Raquel Medina

Most of all be true to who you are. Be truthful with yourself. As long as you feel comfortable with yourself and you’re proud of who and what you are, don’t let nobody stop you from reaching what you believe for and what you want for of your life.

Raquel Medina

Hello my name is Raquel Medina-Perez. I was born December 27, 1969 in the beautiful island of Puerto Rico. I lived there most of my life. I grew up in what you would call a farm here. It’s a little bit different there on the island. There were a lot of rivers, streams, caves, so, I did have a great childhood growing up there.

We were like fourteen cousins around the same age so we have a lot of friends to go out. We used to play hide-n-seek in the caves. Most of the time we spent outdoors. We don’t have snow or our winter is not as cold as it is here in Minnesota. We have summer-like weather so we could spend out time in the rivers or on the beaches and pretty much enjoy ourselves outside.

When I grew up we didn’t have computers. We only had one black & white TV in the home and we didn’t have cable so it was pretty much like two to three channels. We were able to watch TV for maybe an hour. But really we had so much fun outside we didn’t care about watching TV.

My family didn’t have a lot of money. We only got toys if it was our birthday or during Christmas time. Even Christmas was different, like of what you celebrate here. We didn’t have Santa Claus. I didn’t grow up believing in Santa Claus.

I grew up believing in the three Wise Men that is January 6th so we were expecting out gift on January 6th. What we would do is we would go outside the night before and we would gather grass on a shoebox. We would put that shoebox under the bed with a bucket of water so the camels would eat the grass and drink the water while the Three Wise Men would give us presents.

Sorry, I’m a little bit nervous. I have three brothers and one sister. I am the oldest of five siblings. My parents moved here to Minnesota about 16 years ago. They moved here before I did.

For me being the oldest, it was a little bit hard because we, well, in our island, we didn’t count on babysitting so the oldest siblings or relatives would take care of the other kids. So I did have to wash a lot of cloth diapers for my youngest siblings. I have nine nephews and nieces. They all live here in Minnesota.

When I was in high school it was a very wonderful year for myself. We have this senior pageant where we choose our queen. It was a very big event in our hometown. We didn’t have enough money to pay for somebody to do the choreography and set up the whole pageant so I was chosen to do the choreography. It was the first time in the history of the school, actually the history of the whole town that a student was designing the stage, the costumes, and doing the choreography for the pageant. It was something really cool that I did while I was in high school.

Also, like I said before, we didn’t have a lot of money. We didn’t have enough to spend on lot of resources to study.

When I was in first grade, I remember I had to walk like twenty-five minutes. I would have to walk down the hill, across the stream, through a sugar cane field, then keep going down the hill until I get to my school. That was with five thick books, five notebooks and everything else in a little backpack.

We didn’t have buses at that time to pick us up right on the corner of the house or a block from the house. We always had to walk to school. It doesn’t matter if it was raining or just. Sometimes we had to go at six a.m and in the wintertime, it was very, very dark at that time. If you didn’t have any other students close that would go with you, you had to do that alone, by yourself.

Here it is a little bit different. At least I don’t let my kids go even a block by themselves in the dark. We felt very safe where I grew up. Pretty much everybody was family or the neighbors were uncles, aunts, and cousins. Around twenty-five families there and we were all related.

So when I went to middle school, I had to walk even farther. It was like a forty-five minute walk. And the hills there were very different. It’s not fun to go up the hill with all those many books. And then when I get to high school, then we could get the bus, but we still had to walk probably five-ten minutes to the bus stop.

The bus would come down, if the bus was full—here’s the bus driver, (waves) “See you later!” And we still had to walk. But sometimes the bus driver would just go by and there was a bunch of kids together and we did have a lot of fun walking all together. We would sing, we would push each other. We would do pranks to the houses along the road.

Like I said before, I did have a lot of fun growing up. I really had a wonderful childhood. My grandparents live in a house in the middle of the farm. My aunt in one corner, my other aunt in the other. We were very, very close, our family.

