This interview of 1:00:51 hours is with Suyapa Gricelda Portillo Villeda, PhD, assistant professor of Chicana/o-Latina/o-Transnational Studies at Pitzer College in Claremont, California at approximately 8:00 pm on Tuesday, April 18, 2017. The interview was conducted by Diana Nightingale, a graduate student in Claremont Graduate University’s M.A. History and Archival Studies program. The interview was part of a final project for a CGU seminar called “Introduction to Oral History and Theory” taught by associate professor of History, Joanna Poblete, PhD., at Claremont Graduate University.

Dr. Portillo was born in Copán, Honduras and moved with her mother to San Pedro Sula when she was seven after her parents’ divorce. In 1982, when she was nine, she and her mother migrated to the United States, passing through Guatemala and Mexico, and crossing the border through Tijuana. They moved into Echo Park where her mother constructed a social network, found work and a place for them to live. Dr. Portillo also began attending a local elementary school. Her mother eventually met Dr. Portillo’s step-father, after which they moved to Highland Park where she begana new school. She learned English fairly quickly after being enrolled in an all-English classroom, and by eighth grade was a nearly fluent English speaker. She was a very good student attending numerous honors classes. In high school, she also joined the track team and became one of their star athletes, winning numerous medals. She would continue to run track at Pitzer College where she completed her Bachelors degree. After graduation, she worked with numerous labor unions in Los Angeles as a union coordinator. She also traveled throughout Latin America, even being able to return and visit her home town of Copán.

In 2004,she began at Cornell University’s history graduate program, from which she received her doctoral degree in 2011 in receipt of her dissertation “Campeñas and Campeños: Life and Work in the Banana Fincas of the North Coast of Honduras, 1944-1957.” Since receiving her doctoral degree, she has given numerous conference and guest talks, interviews, and written for news and journal sources about her dissertation research, Honduras’s political and social changes, and human rights violations against Hondurans and Honduran immigrants, particularly the increase in violence against women and members of the Honduran LGBTQ community.

In this interview Dr. Portillo discusses her childhood and teenage experiences of the various shifts in her surroundings, and social and cultural circles she entered as she moved from a small, intimate town in Honduras to San Pedro Sula, one of Honduras’ largest cities, and then to the mega-city of the Los Angeles metropolitan region after making the treacherous migratory journey with her mother from Honduras to the United States in 1982. She discusses the difficulties her mother faced after they moved into Echo Park as she attempted to secure a place to live, find work, and save up money. In addition, she talks a lot about the trauma of these transitions as a child and teenager adapting to a very different culture in the United States’ public school system as opposed to what she was familiar with in Honduras. In recalling these years of her life she talks about the prejudice and bullying she experienced, and a strong sense of being out of place or not fitting in with her American-born peers.