STEVE INSKEEP, HOST:
It is Friday which is when we hear from StoryCorps, which collects this country's memories in sound. Today we hear from Linda Hernandez. She grew up in Lincoln, Nebraska during the 1960s. Her father worked for a railroad. Her family was one of the few Latino families in town and as Linda recalled at StoryCorps, that could sometimes make school life difficult.
LINDA HERNANDEZ: We had to sit in the back of the class and stay after school and clean the erasers when the other kids didn't have to do that. But both my parents laid down the law, said you had to go to school. And I had to have been a junior in high school. My sister was a senior. Our high school counselor told us we didn't have to take the SAT tests or the ACT tests because we were Hispanic women, all we would do is have babies.
So we went home and we told our parents, and my mother went in the back room and cried. And then that's when my brother said, Uh-uh, it ain't happening. We were very lucky that he was over six feet tall. So he walked us down to school and he told our high school counselors, my sisters will take the test.
But I remember in order to take the test, you had to have a Number 2 pencil. My sister and I, we had to walk the alleys to find pop bottles because that's when you could still turn them in and get money for them so that we could have money to buy the pencils to go take the test.
We both scored really high. My sister got a four-year scholarship to University of Nebraska, and then she got accepted into medical school, you know. My mother would always post our grades on the refrigerator. And if we got straight A's, they were on the refrigerator until the next time we got a report card. And my mother passed away 10 years ago.
When she knew that she was ill, she had gone and started making photo albums of us kids. I expected to see family photos that we had of us, but I didn't expect to see the report cards in there. And I didn't expect to see the little graduation announcement when we graduated from high school. Those were in our photo albums too.
One thing that made her feel really good was that all her kids went to school. She was very proud of that.
INSKEEP: Linda Hernandez at StoryCorps in Albuquerque, New Mexico. By the way, Linda holds a degree in business management and works at the U.S. Postal Service. Her sister, who was an OB/GYN, retired in 2011. This interview will be archived at the American Folk Life Center at the Library of Congress. And as always, you can subscribe to the StoryCorps podcast by going to NPR.org.
Copyright © 2013 NPR. All rights reserved. Visit our website terms of use and permissions pages at www.npr.org for further information.
NPR transcripts are created on a rush deadline by an NPR contractor. This text may not be in its final form and may be updated or revised in the future. Accuracy and availability may vary. The authoritative record of NPR’s programming is the audio record.