The Places We Call Home podcast
#72.Immigrant or Expat? Neisha Young on Naming Ourselves
Jamaican scholar and assistant professor Nisha Terry Young joins me for a grounded conversation about identity, belonging, and the labels we inherit when we move to the United States. We explore the difference between immigrant and expat —and how those words quietly shape the way women migrants are seen, judged, and expected to perform competence in their new lives. Nisha shares how her identity as a Jamaican woman fuels her work, and how her decision to pursue a PhD became a direct response to the limiting narratives placed on immigrants in American schools. We talk about the quiet pressure migrant women feel to prove their value, the fatigue of constant adaptation, and the emotional cost of rebuilding identity in spaces where anti‑immigrant and anti‑Black narratives still sit in the background of everyday life. She also takes us home to Jamaica—its mountains, riverbanks, wood‑fire cooking, music, and mangoes—and reminds us how home stays alive through taste, sound, and small rituals that steady us when loneliness creeps in or when the grief of the old self shows up unexpectedly. This episode is for any woman navigating competence loss, language shame, identity whiplash, and the slow, uneven work of belonging in a new country. Part two continues next week.
