Lucía Robelo Oral History Interview, February 16, 2021

AUBREYANNA OLSEN: Alright, could you start by introducing yourself by giving your name, the time and date, as well as your current location?

LUCIA ROBELO: My name is Lucía Robelo and I'm in Corvallis, Oregon, where I live and I'm here with my student Aubrey Olsen. I'm working from my home because of the pandemic and we're also doing this interview via Zoom because of the pandemic, right?

AO: Perfect. Yeah, so as Lucía mentioned, my name is Aubrey Olsen and I'm also currently located in Corvallis. I am from my apartment at the moment. This interview is being recorded as a component of classwork assigned for the course, "The Hidden History of Women at Oregon State University." Once completed the 00:01:00interview will be deposited into the permanent historical record at the OSU Library Special Collections and Archives Research Center. The interview will also be described with a biographical sketch and interview abstract and detailed index and made freely available to the public through a dedicated web portal. During the Covid-19 era we are asking narrators to provide verbal consent rather than signing paper permission forms. Do you agree to allow this interview to be preserved, described, and made freely available online as indicated?

LR: Yes, I do. I thank you for this opportunity.

AO: Yes, I thank you as well for your time today. I'd like to start the interview off at the beginning. Could you tell me a little bit about where you grew up?

LR: I am originally from Nicaragua. I was born in Managua, the capital, and I lived there for the first 19 years of my life, 18 years of my life. I was the 00:02:00youngest of seven brothers and sisters and my mom was a widower. My dad died when I was really young: three years old. We lived in Managua, in a big house. I remember having a wonderful childhood. My mom was a very strong and authoritarian woman, but at the same time, by the time I grew up she was kind of mellow. She had mellowed out. My sisters used to tell me that she was nothing with me than she was with them when they were growing up. I remember spending a lot of time with my mom: she reading me stories, reading the Bible to me, reading books, reading the newspaper, all kinds of things. We used to travel 00:03:00together throughout Central America. Went to the theater together and just having fun. I think my mom with me kind of flourished, because when my dad was alive she had too many kids and she was a married woman so life was different. It's not that she didn't love him. She did love him but she kind of was a more mature woman and it was different. I do remember good times with my mom.

AO: Could you talk a little bit more about where you went to school growing up and your experiences with that?

LR: I attended a Catholic school where in Managua it was called Colegio Frances-Sagrado Corazon. It was a nun school and the nuns were from Belgium and 00:04:00they spoke French. We learned French. My mom had attended the same school but in a different town. The original school was in the town of Granada, in the city of Granada, and then they founded another school in Managua. There were two schools of that order. My mom was an alumni. She was also a teacher in the school. I had always interaction with my mom. She used to give me money for snacks during the recess and my classmates used to tell me, oh you're so lucky. Your mom is always here. They used to be jealous, kind of jealous. I went to school, the same school from kindergarten to graduation from high school. Then I attended a 00:05:00Jesuit university in Managua for two years. Those were times, very turbulent times. When I grew up, there was a fascist dictatorship in Nicaragua. It was called the Somoza Dynasty. It was really bad, but it was coming to an end.

By the time I was in college this was the time when this was ending. There were a lot of manifestations. The students were the ones who went ahead and just, as usual, like with the Black Lives Matter Movement, a lot of the young people participated. Young people are brave and they have principles and they want to 00:06:00change the world. That's what happened in Nicaragua as well with the dynasty of the Somozas. When the last part came to be, my mom decided that I shouldn't live in Managua. She sent me to live with my sister who lived in Honduras in Tegucigalpa. My brother had been killed by a policeman, not for doing anything wrong but because they targeted young people and this policeman was kind of drunk and he started shooting around in a celebration. Because my brother had been killed my mom was scared of what could happen and she was scared if I maybe wanted to be involved in the revolution, so she took me away and sent me to live 00:07:00with my sister. I started going to the university in Honduras. I was first studying ecology and natural resources in Nicaragua and then in Honduras they didn't have that so I studied biology. I studied there for three years in the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de Honduras in Tegucigalpa. I had a great time there.

