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And now, from the University of Chicago Institute of Politics and CNN Audio, the Axe Files, with your host David Axelrod.

Until the past few months, Congresswoman Pramila Jayapal was named few Americans could identify outside of the folks in the Seattle District She represents.

But in the past few months Jayapal, the chair of the Progressive Caucus in Congress, has emerged as a central player in negotiations over President Biden's economic package.

Born in India raised in Indonesia, Jayapal has a most remarkable personal story.

I sat down with her earlier this week before a virtual audience at the University of Chicago Institute of Politics to talk about her journey and the state of play in Washington during a critical period for the Biden presidency.

Here's that conversation.

Congresswoman Jayapal, welcome. We had hoped to see you in Chicago, but you've got a big day ahead of you there in Washington.

I do, and I wish I could come back. You know, I lived in Chicago for a couple of years, so it has been home to me, and hopefully we'll make that happen soon. But I'm glad I could do it virtually.

Look forward to that. You're there for the signing of the of the infrastructure bill, the long awaited signing of the infrastructure bill, and you were very instrumental in the process of getting that past.

We'll talk about that later. But so everybody's come to know you in the last few months as the leader of the Progressive Caucus.

But your story is quite remarkable, and I don't think people know that, and I'd love to start there starting with your birth in Chennai and in India.

Talk about your early years before you came here, which was when you were 16 years old.

That's right, David. I was born in Chennai at the time. It was called Madras, and I lived in India for about five years.

And my mom is a teacher, teaches English, and my dad actually worked for an oil company, then called SO. And back then, this was 1969, 1970, there were very few people that left India.

I mean, it was considered a crazy thing to do, but my father had the travel bug. And he said to his company that he would love to go what was called overseas. And so he was posted to Jakarta, Indonesia.

This was 1969, 1970. There was one hotel, actually maybe two hotels in downtown Jakarta at the time. It was mostly patty fields, rice fields, not at all developed. And I went to school there at an international school for almost 12, 10 years in between, spent two years in Singapore.

And my family was a kind of a middle class family, but not a lot of savings. And for whatever reason, my father decided that America was the place that I was going to get the best education.

And he always talked about America and what opportunity America offered. And so when it came time for me to go to college, he had actually gone through a really tough time. He had lost his job.

But he always said, I'm going to send you to America for your college education. And that is what he did. He took his 5,000 bucks and he sent me over here by myself. So I landed at 16 years old with two suitcases, you know, in this new country.

I want to talk about what that was like, but first you mentioned your mom was a teacher. You your family had a lot of highly educated people. You had a lot and particularly among women, you had some real role models. I think your grandmother may have been one of them.

And she was great aunt actually. So this was my grandmother's sister. My grandmother was amazing. Also she just finished high school got married very, very young and was remarkable, you know, played tennis, did all these things that indeed women and sorry, we're not supposed to do back then.

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