I came first to the United States when I was 15. My parents gave me the option of having a quinceañera party and spend money on that, or send me to the United States for a summer to learn English, and I decided that it’d make much more sense to come to the States for a summer than to have a lavish party. And I came to Pennsylvania to a girls’ school for summer, where I learned some English. And then when I was — when I finished — I was 17 when I finished high school — I was able to get a scholarship to a college in Colorado, where I was asked to be the assistant to the Spanish department teachers, who knew the language grammatically and knew a lot of the literature, but really had not the fluency with it. And it was — this is pre- language labs technology, so they wanted somebody that would actually read the lessons and practice the exercises and give a pronunciation model to the students. And that was my first experience on becoming a teacher, because as fate would have it, the sweet nun that was supposed to be the professor of the course had a stroke a couple of days before classes began, so they didn’t have a replacement, and they said, “Well, let’s put the Cuban girl there to just take over the classes for a few days until we get somebody.” And then they decided, “Well, she’s doing it so well, she can stay.” So, at 17, I found myself teaching Spanish 101 and Spanish 201.