AO: How would you say the transition was moving from Nicaragua to Honduras?

LR: It was okay for me. I was a young person who was really outgoing and made friends easily. I was just having a great time in Tegucigalpa. At the same time I was discovering boys, so I started having boyfriends there, and it was just a, 00:08:00I remember it as a great time. Then after three years my sister, who I was living with, with her husband, they used to work for the U.S. embassy and they decided that they would move back to the States. The opportunity came to come to the U.S. with them, and I did. By that time I was pregnant with my daughter. I'm a single mom, and my daughter was born in the States. I moved to the States in 1980, right at the end of 1979.

AO: In which part of the States did you move to?

LR: We went to live in Auburn, Alabama. My brother was associated with the 00:09:00Auburn University in the School of Aquaculture, Fisheries and Aquacultures. At that time, and I think still now, it was the #1 in the world school for aquacultures. My brother-in-law was doing a Ph.D. in Aquaculture and I lived with them just as I did in Tegucigalpa. My sister and my brother-in-law had twins. The deal was that I always helped my sister with her twins and she paid for my school and the same thing happened in Tegucigalpa, and the same thing happened in the U.S. I started school here in the U.S. again.

First I took English classes at Auburn and it was a lot of fun going to English classes. Then I started college in a community college and at that time, I'm 00:10:00talking about a lot of years ago, 41 years ago, they didn't have ESL classes. I got enrolled in English classes for English-speakers, which was odd because I didn't speak any English at that time. I could read. I could write because I had taken English classes all over throughout my life. But I couldn't speak. It was really hard at the beginning, but English was okay because they had a vocabulary class, vocabulary tests, things like that. I did okay. It's just speaking that was hard and then I took, I studied in that community college for about three years and I took some classes at Auburn. I started working with this friend of 00:11:00my sister who had lived in Guatemala and had a publication about the Mayas of Guatemala, middle America. I started working with computers in 1983 with this lady who I really appreciate. Her name is Cherri Pancake. She's a professor, a former professor, at OSU. She's semi-retired now.

AO: You mentioned that when you moved to Alabama you were pregnant with your daughter?

LR: Yes, I was.

AO: Could you talk a little bit more about your experiences with that and her early childhood?

LR: My sister, my brother-in-law had tons of friends in Auburn. All of those friends welcomed me. They gave me clothes from their little babies when they 00:12:00were babies. I never felt like I was being treated differently because I was a single mom. I felt like I was being nurtured and loved. I still have those friends. My daughter grew up really happy in the Hughes household, with the twins, her cousins. When my brother-in-law and my sister were. When my brother-in-law finished his Ph.D. they went to live in Panama as another assignment. I stayed in Auburn. At that time I was already working with a publication. It was a Spanish publication. I had had different jobs, like 00:13:00bilingual secretary. Once I learned English I took off, because I knew how to type. I did translations, different jobs, translation contracts. I was always busy working and earning money to support my daughter and I. It was good. It was hard but it wasn't a bad thing. Auburn was a small town and I didn't feel threatened in any way. It was a good experience living there. It was a college town. It was unlike any of the other towns in Alabama. I never lived in a different town in Alabama but I know what it's like, but Auburn was different because it was a college town and there were a lot of international students, so 00:14:00it was okay for me and my daughter. When we were there we were like maybe five or six Spanish-speaking families and then more people came to live there. By the time I left, we lived there for about 13 years, to come to Corvallis, there were maybe 50 Spanish-speaking families there.

AO: Could you share more about your experiences working as a translator and just what that was like?

