Mollie McAlpin
Dance and Culture 1010
October 17, 2011
Life History Interview
I chose to interview my neighbor Jelena from Serbia for the life history report. I have
known her and her husband, who is an American, for about 5 years now and thought she would
be perfect to interview. I thought she would be a good candidate because I could comfortably ask
her questions without offending her and get honest answers. My dad and I have been invited over
to celebrate Easter and Christmas dinners before so I already knew some different customs, like
the food, from Serbia and I knew that it was a huge part of her life and she wanted it to be a big
part of her children’s life also.
I also picked her because I am interested in the war that broke apart Yugoslavia. Growing
up I had a family of friends from Bosnia and heard about their country becoming a country again
(separating from Yugoslavia) and how terrible the war was for them. The family moved here to
get their children away from all the violence that was taking place because of the war. It was a
husband and wife with an oldest son and three younger daughters, who were all my very good
friends. I would have interviewed one of them but they live back in Bosnia. They were the
family whose son did the shooting at Trolley Square and after that they were afraid to stay here
in Utah and the United States and moved back to Bosnia a few months after.
Jelena was 30 years old when she signed up with an agency back in Serbia to come to the
United States with some friends on a work visa. The agency would then find job positions open
in the United States, mainly seasonal jobs like the Deer Valley Lodge in Park City. She paid the
agency about five thousand dollars to come work in the United States for six months. Once in the
U.S. she explained you can apply for an extension on your work visa every six months to stay in
the U.S. if you are approved. The agency picked where she was going, she didn’t pick Utah and
did not intend to stay in the United States but just to make extra money and travel. She explained
that it wasn’t an hour before the flight took off that she found out she was going to be
working/staying in Utah.
Back in Serbia she learned some English in high school so she did not have such a hard
time with the language barrier once she arrived in Utah. She described how lost she felt once
arriving at the Salt Lake International Airport; she didn’t understand what a shuttle was. Her
instructions were to find the shuttle for her specific hotel she would be staying at for 2 nights
then would be taken to job, but no one arrived for her. She said someone at the airport helped her
get in touch with the hotel and called a shuttle for her. She remembered laughing when the
“shuttle” arrived and it was just a minivan!
Through the agency they got her a job and a place to stay through her six month work
visa. She was employed at Sorelle River Ranch in Moab, Utah. She worked mainly as a cleaning
lady, cleaning the rooms, restaurant, and bathrooms. She said the work experience sucked, the
boss gave all the “immigrants” the worst jobs and had them work over there hours without extra
pay. She explained that some of the workers were housed six in an apartment where his favorite,
harder working people like Jelena only had one to two roommates. Her boss liked her so much
because of how hard she worked, (sometimes putting in 15 hours a day) wanted to have her stay
and work for him another six months so she ended up working there for a year and that is where
she met her husband.
Jelena got pregnant with a little girl and after that someone from the agency or the visa
department here told her boyfriend/baby daddy you better marry your girlfriend or she will be
deported back to Serbia. So soon after their daughter was born they got married. She now has
dual citizenships and so does her two children, they just had another baby. Both children are
recorded as being born to Jelena back in Serbia so they both have United States and Serbian
citizenship which I thought was really cool. There newest baby, a baby boy hasn’t even been to
Serbia but he has citizenship automatically because of his mom.