BACKGROUND
This first days story's audio ended before the interviewee completed narrating their story.
TRANSCRIPT
TRANSCRIBED BY Tara Dorje (x 5)
Hello, what is your name?
Hi, my name is Tatiana Olmedo, and I'm a school counselor here at Carver.
I’m here to interview you on the First Days Project to know about your first day or your first times at America.
Okay.
So, where are you from?
I'm from Quito, Ecuador in South America.
Okay, so why did you move to America?
I moved to the U.S. because my parents were here. Well, my dad. My mom came in after she got all her papers together for immigration and we were able to come with our green card—or, they're called Alien Cards now, but I'm not an alien from outer space, just from a different country, right? [laughs]
And so my mom originally came because of job opportunities, and my dad came because of political problems. There was a dictator in Ecuador at the time and he was closing down the colleges and the universities, and my dad was a university student. And he was fighting against the dictatorship, and so he needed to leave the country right away because he did not agree with the government. And so he was doing demonstrations and stuff, so he got outta dodge.
Alright, alright. What was the first food you tried when you came to America?
Oh my gosh. I think what I remember is pizza. And our uncle is, or was, because he just passed away recently, but my Uncle Larry was married to my Aunt Alicia, and she was the oldest child in my mom's side of the family. And he's Italian American, from Brooklyn, New York. And the neighborhood where we lived in was close to Little Italy in New York City, and so I remember trying pizza and having it be like, “Wow, this is really good.” But my mom wouldn't feed us pizza for dinner, because she didn't consider it dinner. It was just like a snack, or maybe lunch, but we always had real food for dinner, like Ecuadorian cooking, but I remember pizza.
The other thing I remember that my Uncle Larry used to do, he used to make us, like, massive sundaes. You know, they would buy gallons of ice cream, right? And since my mom and my aunt both worked in the evening and we stayed with him, he was our babysitter. He would make us these huge—I mean, like, huge [laughs]—sundaes between my brother and I. We would never be able to finish because he would use half of the tub of ice cream for just the three of us. Yeah, Uncle Larry was great.
Did you like your first schools when you came to America, or no?
My first day of school, I remember like it was yesterday. I didn't speak any English. I only remembered a song that they taught you in grade school in Latin America, or in Ecuador, and that was it. So I knew how to say “chicken” and “hen” and “lápiz,” which is pencil, and “pluma,” which is pen, right? I'm still remembering the song in my head.
So I walk into my school, PS 41 in New York City, downtown Manhattan, and I was going to third grade—and I had to repeat third grade because I didn't know English and there was nobody who spoke Spanish. The teacher didn't speak Spanish, everybody was just English, English. And so I remember just sitting there and copying everything that the teacher put on the board, but I didn't know what I was copying.
And then we got dismissed for lunch and I got lost somehow in all the crowd. A kid just took me to the lunchroom and I didn't know what, so I ate. And then everybody just shuffled out to the yard for recess. And it was just hundreds of people. I felt lost, and then I started to cry because I didn't know where I was and what I was supposed to do. And I was crying, crying, crying in the schoolyard, and the kids were like, “What's wrong? What’s wrong?” And I didn't understand what they were saying until I was like, “Hablo español, hablo español, no sé qué hacer.” I was like, “I speak Spanish, I don't know what to do,” until a little kid, another kid—I don't know how old he was or she was, I don't remember whether it was a boy or a girl—they were like, “Oh, I speak Spanish.” And they asked me, and I told them I was supposed to be in third grade, and they showed me where I was supposed to line up. And there I was, you know, I saw the three, and I lined up, and I stayed there so that I can head back.
Later, I don't know how much later, maybe a week later, there was a Puerto Rican girl who came to the class, and so she knew some Spanish, and so I was able to have somebody that I can speak with. I didn't know what to do with my homework because I didn't know anything, so I just copied everything, carried all of my books home. Uncle Larry helped us because he knew a little bit of Spanish and he knew what we needed to do in English, and so he kind of helped us.
And then, I learned enough. My dad was tutoring us, because my parents were split up and then he came back into the picture to tutor us English. And I learned enough English so that I was tutoring kids in math, because I was really good at math. I can say “Three apples. Three apples,” and I would show them on my hand and say, “How many apples?” And I would put them together like addition, right? So then you would know “six.” And so we would do that with my rudimentary, basic English, and they would teach me English. I would get those kindergarten readers like, “See the dog run, see Spot jump”—you know, that kind of stuff. And they would read those to me, and I would have to read them back, and that's how I made friends, and I learned English at school. But it was rough.
Okay. Have you ever went to, like, what was the funnest place you went to the first time—an amusement park or a water park somewhere?
Oh, no, being in New York City, we went to all the sites in New York City. We went to the top of the Empire State Building. We went to the top of the Twin Towers because they were still there. We went to the top of the Statue of Liberty because back then, you could actually go inside and walk inside. There's like a winding staircase, and you can actually be inside the crown. And so we did all the Central Park, FAO Schwarz, which was this huge toy store, which we couldn't afford any of that stuff because it was just too expensive. We did the huge tree in Rockefeller Center and skating in Rockefeller Center, which are like all the iconic and quintessential things to do in New York City—and then, the beach. We would schlep, we would take all of our stuff on the subway, on the F train from Manhattan, to go to Coney Island. And then I learned and I went on a roller coaster, and I loved the roller coaster in Coney Island.
Alright. You meant on top of the buildings, like you meant the roof or the top floor?
The viewing floor, right? So not the roof, but, like, in the Empire State Building, you actually have a viewing deck that's outside, right? But it has lots of bars so that you're safe. And it was the same thing at the Twin Towers. We weren't on the roof, but we were outside in the viewing area. Yup. And then the cars look like little tiny…
You mean like on an airplane?
Yeah. Mmm-hmm.
Last question. On your way to America, what vehicle did you take? An airplane, or a boat?
Oh, we traveled on an airplane, and I cried all the way from Quito, Ecuador, all the way until we landed. Because I was raised by my grandmom and my granddad—my mom's mom and step-dad—and my mom left when I was two, and she came back when I was six, seven, so I didn't know her. And so really, “Mom” was my grandma. So she was taking me away from my “mom.” And so I cried, because I didn't want to come to the United States. I didn't want to be with this stranger who said she was my mom. I didn't know who she was. I had heard her voice because she would send tapes, and every once in a while we can make a phone call, because phone calls back then were expensive. Long distance phone calls were very expensive, so we would write letters—[recording ends].