LR: My sister worked as a translator and she-I saw what she was doing at home. Sometimes I read the documents as she was translating. She was sort of like a teacher for me in that regard. The kind of things that I did were like contracts 00:15:00for workers, things like that. The university had programs abroad, so I translated treatises between the university and other universities in Latin America. The word spread around that I had a translation business. I always had work to do and made good money. When my daughter was 12, my boss, Cherri, told me that she had accepted a job with Oregon State University. She had gotten a 00:16:00Ph.D. in Computer Science in Auburn after she came back from Guatemala where she had lived as a, she was working at a museum as an anthropologist and then it was the beginning of the computer things, so she really got into computers early on and the work that she had done with the museum, it was a textile museum, and she had created a database of the textiles. She could use her work there as her thesis, or her Ph.D. thesis, to get her Ph.D. in Auburn. She did, but then she encountered a lot of issues with being a woman because she was one of the first 00:17:00women in computer science. She started working with IBM and Intel and she's an amazing woman. She got an offer to come to Auburn, to OSU. You know what? I've been in Corvallis for 30 years and I still look at those two towns, Auburn and Corvallis, as the same. I mix the names. Sometimes I refer to Corvallis as Auburn and vice versa.

When Cherri got the offer, she said I'm going to move the office to Corvallis. I said, Corvallis? She said, it's in Oregon. I said, Oregon? I didn't know where it was. She said, you can come with me and we can look at the town and see if you like it. We came. I loved it. I fell in love with the trees, with the conifers. I said, yeah! I told my daughter that we're moving to Corvallis and 00:18:00been here since 1992 with my daughter. She was in middle school at the time. We had the magazine, the journal, here in a little office on Grant Avenue near 9th Street and we worked together there until maybe '96 or '97. At that time, they had a grant for publishing the magazine. The money was running out. So, she said we're going to close. I started working at the Migrant Education Program in Albany, working at the Linn Benton Lincoln ESD as a Migrant Education Assistant. My job was to be an assistant teacher for the Albany public schools. I visited 00:19:00nine schools during the week and I was in charge of meeting with kids in kindergarten or preschool. I met with the kids. The teachers wanted the kids to learn how to read or be prepared to read in Spanish and that's what I did. I met with them and their families. I taught basically, demonstrated to the moms what activities were conducive to their kids being prepared for school and be successful. That was a great job. I used to love it.

Then I worked at the health department in Linn County in a program called 00:20:00Healthy Start of Linn County. My job was visiting families. Many of the families were the same families I knew from migrant education and linked the schools, the families with the schools. When a new family came to town, my colleagues and I told each other, oh there's a new family. They live here. I helped them to enroll in school, helped them with translation or interpretation. Great, great job, great families. Very, very-we say in Spanish: entrenables. It means that they really get to, because of their kindness of heart. I still remember and have friendship with many of the families in Auburn [Corvallis]. I don't know if you want me to continue talking about that?

AO: Yeah. Actually I'd like to back it up really quickly. I'm just curious how 00:21:00your transition was moving from Alabama to Oregon?

LR: When we moved here, we didn't know anybody and we just knew Cherri. I remember being very frustrated with the streets of Corvallis because some of them went this way and some went the other way. That was the most frustrating part. Little by little I used to go to the grocery store and whenever I heard somebody speaking Spanish I used to approach them and say, where are you from? And this and that. I soon found out that most of the families that spoke Spanish were from Mexico and they looked at me saying, from what world are you coming from? Of course, from Mexico. Many people when they met me, they thought I was 00:22:00from Mexico because that was the most common origin for people in the West. I wasn't familiar with that until I moved here. Now there are many, many, many more Spanish-speaking families than there were when I moved here in 1992, but there were significantly more than there was in Alabama when I left there. I made friends at church. The friends that I have now are the friends that I made when I moved here. We've been friends for almost 30 years now.

AO: I also have another question for you-what has your experience been like as a woman of color in the United States?

