La Broa’ began, as many of the most meaningful projects do, with a question.

I have spent much of my life collecting other people’s stories. Through oral history, I have sat with elders, workers, artists, immigrants, and families across Rhode Island, listening as they spoke about their lives—often for the first time. Over the years, I have come to understand something fundamental: if you don’t ask, the stories remain silent.

What I hadn’t fully realized was how true that was for me.

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On tortillas, memory, and how culture survives

After writing about my early years in Rhode Island—about absence, searching, and eventual arrival—I kept thinking about tortillas. Not as a story I had already told, but as something that refused to let go of me. What stayed wasn’t just the hunger, or the cafeteria, or the can. It was the realization that food had been the first language my body used to understand loss, and later, belonging. This is not the story of finding tortillas. It’s the story of what they came to mean.
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Years later still, that continuity found its way onto a stage.

Earlier this year, Orlando Hernández wrote a play called La Broa’ where he took my tortilla story and allowed it to change. In the play, the character who represents me lets her roommate taste the tortillas. In real life, I never did. But theater makes room for connection. On stage, the tortillas fail spectacularly. They laugh. They spit them out. What was once isolating becomes communal.

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A lifeline called Journalism

During those years, journalism became my lifeline. I found an internship at WPRI TV-12 after applying for a position that was labeled “minority.” They meant African American. I applied anyway and was hired. I stayed through my junior and senior years and was hired after graduation. I learned production, camera work, the mechanics of television news.

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The Market that Meant we had arrived

That search eventually led me to Sánchez Market.

I discovered it in 1993, and I remember the moment clearly—not because the store was large or polished, but because of who stood behind it. Enrique Sánchez. He was one of the first Mexicans I met in Rhode Island, and he made me feel at home. That mattered as much as what was on the shelves of his store.

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I didn’t know what Rhode Island was

I arrived at Providence College in 1976 on a full scholarship. I knew where Rhode Island was, but had no idea what to expect. Other students had visited campus, attended orientations, chosen roommates. I arrived alone—from Texas, from the border.

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