One of my favorite games was when somebody would buy a new fridge or washer, they had this big boxes. We would use the boxes, we’d get like four or five of us in the boxes and go rolling down the hill. Sometimes we’d even put a dog in there—poor dog—all you could hear was the dog whining because we were all over the dog, but that was fun, too.

We had different palm trees there. One of the palm trees have huge leaves. When that leaf falls, sometimes it’s five to six feet long and it will dry and sometime it look like a sled. So we would use that and we would go down the hill with that. So we did sledding; it’s not the same as here with the cold, but we did sled down the hills.

Sometimes on the river that we have there, there was like three different waterfalls. One of them, it was a huge rock and the water would fall right in the middle, it was like a pool. Some of the bravest ones would go with one of those things, we call jagua. We would go to the top of the rock and we would slide right into the middle of the river. And that was a lot of fun. I remember we could run on a lot of rocks and our feet would not hurt. Now if I go back there and try to do the same thing, I would be like, “Ouch, ouch” because my feet are not used to the rocks anymore.

I had a lot of different farm animals. I grew up with horses, cows, everything. I even had a pet goat. I remember the goat, I don’t know how, I guess it’s animal instinct; it’s amazing. The goat will know what time I would be back from school so the goat would wait for me right on the corner of my grandparents’ house. And it would be looking for me to come. As soon as it looked at me, it would go running around my grandparents’ house so I could go chase her. After a while, if I get too tired because believe me, woo! walking around that much, you get tired. I would stop and then it will kind of hide from me to see if I’m gonna chase her or not. Then after a while she said, Nope she’s not gonna chase me so she would come and she would come and start pushing me with her tiny, tiny horns. She would push me so I could pet her and all that.

My sister had a rooster as a pet. We had a cat and one time we went on vacation for a week. When we came back the cat looked at us and go like this (turns head quickly to side) and she went to sleep in one of my brother’s rooms. She slept there for almost two weeks because she was mad at us.

Then she decided we were the only ones who were nice to them. My brother would hear my uncle’s stories about the witches at night would go and they will turn into cats. In order for them not to turn into cats, they would cut the left part of the left ear. So my brother did once. At least he tried. But the cat was too fast for him. He still has the marks on his arms from the cat trying to run away from him.
After I went to high school, I went to college. I wanted to work in the travel industry so I went for travel and tourism. I worked as a travel agent as the manager of a travel agency for many, many years. It was amazing. I had the opportunities to travel to other islands in the Caribbean. And some other places and other countries for very, very little money otherwise I couldn’t afford it. I went to cruises. I had the chance to go to Disney for the first time. I did have a lot of fun. I met people from all over the place from all different countries.

After a few years, I met my husband. When I met my husband, he told me he was a boxer. He was so skinny, so tiny, I just laughed. “You are a boxer?” When somebody mention a boxer, you probably think the guy’s big and all that. You wouldn’t think a tiny little person like that. I just laughed at him.

Then a month later here comes my dad with a newspaper. “Look who’s on the newspaper?” It was him! He was making the Puerto Rico Olympic Team. He was part of the National Team. I said, “Oh, he was telling the truth.” Then I started learning boxing. After that we traveled around the island to see other people also. I never liked boxing, but just because I didn’t like it, I wouldn’t tell him, “You know, you have to stop boxing because I don’t like it.”

He start boxing since he was six years old. He came from a tough neighborhood. Boxing was a way to take him out of the streets. Through boxing he had the chance to travel all over the world. He went to the Woodwill Games. He’s been to Cuba several times, South America. Pretty much every continent.

When we got married, he went to the Pan-American games in Argentina. I couldn’t go there, but I saw him on TV. It was very nice to see him there. And when he won a silver medal it was such an honor for us. We were very happy for him.

After that he went to the Summer Olympics in Atlanta and that’s the first time I came here to Minnesota. My parents were already here and it was the summer of ‘96.

