“We felt unwelcome…this real estate agent took us to show a house in Main Line. He went and showed us a very dilapidated, what do you call, house. Because he knew they wouldn't accept us. That is very wealthy neighborhood, Mainline. That I remember.”

“The morning we take some change and go to the SEPTA… we go up to Erie Avenue, we get down, we walk, we look—yeah, there is a factory! We go there and ask them, ‘Hey, do you have any opening here?’ …some people see us, say ‘No, no, no opening.‘”

“There was a corner office, there was a vice president sitting there…I used to walk around and say, ‘My God, I wanted to sit in that office one day’…that created a passion and desire. That was God’s amazing grace.”

“Five people were staying in an apartment where there is one bedroom… two of them were working night shift, and two of them were working day shift, one is working evening shift.”

“As time passed, I was not able to tolerate certain things, political or otherwise, that happens in India. And every time I go back, I felt like that I should not come back here. [Laughs]”

“I just wanted to do something for me and I wanted to leave something for my children.”

“I was going to the cafeteria, and people would look at me as though I came from a different planet, because they're not used to seeing somebody who didn't look like them.”

Sherry Thomas (she/her) is Kerala born and Philadelphia grown, having grown up in the city and completing her B.A. in International Relations from the University of Pennsylvania and her J.D. from Temple University. She is passionate about issues of social and economic justice and currently combines both in her career as a public interest lawyer. She works at the Legal Clinic for the Disabled (LCD), where she is the Director of LCD’s Housing Initiative, which focuses on tenants rights, defense and eviction prevention. She has also recently worked as a legal consultant with International Justice Mission (IJM), a global organization partnering with local justice systems to end violence against people living in poverty. Additionally, she worked with IJM overseas as a Legal Fellow focused on anti-trafficking efforts, specifically in the area of bonded labor. Sherry grew up in the Marthoma Church in a tight knit Malayali community in Philadelphia. Her lifetime within this community informs her project, which focused on collecting the stories of Malayali American Christians living and working in Philadelphia, over several generations. Specifically, she explored the blueprint that the Malayali American Christian immigrant experience has followed in the past and how the blueprint has changed and stayed the same over time into the present day. Malayali Americans have contributed deeply to Philadelphia and Sherry hopes through archiving and collecting these stories, these contributions may not be forgotten and that we gain a rich understanding of what it has meant to be a Malayali American in Philadelphia over the decades.

The Philadelphia Fellowship is made possible with support from The Independence Public Media Foundation.