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Interview with Rosalina Gonzalez

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Interview with Rosalina Gonzalez Rafael E. Ortega Narrator Lorena Duarte Interviewer February 28, 2011 Saint Paul, Minnesota Rafael Ortega - RO Lorena Duarte - LD LD: Today is Monday, February 28, 2011. My name is Lorena Duarte and I‘m going to be conducting the interview today. I am here with Commissioner OrtegaProject in his office in downtown Saint Paul. This interview is for the Minnesota Historical Society‘s Latino Oral History Project. First of all, Commissioner, I know you‘re very, very busy, so, onSociety behalf of the Historical Society, I just want to thank you for taking the timeHistory and sharing your story with us. RO: Thank you to you and the Historical Society for choosing me. LD: If we could first start off with yourOral name and how to spell it… RO: Rafael, E for Enrique, Ortega. Historical LD: Can you tell us your date of birth and occupation, please? RO: January 8, 1952. LatinosI am Ramsey County Commissioner, Fifth District; representing the southern third of St. Paul, from Highland Park in the west to Dayton‘s Bluff in the east. LD: If we could just start off with a little bit about you family, where you were born, and the names of your parents,Minnesota and a little bit about their background. Lideres RO: My mother‘s name is Josephina. Nieves is her maiden name. My dad‘s name was Enrique Ortega. They were both born in Puerto Rico. My mom is from Utuado, which is in the center of the island, in the mountains. She grew up on a coffee farm. At one time it was coffee and sugar, but it is basically coffee. Of course it‘s in the rain forest, so you have mangoes, and plátanos, and guineos of all kinds, and naranjas. Everything grows there because it‘s a rain forest. My dad came from Aguadilla, which is close to the ocean. I‘m trying to think now; and I believe it would be the part of the island that would be facing more towards the Atlantic. My mother comes from a family of thirteen and my dad comes from a family of twelve. 32 My dad‘s parents died early and he came to New York. I‘m not quite sure of the age, but he was close to being a teenager. His older brothers and sisters brought him over. He‘s one of the younger members of his family. My mother is actually the youngest, the baby of thirteen. She came after high school to live with her older sister, so she came when she was already nineteen or twenty years old. LD: Where in New York? RO: On the Lower East Side of Manhattan. LD: Both of them? RO: Yes, from Fourteenth Street on down. If you‘re familiar with the island of Manhattan, Fourteenth Street is sort where it starts narrowing down towards the tip of the island where Wall Street is, so the Lower East Side. From east to west,Project you have the Lower East Side, and then you go into what was in those days Little Italy. You had the Polish neighborhoods, and then you had the Village. They came to live in those areas because those were, basically, where the tenements were. That‘s where most of the poor people lived - in the tenements. Society History LD: Tell me where were you born? RO: I was born in the Lower East Side of Manhattan in New York City. Oral LD: Do you have brothers and sisters? RO: I do. I have two brothers, Luis Ortega,Historical who is a year and a half younger than me, a sister Evangeline Ortega, who is nine years younger than me, and then my brother Mark, who is eleven years younger than me. Latinos LD: Tell me a little bit about what you were like as a kid. Did you like sports, school? What did you like to do? RO: Well, my mother went to Catholic schools in her hometown of Utuado, so she sent us to Catholic grammarMinnesota schools and high schools . Actually, when you look at it, I went to FordhamLideres University, which is a Jesuit university, so most of my education, except for one year, was in Catholic schools. I went to Brooklyn Technical High School for one year. First of all, there‘s a big difference, at least a nine-year gap, between my brother and I and my sister and younger brother. So it‘s almost like growing up in two different eras. My brother Luis and I grew up very poor. My dad was a merchant marine, so he would be gone sometimes for six or nine months at a time in the 1950s. My mother worked in a sweat shop factory. At the end of the school year in June, we were shipped to Puerto Rico and didn‘t come back until maybe the weekend or the week before school started in September. So we spent that time in Puerto Rico with my grandfather on the farm, and 33 with my grandmother and with the various aunts. Roughly, in my dad‘s family, out of twelve people, let‘s say that eighty percent lived in New York. With my mother‘s family, let‘s say eighty percent lived in Puerto Rico and twenty percent in New York, so we sort of grew up with both sides of the family in two different cultures. For Luis and me, Spanish was our first language. When we went into school in those days, there were no programs, so I didn‘t learn English until I was maybe in the second grade. That was when I felt at least I had a command of the language and could communicate in that language. Then, if you look at my two younger sister and brother, their main language was English, even though they are also bilingual. They speak Spanish. It was just two different worlds. LD: Sure. RO: Technologically, we didn‘t get a phone in our place until I was already in grammar school. We didn‘t get our first TV till I was already in first or second grade, while my other brother and sister grew up with that from birth. Project LD: Right. RO: There was a difference technologically and culturally and so forth. Society LD: What was it like growing up in the Lower EastHistory Side at that time? RO: Well, you know, the Lower East Side is part of the history. It was the port of entry until recently. In the twentieth century, that‘s the port of entry for any immigrant. When we grew up at that time, our predecessorsOral in that neighborhood, if you go back to the 1890s, you were talking about Irish and Italian immigrants and then you were talking about Jewish immigrants, and then after the war when Lithuanians and Polish refugees came in. Puerto Ricans were really the firstHistorical group of folks to immigrate via airplane rather than boat. Because of the proximity of the island to the East Coast, the population grew very rapidly. I think by the time I was in high school, there were well over 1 million Puerto Ricans in New York.Latinos But we were also very mobile, going back and forth, because of the airplane. So it isn‘t quite the same as other immigrant groups that sort of come and stay. If they come to Minnesota, for example, they might stay here several generations. We are highly mobile in that sense compared to other groups. LD: You went to CatholicMinnesota schools throughout. When did you graduate high school? Lideres RO: I graduated in 1970. LD: What did you do then? RO: Let me just follow something else up. LD: Sure. 34 RO: We grew up in the tenements. These were the tenements from the 1800s. There were four of us at the time, and as we grew up it was just a cold water flat. When I was born, in the two places we lived, there was no heat. That‘s number one. LD: Wow. RO: And there was no bathroom in the apartments. We used a common bathroom for the building, for the floor. So you had to go outside. The bathtub was in the kitchen. I grew up with that all the way until I entered high school. That‘s when my sister was born and we needed more space, especially since she was a girl. So we became caretakers of a Jewish synagogue. All through high school, my four years of high school my dad had come home from being a merchant marine. He worked for New York State in the hospital system. Eventually, my mother did, too. We couldn‘t get into the housing projects, and we couldn‘t live in the tenements anymore, because it was just too small, too constricting. So we moved into a Jewish synagogue. That was the first time my brother and I—I was in the ninth; he was in the eighth grade—ever shared a room just theProject two of us. First time we had a room and the first time we had an indoor bathroom. LD: And this was in? Society RO: In New York City, in Lower Manhattan. History LD: In what year? RO: Oh, this would have been 1966. AsOral I was growing up until, let‘s say, the time that we moved to the synagogue, my brother and I - starting from the first grade - walked to school. I think in kindergarten my dad or my mom would take us to show us the way, but from pretty much the first grade on, we walkedHistorical to school and back on our own.
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