Because I was going to spend a few months here, I tried to get a part-time job. I decided to go work at Camp Snoopy; it was still Camp Snoopy at that time. When I got here and I saw the Mall of America, I thought, “It’s really true.” It’s so huge. I never seen something like that and then there was an amusement park right in there. I never got to see that, either.

One of the days I was working there, there was commotion all around. They were filming the movie, “Jingle All the Way.” I got to see Arnold, I don’t know if I can pronounce his last name—the governor of California. I got to see that very person! And also Sinbad! Oh, my goodness. I had to call Puerto Rico, all my friends, and say, “You’re not going to believe this, this is who I saw. It was here where I was working.” It was a very wonderful experience.
Because I came here in summer, and saw all the wonderful things, I say, “I’d love to live here in Minnesota.” I never seen snow before. We were planning to live in Minnesota.

When I went back to Puerto Rico after the Olympics, my husband got a boxing contract in California. So instead of moving to Minnesota, we had to move to California. We were living in East Los Angeles. That was a shock for me. It was culturally very different. They have a lot of Hispanic people, which I thought it would be easier for me, because Spanish is my first language, that’s my native language.

I thought it would be easier for me to communicate with the Hispanic people in California. But when I started speaking my Puerto Rican Spanish, people were looking at me like, “Where does she come from?” They couldn’t understand my words and I couldn’t understand most of their words. Even though we speak the same language, there’s a lot of different words that means very different from each of our countries. It took my a while to get used to the accent and to the way of living there.

In Puerto Rico I could pretty much sleep with my doors and windows open and I know nothing was going to happen. All were family, even the neighbors were family. So nobody really was going to get into the house. But when I moved there, I had to be all the time inside the house. I didn’t know anybody and it was dangerous to go outside. I had to use a key to go everywhere. I had to use a key to go to the pool. I had to use the key to get my mail. I had to use a key to go to the garage. A key to go outside and there was only one key. My husband was using the key so I had to stay home and I couldn’t go anywhere.

Most of the people outside, I love to make friends. So I will go outside when I have the time to see if I can see one of my neighbors so I could introduce myself. You know, start making friends.

When you go to a different place, the best thing to start knowing the things around you is to at least find one friend. You find one friend and you’re going to make sure that you keep finding friends. But I couldn’t really do that because most of the people were working, working all the time. They’d get home late and they’d have to take care of the house and on the weekends everybody was out. It was very hard from me.

I spent six months without even knowing my downstairs neighbor. Then I started going with my husband to the gym. Then I started making friends and I started going out and I knew about the Puerto Rican parade in California so I get in contact with the people that were organizing the Puerto Rican parade there.

Once I started getting there, they start asking me to help out during the day this and all that. I start volunteering there. I start knowing a lot, a lot of people. And I start to learn something else. I will have to get in contact with people in the government and the people in the community there.It was learning a new job for me. Even though it was volunteering; I was not getting paid for it, but I think of it as getting paid in knowledge. I learned to do a lot of things that otherwise I never would have learned by volunteering there.

Then my daughter was born and I know a lot of you know my daughter and my son. Rachel, because they used to come here. Now she’s in Sanford and Angel’s in second grade. They were both born in California. Those were two of the most amazing days that I have had. The day that Rachel was born and the day that Angel was born.
When Rachel was born, everybody was suspecting a boy. So when they saw her for the first time, that was the first thing they said, “It’s a girl, not a boy!” And everybody bought blue for her. Everything was blue for her. Angel was born two months early so nobody was suspecting Angel. Angel was born by itself. No help from doctors, no help from nurses.

When Angel was still like eleven months old, we decided to move here to Minnesota. My husband decided he didn’t want to box anymore so he tried to find a different job in California. It was a little bit hard so we asked help to our family here to see if there was something that we could do over here.

