Adjusting to a New Nation

by

The story below is from our March/April 2020 issue. For the full issue Subscribe today, view our FREE interactive digital edition or download our FREE iOS app!

These female professionals are in the Roanoke Valley legally and they contribute to life in many ways. But some still struggle.

The prevailing and pervasive image of women seeking to immigrate to the United States is a picture of a huddled mass, exhausted, dirty, desperate, looking into a camera from behind a chain link fence at the southern border.

That is often the case. Mexico provides a large percentage of U.S. immigrants. Mostly, however, the 45 million immigrants living here—52% of them women—have come into America on airplanes with proper visas. They stay for a pre-determined length of time and then go home. Those who stay, do so legally, often working in professional positions, paying taxes, raising families and frequently becoming productive—even leading—citizens. 

A third of immigrant workers are in management, business, science or the arts. Nearly that many are skilled workers.

The first story has been told many, many times in recent years with the often-cruel crackdown on those wanting sanctuary. The latter is not so frequently shared.

Herewith the latter group in the lives of six Roanoke Valley women professionals who have found a home here, one they like a lot. Most will stay.

Yolanda Rodriguez Puyana was a primary care physician in Sierra Madre, Mexico, for six years and came to America in 1987. She was newly married to her late husband, Richard, who was beginning his first medical residency in New York. 

She no longer practices medicine because of the requirement to pass a federal exam and do a three-year residency. “I passed the exam [in Mexico] in 1986 but not being fluent [in English] and my desire to be a mother [she has two sons in their 20s] deterred me from practicing. After passing the federal exam, I did one year at New York State University, an internal medicine internship. I got pregnant during that year and had a difficult pregnancy,” having to rest for six months.

“Being in a new country without my family or any support group made me make the decision of staying at home with my children. My husband worked many hours and medicine is very demanding. I wanted my children to be raised by me and there’s not a single day in which I regret this decision. I guess I’m more family-oriented than career-oriented.” 

Puyana has been heavily involved in major social issues for some time. “The difficulty as an activist while being an immigrant is the sensation that I have to make a major effort to have public credibility and to have my voice heard. 

“The fear that permeates every area of Latinos’ lives and creates an atmosphere of distrust, apathy and indifference, something that is frustrating since it gives me a feeling of impotence because the fear is caused by external forces I cannot control. The political environment right now is toxic and, in some ways, detrimental for Latino causes. As a member of a minority, it is difficult to break through and be more effective in local politics, even when belonging to progressive groups.” 

Despite the obstacles, says Puyana, “I feel I obtained the American dream, since I always dreamed of having my own organization and I accomplished it here in the U.S. Being involved in local and state level politics has been an experience from which I’ve learned how the system works. I participated with Gov. Mark Warner during the creation of the first Virginia Latino Advisory Board, and for eight years I served on this board for Gov. Tim Kaine.” Kaine and Warner are both U.S. Senators now. 

She remains on several local boards of directors and worked for a decade for the Mexican Consulate in Washington, bringing the first mobile consulate to Roanoke in 2004.  

Like so many parents, she says, “My biggest accomplishment is being a mother for the last nine years.”

Ekta Bansal is an infectious disease specialist at Carilion who came to the U.S. in 2000 for its medical educational excellence. She arrived with two suitcases and not much more. 

“Coming to United States all alone was not less than a rebirth,” she says. “[It is an] entirely new culture, new mindset, new driving techniques and new system in every single aspect of life. What was not new, thankfully, was the human body and the humanity. While I was learning medicine, at same time I was dealing with daily challenges of adapting to a new system like getting Social Security card, driving license, immigration system, etcetera and learning to survive without my family around. 

“They all were 8,000 miles away in India and I missed them every day. Thankfully there were so many people around with kind hearts and humanity that made surviving the first year possible, and I successfully finished three years of my medical residency and received Internal Medicine board certification.”

She came to the U.S.—initially Philadelphia—from a town in Northern India because of the predominance of patriarchy, where women were a secondary consideration, she says. The difference she found? 

“It was literally East vs. West,” she says. “I started with a process, met people who were open-hearted, learning at every step.” She bought a cell phone so she could stay in close contact with her family. “I felt [the separation] deeply,” she says. 

Her husband is Ritesh Kohli, a hospitalist at Carilion Clinic, and they have two children, 5 and 2. Much of her time (and her husband’s) at Carilion was spent driving to and from Giles Memorial Hospital to work. “I felt the toll” on the family, she says.

The family tries to return to India once a year, but there is always the fear they won’t be able to get back into the U.S. Her sister was denied a visa. 

“There are so many hurdles and challenges” in a dramatic move like hers, she says. But “this is life … Nothing in life is less than a challenge. … I think I’m happy. I am blessed to call [Roanoke] home.” 

Celeste Delgado-Librero, a native of Andalucía, Spain, is an educator who isn’t working now. She has, however, worked at Sweet Briar College, the University of Virginia and the University of Auckland, New Zealand, among others. 

She is also the founder of Manzanw LLC, which offers small-group Spanish language, culture and creativity programs in southern Spain. She moved to Virginia in 1992 and is married to Steve Wassell, a math professor at Hollins. 

