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Speaker 1: This is an oral history interview for the Riverside Library community

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archive.

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Today is the 12th of March.

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Could you tell me your name and where you were born?

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Elena Vasquez: My name is Elena Vasquez.

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I was born in a small town near the coast in 1952.

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My father was a fisherman and my mother sewed clothes for the neighbors.

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Speaker 1: What is your earliest memory of that town?

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Elena Vasquez: The smell of the harbor in the morning, salt and diesel.

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My father would come back before sunrise and I would run down to the boats to see

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what he caught.

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If it was a good day, he would give me one small fish to carry home, like a prize.

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Speaker 1: When did your family decide to leave?

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Elena Vasquez: In 1968.

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The fishing was getting worse every year and my uncle had already moved to the city.

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He wrote letters saying there was work in the canning factory.

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My mother read those letters out loud at dinner, again and again.

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Speaker 1: How was the journey?

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Elena Vasquez: Long.

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Three days on a bus, then a train.

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I remember I was angry, because I had to leave my best friend, Lucia.

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Speaker 1: we promised to write every week, we did, for about two years.

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Speaker 2: And your first job here?

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Speaker 1: At 16, in the same canning factory as my uncle.

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I worked on the line, putting labels on tins.

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The forewoman, Mrs.

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Doyle, was strict, but she taught me English in the lunch break.

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I owe her a lot.

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Speaker 2: Is there anything you would like your grandchildren to know about that

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time?

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Speaker 1: That we were not poor in the things that matter.

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We had each other.

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And that every tin they see on a shelf was touched by somebody's hands.