LR: In the United States? I wasn't very conscious about any of that. My experience as a woman of color [gestures with air quotes], I never thought of it that way. I do remember, though, when I came in anytime I had to fill out a questionnaire or something they used to ask me what I was, if I was Hispanic. I remember being kind of annoyed because I said what is this obsession with what I am? I'm a woman and you know I'm a person. I do remember that. Later I found out that everything in the U.S. was that and that it was for reasons to allocate money and stuff like that, or at least that's what they told people. I don't know. But my experience, I'm one of the more privileged persons, I think, because I spoke English. I came with a visa, even though it wasn't a work visa, 00:24:00but I later obtained a work visa. I applied for political asylum, because of the issues that we were having in Nicaragua when I left. I had a cousin that was in politics. His name was Alfonso Robelo. Things got mixed up, and I felt that maybe if I went back I would be, not too safe. I went ahead and applied for political asylum and they gave me a work permit while my papers got approved. It took them about three years to answer.

I got a letter and in the letter they said that they denied the asylum and I 00:25:00needed to leave the country because the partition was going to be proceeded or something. I didn't leave. I didn't leave. I didn't have, at that time my work permit said indefinite but I assumed that I was working illegally. That was like a secret, a very, very dark secret that I had. It wasn't until several years after working for the journal that I told my bosses that I needed to work on a visa. I had hired a lawyer in Atlanta, that was before I moved here. I had hired a lawyer in Atlanta and he was an Indian lawyer, Mr. Krishnamurti [phonetic]. He was a really nice guy, very old. He said that he was going to charge me $2,000 00:26:00and I started paying him. He said, the best thing that could happen to you would be for the amnesty law to come to pass. I didn't know what it was but it was a law that passed and he said here is your money. He gave me all the money I had paid to him. He said, the law passed. You can now apply. You don't need a lawyer. I applied for my legalization and after a few years I got my residency in the U.S. but that was 1988 when I got my legalization papers in and 1991 when I got my resident card. When I moved to Corvallis in 1992 I was a resident for 00:27:00one year and everything was fine.

AO: After all of that how did you find your way to Oregon State?

LR: The only relation I had with Oregon State was through my boss because she was a professor in Computer Science and after work I worked in the little office she rented for us on Grant Avenue and everyday-I worked full-time there by myself, just editing publications in Spanish about the Mayans of Guatemala-everyday after work around 4:30 she used to come over and would talk about how the work was going and all of that. I used to enter texts into the 00:28:00computer and I also translated documents and I was a publications director. There was another office in Vermont and we sent everything through the mail. We sent the mechanicals, everything when it was ready to be published to the printers in Vermont and we received the journals when they were printed in the office, in here, in Corvallis. The only relationship I had with the university was through Cherri. She was the link. When Mesoamerica, that's what we used to call the journal, when the Mesoamerica office closed and I started working with migrant ed and Linn County health and then later in Corvallis in another 00:29:00program, my daughter was starting college. She decided to go to Oregon State. She started Civil Engineering. When I was working in the Corvallis schools one of the agreements I had with them when I was hired was to not to leave me without a job in the summer but to save some translation work for me so that I could work during the summer and have an income because you know how the schools work for ten months, but that didn't happen. In the first summer I started working in the Corvallis School District I found myself without work in the summer and that was really scary. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't get 00:30:00unemployment because I was supposed to go back to work in the fall, so they said technically I had a job but I didn't have an income. I was really upset and my daughter said, who was going to OSU, she said, "mom why don't you go and finish your degree," because I had still two years to go to finish my degree, which I stopped studying when my daughter was born and she said "Why don't you go back to school. You can get a Pell Grant because you don't have a job. You probably could in fact." I did. I did that. I applied for Oregon State.

