Realizing We Were Here
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, but I applied anyway and was hired. I stayed through my junior and senior years and was hired after graduation. I learned production, camera work, and generally the mechanics of television news.
Eventually, one assignment changed everything: I was asked to be film crew for a short Spanish-language program called Nuevo Horizontes. Through that show, I met Gioconda Salazar and for the first time, I realized that Latinos did exist in Rhode Island—even if I hadn’t yet found them in my daily life. That realization mattered because it told me that I wasn’t imagining my isolation. It told me there was more here than what I could see.
Coming Back With Different Eyes
After college, I spent several years in Washington, D.C., working in journalism and later at Gallaudet University. Then, in 1988, I returned to Rhode Island. This time, I came back with intention. I took a position with the Hispanic Social Services Association (known as HSSA), and once again I went searching—but now I knew what I was looking for.
By the early 1990s, I wasn’t just looking for tortillas anymore. I was looking for Mexicans, for people like me. People who carried the same references, the same absences, and perhaps the same unspoken understandings. There were very few of us then—fewer still who had arrived directly from Mexico, carrying our own foodways and histories, not filtered through somewhere else first but, from a border city, like me.
When I asked where I could find other “Hispanic” people, they told me to go to Broad Street. I walked it up and down, looking for tortillas, looking for something familiar. I didn’t find Mexican food—not yet—but I heard Spanish. I also saw signs in Spanish and for the first time since leaving El Paso, something settled in my body and started to feel closer … to home.
Proof, Continuity, and What Remains ➤
