Framed onstage by American flags, Harris struck patriotic and bipartisan tones throughout her nearly 40-minute speech, continuing a weeklong theme for a Democratic Party intent on selling itself as the party of patriotism.

Loading

Harris, who has only 10 weeks to fully introduce herself to the American public before the election, also shared how her mother had travelled at age 19 from India to California, dreaming of becoming an American scientist.

She spoke of how her father, a student from Jamaica, had come to the United States. How he had fallen in love with an Indian American dreamer. How they had raised her and her sister to dream big dreams, too.

“Don’t be afraid,” her father had told her. “Don’t let anything stop you.”

She recalled how her neighbours in the San Francisco Bay Area helped raise her, and became her family by all but blood.

She also spoke of challenges – how her parents had split up, and how her mother worked long hours to make ends meet.

Loading

Harris’ rise to become the face of the Democratic Party has been at once slow and sudden. She spent the better part of two decades in prominent law enforcement offices in California. She served in the US Senate and, in 2020, ran for president.

But before President Joe Biden ended his reelection campaign on July 21 and the Democratic Party united behind Harris to be his successor, she had never been so squarely in the spotlight.

Her campaign now carries the weight of history. No woman has served as the country’s president. She is the second black presidential nominee from a major party, and the first South Asian American nominee.

Harris nodded towards those facets of her identity, but did not dwell on them. She said she was running for every American, without “regard for party, race, gender”.

The words “first ever” did not leave her mouth.

Still, she said she had seen how people could sometimes treat her mother, who was a “brilliant 5-foot-tall brown woman with an accent”.

When the time came to formally accept the nomination, she said she was doing so on behalf of the American people, her mother and “everyone who has ever set out on their own unlikely journey”.

As Harris turned her focus to the road ahead, her great-nieces sat in the front row, listening intently.

Harris vowed the United States would not return to the era of her opponent, Donald Trump. “We are not going back,” she said six times.

“We are charting a new way forward,” she said. She added, “This is personal for me.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.