StoryCorps Historias: Jose and Teresita Fernandez
Series: StoryCorps
From: StoryCorps
Length: 00:01:23
Jose Fernandez and his wife, Teresita, came to StoryCorps to record an interview as part of our Historias initiative -- an effort to record and celebrate the lives and histories of Latinos.
Fernandez came to the United States as a teenager from Cuba in the 1960s. And here, he tells his wife, Teresita, about that first Thanksgiving in Vero Beach, Florida...
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Piece Description
Jose Fernandez and his wife, Teresita, came to StoryCorps to record an interview as part of our Historias initiative -- an effort to record and celebrate the lives and histories of Latinos.
Fernandez came to the United States as a teenager from Cuba in the 1960s. And here, he tells his wife, Teresita, about that first Thanksgiving in Vero Beach, Florida...
Broadcast History
Latino USA 11.20.09
Transcript
JF: I didn't know about Thanksgiving. From the little English that we knew, my brother and I knew that we were not going to have class that day. And everybody was saying, Thanksgiving, but we understood it as "San-Giving" so we figure out, Oh, it must be some patron saint of the United States. And my brother said, Well, this must be a real important saint because they're going to have these dinners and so on. So we went over and looked at a missal in spanish and we kept looking and we didn't see any saints marked for that particular day. So we asked our friend Jack Johnson, who was our neighbor, great guy, to explain to my dad, who spoke English, this idea of Thanksgiving. My dad said that Jack had told him that they celebrated with pumpkin pie. So we went out and we got this pumpkin pie and it was frozen and we had the sharpest knife there trying to cut it--we couldn't cut it--and final...
Read the full transcript
Intro and Outro
INTRO:This week, from StoryCorps Historias -- the project that's recording Latino stories -- we'll hear about one family's first Thanksgiving meal.
Jose Fernandez came to the United States from Cuba in the 1960s. He was a teenager when his family arrived in Florida. And here, he tells his wife, Teresita, about that first November...
TAPE (01:22)
OUTRO:Last year, StoryCorps launched a new holiday tradition -- it's called the National Day of Listening, which happens on the day after Thanksgiving. StoryCorps encourages you to take an hour on that day to sit down with a relative or loved one and ask them about their life.
StoryCorps has Do-It-Yourself materials to help you get a great interview and preserve it for your family -- and they're available for free online. If you want to take part in the National Day of Listening this year, you can find out how at national-day-of-listening.org.
Additional Credits
NPR, Corporation for Public Broadcasting
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