My brothers found my husband a job. He moved here around Thanksgiving. So I stayed in California with the two kids. Had to help gather everything ‘til we moved. We moved here Christmas Day, 2002.

When I moved here, it was a little bit hard for me to find a job. I went to different places and all the things that I put on my resume that I knew how to do because of my studies. I just wanted to work. It doesn’t matter what kind of job because when you need, it doesn’t matter what you do because every job, there’s no job beneath, it’s honor in every job. It doesn’t matter that I have so many studies, what I wanted to work, it doesn’t matter it was cleaning or cooking, whatever.

But it was hard for me to find it. Some people say I was overqualified for the job. They didn’t want to give me a job cleaning because they said, “Well, if you find a job in as office or some other place, what’s the point of giving you a job? For a while it was a little bit hard, but I keep going and going until I find a job at this schools.
Then I start working different schools and one of the schools I work with was Hiawatha. I love Hiawatha. My kids were at another school. My heart was at Hiawatha. I always wanted to bring my kids here. The community is very welcoming.

We find a lot of people that they don’t like. Hispanics for one reason or the other. Some people understood that because you have an accent. My kids laugh at me because of the way I say coconut. I say, “Koh-koh-nut.” (instead of koh-a-nut) But they laugh at me, but it’s not making fun of me. I know it’s funny the way I said, I know I have an accent. I don’t mind people smile when I say the word that sounds funny. But sometimes it’s hard that people talk to you in a different way just because they think that because you have another language, you’re not smart enough to understand what they’re saying.
That’s something that we all immigrants have a hard time here. I told my kids that having another language, being able to speak two languages, it doesn’t make you dumb. It makes you even smarter because you can think and talk in two different languages and not everybody can do that.

I love Minnesota. I have a wonderful time here. I’ve been struggling a lot trying to adjust. The culture is different. My family is people that love to touch and hug and kiss. Here, not only in Minnesota, most of the United States, not everybody is willing to let you hug them or kiss them if they don’t know you for a long time.

If I know you or I know your mom and she introduce me to you because if your mom is my friend, well for me I want to hug you and kiss you to let you know that you are a friend of mine, too. So it’s a little bit hard not to be able to be as friendly as you want to. You have to be very careful who you let to hug and kiss. You cannot let everybody do that. That was one of the big adjustments for me.
We are people who love to do a lot of parties. I remember the first time that I invited friends for my daughter’s birthday. She was in kindergarten and I made all these invitations and I invited everybody in the classroom. In Puerto Rico, when we invite a child, we expect the whole family to show up. So I made this big cake and I make all this food and we never have set up a time.

So when I start seeing the kids coming and just being dropped off and they start asking me, “What time should I pick them up?” I say, “I have no idea, it’s up to you.” “Yeah, but how long you want them here?” For me, I say, “As long as they want to stay.” And then the parents and siblings were leaving, they were just leaving the child and I was wondering what’s wrong, what’s going on. I know here, when you invite a child to a birthday, it’s just the child and you set up two or three hours for the party. I never heard of that. So I have all this food, and things planned, and most of it, well, it didn’t go to waste because I have a big family and they like to eat.

That was something different from what I grew up. We’ll do any kind of parties. We’re used to being up late. And we didn’t have to ask the neighbor permission to throw a party in our house. We could have music, loud music, late at night and no body would complain. Here we got a police call because we were making too much noise. Here are the things we had to get adjusted to.

When I was working at the school, I also went to culinary arts school. I love cooking. I love entertaining friends and people. Here I couldn’t find a place that has authentic Caribbean food. It was hard for us to find all our favorite food here in Minnesota. We were, I will get to know how to do that.

My plans were to open up a restaurant. I’m still thinking about opening a restaurant. I have to first have all the nice spaces. Make sure my family has everything that they need, not everything that they want, but that they need. That’s what I want to do.

