Category: English

Tony Figueroa

Posted on by laurenmeranda

Tony Figueroa

Waukegan community leader, interviewed 2022

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 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.

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Jaime García

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Jaime García

Founder of Centro de Información, interviewed 2017

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.

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Luis & Lorena Muñoz

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Luis & Lorena Muñoz

Chilean immigrants, 2018

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.

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Margarita “Mary” Decker

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Margarita “Mary” Decker

Aurora community leader, 2020

Mary Decker was born María Margarita Rodríguez in 1944 in the Rio Grande Valley of Texas. Her parents were migrant workers who picked crops along the Texas-Illinois migrant circuit until eventually settling in Aurora, Illinois in 1954. Margarita 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.

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