RI Latino Voices | Voces Latinas

[00:00:10] Wow, that's 1978. My mother was raising six kids, a single mom in Brooklyn. 1978 was the Summer of Sam in New York City. It was the winter of the big blizzard. And it was also the blackout in New York. So, before another plague beset the city, my mother decided we needed to move out.

[00:00:37] We learned about Providence, through a family that were the supers in the building that we lived in. Their daughter got accepted to Brown and they came to bring her one summer and ended up staying. So, when my mother talked to Gloria and Orlando, she, you know, they said, no, you need to come here. The jobs are plentiful. The rents are cheap. And you can't raise those boys by yourself in New York. It's not a good place. So we came up to visit one Labor Day weekend and try as I might in the ensuing years to escape, they kept bringing me back. So we've been here since then.

[00:01:10] And it was, it's, Providence and Rhode Island have been really a tremendous experience for myself and my family. Really provided us with opportunities that I don't think we would have had had we stayed in New York.

[00:01:23] Providence, at that time, was really an evolving city. It was a city kind of struggling with itself and what it was going to be and how it was going to achieve that. I mean, there was still largely ethnic city, Irish, Italian, ah, African Americans, the East Side. But in the neighborhoods, there was the beginnings of these struggles, these shifts with ethnicity and new people coming in and the fears that always come along with.

[00:01:54] I remember we used to, there would be at very narrow confines. There were certain neighborhoods that we could go in, certain neighborhoods we could play basketball in, and certain neighborhoods that if we ventured too deep into, we ended up getting chased out. So it was a city not really prepared to deal with this change.

[00:02:15] The other part of the political landscape, which is often is the case with newcomers, is we weren't participants, we weren't active participants making political decisions in the city. We were far too often the victims of those decisions.

[00:02:30] And yeah, it was, it's always hard to be the first. And many of us that came around that time were fleeing New York for one reason or another. Coming to Providence, coming to Pawtucket, coming to Central Falls, and encountering some real cultural differences and cultural norms that we weren't accustomed to.

I can remember in the summertime, growing up in New York, sitting on the fire escape at one, two o'clock in the morning because the apartment was too hot to sleep. And on the street below, there were people playing dominoes on garbage cans and neighbors sitting out front, the fire hydrant on and kids running around, trying to stay cool. In some parts of Providence, once the sun went down, you didn't see a soul, it was a vastly different experience. Public transportation wasn't what it was in New York or what we were accustomed to, so the need to get a license, the need get a car, to be able to drive to be able to go to work and get to appointments became a necessity. In New York City, a car is a luxury at that time. In Providence, cars are a necessity.

[00:03:42] There weren't … you know, I had the real interesting experience that I was old enough that I could understand and I was fairly bilingual, so I became like the neighborhood interpreter for all of my mother's friends who needed to go from everything to a utility to a state office and needed someone to interpret because there weren't interpreters in any of those offices. They didn't feel there was a need at that point.

[00:04:07] So, when you look at... It's interesting to look at what Rhode Island has become today and view what it was, and far too often we sort of view it from today's lens, not understanding what folks had to struggle through and fight for. So, it's a very different place, it's been a place that's given many of us opportunities that we probably would not have had had we not come here.

[00:04:34] And I've lived here all these years, and ... On many occasions, I still don't consider myself a Rhode Islander, but my kids are and they struggle with that. You know, it's, they were both, they were all born here and have all known nowhere else, this is where they have lived their entire lives. So, what I hope for them and what I think is different from my experience is that they're from here, they are full-fledged Rhode Islanders. I sort of feel like I'm the first group that immigrated here, still struggling with whether I'm a New Yorker or I'm a Rhode Islander. But, my kids are full-fledged Rhode Islanders. And they enjoy Carolinas on Broad Street as much as they enjoy Iggy's in Oakland Beach. They like the Dominican Festival as much they like going to the Charlestown Seafood Fest. And that's what it means for them at this time to be descendants of Latinos having been born and living in Rhode Island, it's the best of both worlds, that sancocho cultural experiences and understandings.

[00:05:47] And I think that all my kids understand that it was not always like this. And I take great care to explain to them that it was not always easy. Abuela had it hard when she came here and struggled with the language, and struggled with not knowing it, and it was far too often people made it more difficult than it needed to be to able to get the things that every family should have, that every family’s needs. And all my kids are real sensitive to that. And because of that we feel a sense of obligation that we have to help others, that we have to make it a little bit easier, make it better, leave this place a little bit better than we found it.