I think it was in 2001 that I became a student. I wanted to go and study public 00:31:00health because I had been in biology before, but something happened when I applied. It was too late for public health. I said, "I need to get into school. I need to get into school," so I went to the Spanish Department and I applied for the Spanish Department and they gave me a test, the test that you take-what do you call it? The placement test. They said, you are bilingual and you cannot get credit for anything beyond third-year. You can start with third-year Spanish and you can be a student. I started going to school in Spanish and I did my BA 00:32:00in Spanish and then I did my masters in Spanish, adult ed in Spanish Lit. My daughter was going to school and sometimes we used to have coffee at the library, at Java II or Java I. It was fun [laughs]. Then she finished her BS in Civil Engineering and she started grad school at OSU also. Then she graduated and she moved to Boston and I was working on my masters at OSU. I finished my masters in '97 and one of my professors, actually two of my professors suggested that I apply for work in the Department, in Languages and Cultures, to be an instructor. I did and I got a job. I've been an instructor since '97. I started 00:33:00teaching first year Spanish and then I started teaching second year and now I teach third year Spanish and I also teach second year sometimes. I love it. I enjoy meeting with my students. I have a lot of respect for them. They work hard. I don't know, I just love working for OSU.

AO: That's awesome. Could you share maybe what has changed at Oregon State and in Corvallis since you started working?

LR: What has what?

AO: What has changed at Oregon State since you started working?

LR: Oh, many things have changed. I started working with the study abroad 00:34:00program in Chillán, Chile. I used to recruit and prepare and send the students to go there. That program is no longer there. The Global Opportunities Office has had a lot of changes, wonderful people there. I have met the most wonderful people there. They have had a lot of people coming in and out. We used to have a system for pay, for the payroll, which was like each person had their own administrator, each unit. Now we have a centralized system. We used to have different departments in the CLA school. Then right now we're WLC, World 00:35:00Languages and Cultures. We're part of the School of Language, Culture, and Society and that's part of CLA. Before we used to be part of CLA, but the School of Language didn't exist. School of Language Culture and Society didn't exist and now it's comprised of four schools. In some ways that's a good thing because we interact more with people in ethnic studies, anthropology and women studies that we didn't have that opportunity before. Now we meet together and they're wonderful people. But, yes, I have seen a lot of changes. Some of them have been really good and some of them are a little uncomfortable, like the administrative changes have been a little bit complicated to navigate sometimes, but the 00:36:00university's always trying to come up with better ways to serve the community, to link the community with the school and that's a great thing.

AO: Have you noticed any changes in the city of Corvallis since moving here?

LR: Yes. When I moved to Corvallis in '92, I remember going to Winco, which used to be called Cub Foods, like a bear cub. The area across from Timber Hill Shopping Center was a whole, like a forest. It was a forest, I mean it was incredible. Beautiful. I remember saying the day that thing goes I'm leaving Corvallis. Now, that's where I go to my physical therapy sessions. The Corvallis 00:37:00Clinic on Walnut is there, where they used to have that, I used to call it the vega de Corvallis. Vega is a whole bunch of trees and now it's Corvallis Clinic on Walnut Boulevard. That's one of the biggest, I think cutting trees is one of the biggest changes. Where I used to have the office of Mesoamerica on Grant Avenue, there was sequoia trees lined the whole street. I remember when they came to cut them. I cried. It took them months to cut those huge trees. Now you can only see a few of them by the Chevron gas station across from the Chevron 00:38:00gas station on 9th and Grant. There is maybe one, two, or three of those big sequoias there. But those sequoias lined the whole Grant Avenue all the way to the end. Now there's none. Just the ones by the Lock Doctor. Are you familiar with Corvallis?

AO: Yeah. It sounds like it was beautiful.

LR: Yes, more beautiful. Still beautiful, I mean Corvallis is an incredible city. I fell in love with this town the first time I came. I don't want to move, even though the climate has also changed a lot. We have more winter events nowadays than we used to have when we came. But I love it here.

AO: Yeah.

LR: I love being a part of the Corvallis and OSU community.

AO: Moving on to our next question, do you think you could share what your day-to-day looks like with teaching third-year Spanish students?

