Kamala Harris spent much of her childhood living in a modest, yellow house in Berkeley, California. But as she campaigns for president, she calls herself a “daughter of Oakland.” The residents there say they get it.

High above an arena packed with Democratic delegates in Chicago last week, a video introduced the life story of Kamala Harris to the world.

“Behind me is where it all began,” said her childhood friend, Stacey Johnson-Batiste, standing in front of a charming yellow, two-story home where Ms. Harris grew up in a small apartment above a nursery school.

But where was that exactly? The screen simply read “East Bay,” as in the eastern section of the San Francisco Bay Area that sprawls over 1,400 square miles and is home to nearly three million people. Ms. Harris called the area just “the bay” in her speech on Thursday night. Other speakers throughout the week referred to Ms. Harris as hailing from Oakland, the East Bay’s largest city.