I was working at two different schools, I have two different jobs and also going full-time to college and taking care of a husband and two kids. Sometimes I was wondering where I would have time for all that. But I was thinking about my future, my family’s future, that I want things better for them. So in order for me to have something better, I would have to sacrifice for a while.

Coming here to the United States, there’s so many opportunities that you don’t have in your country. It is amazing. People who are born and raised here, a lot of take things for granted. When we come from a country where we didn’t have all the resources, we didn’t have computers everything you have to look at the board and we have to write everything in the notebooks. There was no papers that the teachers have to write the answer. You have to write everything first and then you have to work on it. So we spent a lot of time writing.

We didn’t have video games. I remember taking tiny avocados and use matches and put four legs and two horns and it was our bulls and cows. We had some flowers, the flower look like a girl with a dress. So we take half of the flower—that would be the face—and get the middle of the flower that would look like a boy. Those were our dolls, those flowers.

I remember going with my cousin who was six months younger than I am. We would go to, um, this huge field with different flowers and it would be between them there was some that has, I really don’t know how to call them here, they were like a little ball with spikes that would stick to your clothes or your hair. My cousin, her hair was knee-length, a lot of hair. And we walked through that field and her hair got tangled everywhere. So there were like four different bushes of those things and her hair was like this everywhere. The more she moved the worse it got. I started running, calling for my aunt to come and help us out. I don’t know what was worse, her being there or my parents going at us because we were just over there and we knew those things were there.

I had tiny peppers, they’re hot, but they look like cherries. So we were picking them up because they look like the cherries we had in the back yard and we start eating them. In the beginning you don’t feel the heat, but after you eat three, four, five of them, the heat just start coming up. It starts in your tummy all the way to your head. We start touching ourselves and it has some kind of oil. You touch your eye and your eye go phssst. We looked like somebody just started punching us. So they had to rush us to the hospital a couple of times because we did it once and then after a while we forget and then we try it again to see if the second time it doesn’t happen. But it does!

I remember my uncle has this huge places where he put the chickens and the rabbits and all kind of animals. The doors sometimes get stuck. One time my cousin and I got into the rabbit. We were playing with the rabbit and we got stuck there. We started hitting the door to get out and we broke it. But not only that door, we broke everything on that side. So the chickens were out, the rabbits were out.
My aunt had, they were not eagles, but they are in the eagle family. They are very hard to catch so we let them loose. Oh, my goodness. We were grounded for a month. We were grounded, but that means we couldn’t go more than six houses down to our friends house, but we still had our family. We had everything there. We climbed a lot of trees; we would fly—some of us were superman, some of us were catwoman. So we had our props and everything. And you would see us jumping from one tree to another. Or swinging. We looked like monkeys like that from one tree to the other.

I remember my parents and my aunts and uncles decided one week to go to the river to clean up a place. We started building. It’s called josus. It’s made out of palm trees. We had three little houses there right close to the river. They would let us go there by ourselves. I think probably because we grew up there, we didn’t see the danger of being by ourselves, playing close to the river.

Except for a few days when the rain, it was raining a lot and then the river gets too much water and you have your clothes and your shoes there and *phwiwt* they would go away and and you’d have to go home without shoes. And it’s not funny and it hurts a lot.

When the electricity went out, it would go out for a few days. We know that the electricity would go out, so would the water. We were not going to be able to have water in the home. On the weekend, when there were piles of clothes there, we would have to go with our moms, carrying the clothes down to the river. Get river rocks and make like a little pool here. I remember my mom carrying a big bucket. That bucket, she would wash the clothes and then she would throw it on the little pool that we did in the river to rinse it. Then the clothes would go all over the rocks so some of us had to be out there to catch the clothes. Well, we started playing on the river so some of the clothes would go *woosh* and we would have to run and try to catch the clothes that were down the river.

While we were doing that, some of our parents or my older cousins were fishing, catching shrimp. That’s the best shrimp ever—river shrimp. That’s my favorite. We were doing a few things while we were there, having a lot of fun.