LR: We teach, instructors like me, Spanish instructors, teach four courses per term. One term a year we can take a course down because we do service. I do some service activities in order to get a course down once a year. This winter I decided to do my course down in the winter. I was having issues with my fingers, 00:40:00my carpal tunnel, and I decided that it was time to take my course down. It has helped incredibly. I'm feeling much, much better. What I do when I teach my four courses is that I usually teach either Tuesdays and Thursdays or Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays. Before the pandemic I used to have my classes in Kidder or at the Stag building, Batcheller, all around the university. I used to hurry up before each class to get to the next class. After the pandemic we moved to remote teaching and all my classes are taught via Zoom. I feel bad for the poor 00:41:00students because they must be sick and tired of Zoom because all their classes are via Zoom, or most of their classes are via Zoom. I'm not complaining about Zoom because I can teach from my home. I have my lunch in my kitchen. I got to the bathroom while during small groups, come right back and then when I'm done I'm home. But it can get old too, because you don't get a lot of interaction with people, but my days mostly are spent either in class doing preparation for class even though I have all my classes figured out in my calendar when I start a course, each day before class I do a little sheet in which I tell the students 00:42:00what we're going to do today and what's going to happen during the day. So, the order of the day. I do that before each class. It takes me about an hour and after class I have a snack or go to the bathroom or answer emails and then for my next class until I finish the day. When I don't have class, I do grading and prepare for the next term or update things in my courses. I'm always, always updating my courses if I have ideas. If I look at a course that I taught in my first year in Spanish at OSU I think it has nothing to do with what I'm teaching now, but I'm happy about all of those changes that I've done in my courses. 00:43:00That's, I think, the part that I enjoy the most about innovating, about having ideas for my classes.

AO: I'd love to hear a bit more about your experiences with Covid-19, both in the workplace and in your personal life.

LR: In the workplace because I'm so isolated here, I don't hear a lot about people who have had Covid among my colleagues. That's something that I never hear about. I do hear about my students. They tell me "I tested positive and that's why I'm not coming to class" and it's heartbreaking to hear that. I also hear about my students' relatives who have had Covid. I don't hear about any of 00:44:00my colleagues' relatives having Covid because we have meetings, my colleagues and I. We talk about the things that are related to work. We socialize a little bit but via Zoom is hard to do. It's order and business. With my students I feel like I have a more direct communication via email, so I've had an incredible amount of students who have either had Covid or their families have had Covid. I don't know if that's something students talk among themselves about-I'm sure they do.

Family-wise, I've had a cousin who passed away from Covid-19 in Nicaragua and 00:45:00I've had the father of a niece who died of Covid in New York, and I've had friends who have had it, too, friends who moved from Corvallis to another state and they have a lot more cases there than here. My best friends, the ones that I interact with here in Corvallis, we are terrified to come out and we haven't had it, but we're lucky because I'm able to work from home. I'm a diabetic, so I'm high-risk, so I feel very lucky to be able to work from home. Zoom for me is a lifesaver and I know that the students are tired of it but I'm pretty sure that 00:46:00we're going to be back on-campus during the fall because the vaccine and everything will be-I hope this vaccine helps. I got my first dose of it and I'm looking forward to my second dose, and without it I don't know what I could do, what I would do. I feel pretty good about going back to teach on campus with the vaccine. I think the students, everybody's ready to come back to campus. I haven't been to campus too much since the pandemic started and I went one time and maybe I've gone maybe four times since the pandemic. The first time I went after spring term it was really sad to see the campus so empty. It was during the summer and they had even vandalized some of the buildings. It was really sad.

AO: What was your experience like during quarantine when everything was really shut down?

LR: I was very scared. My daughter lives in Portland. My grandkids-I have two grandkids-one is six and one is three, Adrianna, who is six and Felix who is three, very close to them. I'm very close to my daughter, my son-in-law. I used to spend a lot of weekends there. After the pandemic I was here by myself. I've always been on my own, but it was a big shock not to be able to interact. I'm very-I can be on my own, no problem. But not being able to was a big difference. 00:48:00It was traumatizing in a way but I was doing it to be safe. I think everybody, we did what we needed to do. This winter I was getting worried that I was going to be depressed because of the low light and all of that. I started leaving the lights on all the time and it has helped. I also do a car ride in the morning. I drive around and it feels like a normal life, almost. I'm okay but it's been isolating. It feels isolating. I'm ready for the pandemic to be over, even 00:49:00though they say that it's not going to be normal for a while. I believe it.

