in 2011 she would become Attorney General of California, making history, something she repeated in 2017, entering the United States Senate. In between, had published his first book, Smart on Crimein 2009, followed by two in 2019: The Truths We Hold: An American Journey [Las verdades que sostenemos en castellano] and the children’s book Superheroes are everywhere, which in Spanish was titled Superheroes are Everywhere.
But, above all, at that time she met her current husband, the lawyer specialized in litigation within the entertainment sector. Douglas Emhoff, whom she met in 2013 thanks to a blind date arranged by a mutual friend. They hit it off so quickly that a year later, on August 22, 2014, in Santa Barbara, they got married in an intimate ceremony according to the Jewish rite, officiated precisely by their sister, Maya Harris.
Douglas had two children, Cole and Ellafruits of her previous marriage, with producer Kerstin Emhoff, with whom in fact both Kamala and her ex-husband maintain an excellent relationship, sharing everything from vacations to special celebrations. They both call the Democratic candidate ‘Momala’, an affectionate nickname that mixes her name with the word ‘Mom’.
Furthermore, both have a large part of their lives resolved and although they maintain a great relationship, each one has chosen a separate path: while the eldest, Cole, 30, lives in Los Angeles, works at Plan B—Brad Pitt’s production company— and married executive Greenley Littlejohn in October 2023, the youngest, Ella, 25, recently graduated in Fine Arts from Parsons School of Design in New York and Today she works as a model.
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