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    Usha Chilukuri Vance to Be the First Indian-Origin Second Lady of the US

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    As per reliable agencies, Usha Chilukuri Vance, the wife of JD Vance, has her ancestral roots to an Indian State-Andhra Pradesh. She is a Yale graduate and has a set of impressive credentials.

    A highly accomplished lawyer and the child of Indian immigrants, Usha Vance is known for her academic success. Her husband, J.D. Vance, is the Vice-Presidential candidate in Trump’s election campaign, who is now slated to be the second man of the US after winning the election along with President Donald Trump.

    When Trump was addressing a roaring crowd of his supporters at Palm Beach County Convention Centre in Florida, ahead of a historic election victory, he had heaped praise on his running mate JD Vance and his Indian-American wife Usha Chilukuri Vance.

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    President Trump had shared then, “I want to be the first one to congratulate — now I can say Vice President-elect JD Vance. And, his remarkable and beautiful wife, Usha Vance”. After Trump announced him to chants from the crowd, JD Vance told supporters, “We just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America.”

    Usha Vance’s Roots

    Usha hails from Vadluru, a village in Andhra Pradesh, India. Her family moved abroad over 50 years ago and has since contributed to the village by donating land for temples like the Sai Baba, Lakshmi Narasimha Swamy, and Goddess Bala Seeta temples, which were built for her village’s welfare.

    Villagers in Vadluru had offered prayers for JD Vance’s success in the election, hoping his victory will bring pride to the village and strengthen the relationship between India and the United States.

    Although Usha has never visited the village, her father, Chilukuri Radhakrishnan, visited his ancestral place around three years ago. He was there to check on the condition of the temples.

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    Usha, a Yale Law School graduate, is now set to become the first non-white Second Lady of the United States, after Donald Trump’s win.

    She is the wife of JD Vance, who is Ohio’s junior United States Senator and vice president-elect of the United States. Vance will assume the role of Second Lady of the United States on January 20, 2025. As such, she will become the first Indian American, Telugu American as well as the Hindu American to hold the coveted position.

    She had met her husband, J.D. Vance at Yale Law School. Both married in 2014. They have three children together. Vance had graduated from Yale University with a bachelor’s degree in history and from Yale Law School with a Juris Doctor degree. After law school, Vance served as a law clerk for multiple federal judges, including Chief Justice John Roberts, Judge Brett Kavanaugh, and Judge Amul Thapar.

    In 2019, Vance was admitted to the District of Columbia Bar and subsequently worked for a leading law firm handling civil litigation and appeals in cases involving higher education, local government, entertainment, and technology. She resigned from her law firm job in July 2024.

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    She had delivered the introductory address for her husband, JD Vance, at the 2024 Republican National Convention. Since then, she has been an advisor to her husband and often travelled with him to campaign events, and also occasionally appeared onstage with him.

    According to some sources, she helped her husband prepare for the vice-presidential debate. After the debate, she received some credit for his debate performance, which some political analysts considered “impressive”.

    In 2013, Chilukuri and Vance collaborated to organize a discussion group at Yale focused on “social decline in white America”. Vance often called Chilukuri his “Yale spirit guide”.

    Chilukuri and Vance married in 2014 in Kentucky, in an interfaith marriage ceremony. Her husband’s friend Jamil Jivani read from the Bible and a Hindu pandit blessed the couple. They have three children and reside in Cincinnati. She is a practicing Hindu, and her husband a Christian, who was raised Evangelical but converted to Catholicism in 2019.

    Strange, according to public records, in 2014 Chilukuri voted in Democratic primaries, but in 2022, she voted in the Republican primary in which her husband was a candidate.

    Her father is a mechanical engineer from IIT Madras and a lecturer at San Diego State University, and her mother is a molecular biologist and provost at the University of California, San Diego. Her parents are from the Telugu Brahmin community of the West Godavari and Krishna districts of Andhra Pradesh, India. Her paternal ancestry can be traced to Chilukuri Buchipapayya Sastri (c. 18th century), who lived in Saipuram in Vuyyuru Mandal of Krishna district, Andhra Pradesh. Later, one branch of the family migrated to Vadluru near Tanuku in West Godavari district of Andhra Pradesh. Usha’s mother, Lakshmi, is from Pamarru in Krishna district.

    Her great-aunt, Chilukuri Santhamma, living in Visakhapatnam, Andhra Pradesh, is considered India’s oldest active professor at age 96 as of 2024. She has authored a book based on the ancient Hindu sacred text, Bhagavad Gita. Usha’s paternal grandfather, Chilukuri Rama Sastri, taught physics at IIT Madras, and the institute now runs a student award in his memory. Her paternal aunt lives in Chennai.

    During her time at Yale, Vance volunteered in local elementary schools, served as a Girl Scouts troop leader, and became the editor-in-chief of ‘Our Education’, an education policy publication. After graduating, she taught English and American history as a Yale–China Teaching Fellow at Sun Yat-sen University in Guangzhou, China. Vance then attended Clare College, Cambridge, in England, as a Gates Cambridge Scholar, receiving a Master of Philosophy in early modern history in 2010.

    Usha Vance’s parents immigrated to the U.S. from India in 1986. She was born in San Diego and raised in an upper-middle-class suburb. Usha’s great-grandfather left Vadluru.

    Her father was raised in Chennai before pursuing further education in the U.S. Usha Vance’s story is representative of the growing Indian American community.

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