Delgado-Librero has taught in several countries, and she and her husband even taught Semester at Sea, a study-abroad program that takes place on a cruise ship. At the moment, “I’m not looking for a job. My currency is time, not money, and I am doing a bunch of things.” 

Among those things: teaching three classes in Spanish at Virginia Tech and translating for a Chicago company. She has been a court and medical interpreter. 

She visited the U.S. as a teenager and when she moved here, “it was very familiar,” she says. Nothing shocked her: “It wasn’t that different” from her home in Spain, though there were certain professional restrictions there stemming from the social and work structures of the Spanish system. 

“The U.S. liberated me mentally,” she says. She likes the idea of living in different countries, different cultures. “I want a year in Italy, a year in France … I’d love to live in each country learning the language and the culture.” 

She admits that “I never really wanted to live here. It was never an ambition, but when you fall in love with someone who lives here” you make compromises. 

Through it all, she says emphatically, “I am a teacher.”

Lutz Lovern, who owns and operates Luz Life, Roanoke’s only classic Pilates school, came to the U.S. with her American husband, Marvin Lovern, a lawyer. “He asked me to bring him home to die,” she says. He closed his business in Qatar, and she moved her Pilates school to the Star City. 

They were a globe-trotting couple, living in Hong Kong, Australia, India, Bangkok and Katmandu and she speaks English, French, Italian, Chinese and Arabic, so the move to the U.S. was not as traumatic as it might have been. Her biggest challenge “was being without my husband,” she says. “We need love, people to understand our pain” and working with her students ultimately provided that.

Lovern was and is “a student of everything,” she says. She is a reiki master, a yoga teacher, a licensed nutritionist and a teacher of wellness, fitness and cycling. She has been a graphic designer. But she doesn’t drive a car, instead using Uber. At 14, she broke her neck in a bicycle accident and was paralyzed for a time. She overcompensated with her comeback.

She studied Pilates on the West Coast, her teacher a direct student of Joseph Pilates, she says. “Not everybody teaches real Pilates and I only teach it one on one,” she says. “I work seven days a week at it, building a foundation.”

Her goal, she says, “is not to be rich, but to travel. Next year, I’d like to go to the Bahamas, Poland, Barcelona, Bangkok. But today, this is my home. It is safe with no negatives. I like Roanoke. My clients are my family. … I am a citizen of this planet. My only fear is that I might stop growing.”

Jane Judah, co-owner of Court Accountings LLC in Roanoke, does not feel like an immigrant. But she was born and grew up in a troubled and dangerous Jamaica, the daughter of a Jamaican father (who took a British law degree) and a British mom. 

“In the 1970s,” she says, “Jamaica became very violent and everybody who could leave left. The country was cracking up.” Judah had just finished her first year of high school when, in 1976, the family immigrated to the U.S. 

“We didn’t know if we could get into the U.S., but we did. I had an uncle who went to Florida and one who went to Canada. We wound up in Hot Springs” because a friend of her father’s lived there and suggested it. Her dad had to pass the American bar before he could work as a lawyer.

Her strong dialect, which she calls “Southern Jamaican” set her apart for a while and “nobody expected a blonde.” Most Jamaicans are of African descent. But ultimately, she blended and found her way to Roanoke College (sociology). “It was a whole new world. I’d had 13 subjects in high school, but just six here.” She became an American citizen in 1993.

This past June, she married Curtis Worrell, a financial consultant, and the family still has a cottage in Jamaica. After school, Judah worked for law firms as a bookkeeper, paralegal, and firm administrator until she and colleague, Ann Hodges, founded Court Accounting in 2014. The company is involved with the administration of estates, trusts and conservatorships though its owners are not lawyers. 

“We created a monster” that lawyers told them couldn’t work, says Judah. “It’s one of two companies like it in Virginia. There’s one in Texas and one in California.” 

Both the Texas and California firms are run by women.

For her,  America was “a whole new world” and continues to be so.

If Stella Xu had remained in China, she’d probably “be a businesswoman [heading] a trading company,” she says. As it turns out, she is a top-level academic, teaching East Asian studies at Roanoke College. She came to the U.S. in 1999 to finish her master’s degree and study for a PhD, in “a more liberal environment” than was offered in Beijing. She wound up at Roanoke College in 2006, having finished her book-length dissertation. 

“I wanted a tolerant environment where I could say what I wanted to,” she says. In 2016, she published her first book, “Reconstructing Ancient Korean History.” 

“If I had studied in Asia, I would have seen it from the inside. Here, I think I was able to give a more nuanced view. … In Asia, it’s hard to be too critical of your own history. If you’re in China, you have to take sides with Asia.”

Xu became a citizen in 2019. She’s been married for 20 years to Jason Bai and has a nine-year-old son. At home, she speaks “mostly Chinese,” but “not to my son. I want him to speak perfect English, so we don’t teach him Chinese at all.” Ultimately, though, she would like for him to speak Chinese, she says.

Among the benefits of being an American, she says, “travel is easy. With an American passport, I can go to any of 184 countries without a visa.” 

What does she miss? “Authentic Chinese food,” though the Red Palace at Valley View Mall comes close, she says. She tries to visit China once a year, but in her new life, she says, “I’m very happy now.”

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