Hada Matías was born in Dover, New Jersey and grew up in Elgin, Illinois. In this interview, she examines her family’s Puerto Rican heritage and her own racial identity. She shares insights into her childhood and her growth as a trans woman and a human being. She also explains the challenges and joys of being trans in the United States today.
San Luis Potosí, 1958
Ramon Angel Campos was born in San Luis Potosí, Mexico in 1942. As a young man, he traveled across Mexico and Central America as part of several musical groups. He regularly performed comedy and impressions under the stage name “Quello El Bello.” In the 1950s and 60s, Campos rubbed elbows with illustrious actors and musicians of Mexico’s world famous Golden Age of Cinema — La Época del Oro del Cine Mexicano — such as Agustín Insunza, Libertad Lamarque, and Manuel Medel.
Ramon Angel Campos came to the Chicago area in the mid-1960s and has resided here ever since. In 1978, he started Radio Fiesta, Elgin’s first Spanish-language radio program, and was its host for more than twenty years. Over many decades, he organized dances, parties, and musical performances across Chicagolandia, the state of Illinois, and the United States.
In this Spanish-language clip, Campos talks about establishing his first musical group as a 12 year-old boy. He also shares how he developed his impressions of performers like Cantinflas while sitting in the balconies of Mexican theaters.
In this clip, Aracely García describes in Spanish how she lived in San Salvador, El Salvador, and worked as an assembler at a U.S. multinational corporation, Texas Instruments. The 1970s and early 1980s were a period of dramatic change in El Salvador. The deep and long-standing inequalities in Salvadoran society became unbearable for large segments of the population. Unions and social movements began making increasing demands on the state and the Salvadoran government responded with increasingly violent and bloody repression. Government death squads murdered two workers from Texas Instruments during this period. The Salvadoran labor movement called for a general strike on March 21, 1980. In her oral history interview, García called the strike a huelga de brazos caídos, or a sit-down, (literally “dropped-arms”) strike. When García and other Texas Instruments workers went on strike in 1980, the army stormed the factory. The manager fled in an army helicopter and the director of plant security paced the rows of machines with a pistol in each hand. The army captured and shot two workers. The following day Texas Instrument workers held a memorial at a union office. The army arrived again, killing two more workers and arresting the rest. Two days later, a death squad assassinated Archbishop Óscar Romero as he delivered mass in San Salvador, an act largely understood to have officially sparked the country’s civil war. García did not flee El Salvador immediately. She decided to leave only after her co-workers distributed a secret list at the factory for workers interested in purchasing a Black-market memoir called Las cárceles clandestinas de El Salvador, or The Secret Jails of El Salvador. It was written by Ana Guadalupe Martínez, a militant who was brutally tortured by U.S.-trained Salvadoran security forces. The book was distributed during a time when the Salvadoran government was officially denying rumors of its own brutality. García signed up to buy a copy. When workers who signed the list started disappearing, she decided to flee to the U.S. She eventually ended up in Elgin, Illinois.
Tony Figueroa describes his parents’ lives in Puerto Rico and their arrival to Waukegan, Illinois in the 1940s. The Figueroas were among the earliest Puerto Rican migrants to the Chicago area.
Tony Figueroa describes his father’s experience working in foundries in Waukegan. He remembers the vibrant African American neighborhood where he and many other Puerto Ricans lived.
Tony Figueroa describes the founding of the Puerto Rican Society in the 1950s and its development into one of Waukegan’s most important organizations under the leadership of Edwin Montano and others.
Alma Nevarez has worked at Elgin Community College since 2007 and is currently a Custodian Lead.
She describes her first job after high school at City Hall in her hometown in the Mexican state of Durango. Her family, though, was poor and Nevarez eventually decided to migrate to the United States in the early 1980s for higher wages.
Nevarez describes living in Franklin Park and working at a brush factory in the early 1980s. There were few Mexicans living in the area. Nevarez studied English and eventually earned enough to rent her own apartment. She also describes how she fell in love with her future husband at a dance in Mexico. In 1987, the couple married and settled in Elgin.
Nevarez describes the positives and negatives of doing custodial work at Elgin Community College. She explains that she has always taught her own children to treat everyone with respect regardless of their social status or job.
Jaime García was born in Mexico City but immigrated as a young boy with his family to Rockford, Illinois in the early 1960s. As a lifelong United Methodist, Jaime was hired by the church to do outreach to the Spanish-speaking community in Elgin in 1970. Two years later, he helped found social service agency Centro de Información. Today, Centro continues to be the most important Hispanic-serving social service agency in Elgin and the region. In this interview, conducted by students at Elgin Community College, García talks about Elgin in the 1970s and the founding of Centro.
Luis and Lorena Muñoz are originally from Talca, Chile. In this interview, they describe coming of age under the dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, the fear-filled climate of their youth, friends who were arrested or disappeared, and facing Chilean police during protests against the regime. The couple shares the joys and difficulties of moving to Mexico and later the United States. They raised their children in the Elgin area.
Mary Decker was born María Margarita Rodríguez in 1944 in Crystal City, Texas. Her parents moved to Aurora, Illinois in 1950 where her father worked at Austin-Western’s manufacturing facility. Margarita was a precocious and athletic child. She later became a community leader in Aurora, married welder Stanley Decker, and worked for the Aurora Urban League. Decker eventually became one of two Spanish-speaking real estate agents as Aurora’s east side Mexican immigrant population boomed in the 1960s. In this interview clip, Ms. Decker describes her advocacy on behalf of immigrants in Aurora and her successful campaign running for Kane County Board in 1972. It is likely that Ms. Decker’s victory in that election made her the first Latino or Latina elected to a county-level political office in Illinois history.
