Part of an interview with Nafeesa Sallee conducted by John Gyrgo on March 21, 2013. Sallee discusses her career transition to the banking industry, buying a home and when she first heard about the Westside.
Nafeesa Sallee oral history interview, 2013 March 21. OH-01621. [Audio recording] Oral History Research Center, Special Collections and Archives, University Libraries, University of Nevada, Las Vegas. Las Vegas, Nevad
English
I wanted to go back to school to get licensed as a surgical tech because I had worked in a hospital for 14 years. But I decide that I needed to be home for my kids, so I tried something new, banking. Once I got hired I was the oldest teller on the line. But I was okay with that, and I was okay with starting from the bottom because I knew I had to work my way up. It was interesting because I met many different women being trained to be tellers or new accounts or whatever they were being hired for at that time. This one particular time we were eating lunch and I was telling the ladies that we just purchased a house and one of the tellers said how did you buy a house? And I said with a down payment (thinking to myself like everybody else) and she said that she didn't know that I could a buy a house and that she thought most black people live on the Westside. I said, oh that's news to me and I didn't even know where the Westside was. That was the first time I heard about the Westside. After learning the history of Las Vegas, I found out that at one time that was how it was.