AO: My next question for you is what would you say have been some of the greatest achievements in your life?

LR: I think what my greatest achievement in my life has been my daughter. She's brought so much joy and pride to me, to my life. She's always been a kid that I can be proud of. Whatever she does she's incredible. She's very smart. She's not only intelligent but she has the kind of smarts that she gets along well with people. She knows how to get along well with people. I don't know if you've 00:50:00heard the expression nobody can learn in another head. Have you heard that expression?

AO: Hmm-mm [shakes head no].

LR: I heard that. She can learn from other people's mistakes. She won't commit them. She's my greatest joy. Her name is Melissa. I think finishing my degrees has also been a big source of joy. When I started finishing, I knew I could finish my BA. I wasn't sure I was going to finish my MA, not because I didn't feel capable but because I had never thought about it. I did it and it was natural. The hardest part was not having time to do the work but at no point was 00:51:00the work difficult in the sense, "oh I cannot do this." "I could not finish this in the time I was given," was more like it. I don't know if that happens to you. Definitely finishing my education. It's very empowering. I don't feel I'm better than anybody because of it, because I'm not. But it's something that I was able to do and is rewarding. It's very rewarding.

AO: Of course. Yeah. Then on the flip side, what would you say have been some of the greatest challenges in your life?

LR: I guess providing for my daughter when she was little. That was hard. It was 00:52:00a challenge. I was lucky to have that job with the journal because my Spanish came in handy and I was paid well for it. I didn't have a degree to be paid the way I did, but because I was a bilingual person and they needed somebody who had great skills in Spanish I was able to get that job. But, sometimes I had to have more than one job when my daughter was little to make ends meet. I did translation work after work. Worked full-time and did translation work and things like that or on weekends. At the same time, I felt like I spent a lot of time with my daughter because I wasn't a person to go out a lot. We always, she and I were really close and I was working at home. She was being entertained. We 00:53:00played a little. Maybe making ends meet at the beginning when she was little had been the hardest thing. But it was a pleasure to do anything with her or for her.

AO: Lucía is there anything else that you would like to add before we wrap this interview up?

LR: I just wanted to say that I'm very lucky. I feel very lucky to have come to the States when I came because things got really bad in my country and also the immigration laws in the U.S. became so tough that people cannot come anymore and 00:54:00if you come you have no hopes of becoming a legal or documented resident. It's so hard for people. So hard. It's unbelievable. They criminalize you. You are a criminal for wanting to look for a better life for your family. Because I came when I came before all of these things started, gave me, I feel privileged. But it's unfair for a lot of people who want to do the same thing. I hope that things change. I have high hopes that things are going to change. Maybe a few months ago I didn't too many hopes but now I do. I think Hispanics contribute to the U.S. society in a way that people a lot of times are not ready to 00:55:00acknowledge. I don't know why I'm sort of teary-eyed, but it's hard to see what happens to some people. But I have no complaints about my life. I feel very lucky and sometimes being lucky means that you have tried really hard and I don't think you say that I never tried.

AO: Of course. Well, I really want to thank you for your time today. I know it was a pretty big time commitment you gave up today and I'm really appreciative. I had a great conversation with you.

LR: I really appreciate you having given me this opportunity to speak up about my life. It feels really, really nice to be able to do that and I really thank 00:56:00you for that opportunity and I just also want you to know that I enjoy having you in class a lot [smiles and laughs]. I have a lot of fun with you guys in class. I don't know about you but I do [laughs].

AO: [Smiles] I do, too. Definitely.

LR: I wish you good luck with everything and this project, too. If you need anything else, let me know.

AO: Of course.

LR: And let me know where I can see it.

AO: Alright.

LR: I can tell my daughter.

AO: Alright, I'm going to end the recording.

LR: Okay. Take care everybody [waves goodbye].