Interview with Debora Gil Casado, November 7, 2015

GOMEZ: Well, good morning, Debora. I thank you so much for participating in this audio interview with Tess Arenas, myself, Eloisa Gomez. Today is November 7, 2015. So, we have a number of questions for you. And we just encourage you to, if you could, just add any dates as to any major events that we begin to discuss. It kind of helps provide that context. So Debora, tell us where you were born and a little bit about that history of being in Wisconsin.

CASADO: Okay. I was born in 1957 in Ashland, Wisconsin. We ended up there because as I told my students is, against. . . I was here because of the fight against communism. The US had a policy in the race with the Soviet Union. They 00:01:00decided that they need more foreign language in the United States. So they had this policy that they were going around the world advertising saying that if you wanted to teach in small towns in the United States, that they would provide you with a visa and entry and papers and the whole nine yards. So for some odd reason, which I don't quite know, my father applied and felt he and my mother, they quickly got married, came right away to the United States. And that's how we ended up in Ashland, Wisconsin, which is a very, very, very, very small town at the time. And so that's how I got to Wisconsin.

GOMEZ: And how long did you live in Ashland? And where did you move next?

CASADO: Yeah, in Ashland, we were there for approximately three years or so. And then my father decided that he wanted to go back to school. He kind of had come 00:02:00in under the radar, because he had worked in a bank, but he hadn't quite finished his degree. And somehow he managed to convince authorities that the studies that he had were equivalent. And then he started doing graduate-level work. And so after that, we lived in a variety of different places. We lived in Milwaukee, we lived in Madison for a short time, then we moved down to Iowa. For about that went on for about four or five years. My sister was born in Cedar Falls, Iowa. And then he ended up coming to Madison to go to graduate school. And so that's how we sort of ended up in Madison. So that would have been '57. 00:03:00Probably 1962-ish. Through his graduate studies, we lived for a while in Mexico. We had gone to Europe several times. He was in Spanish literature. And eventually he got his Ph.D. from Madison and then my parents divorced. He went to North Carolina and we stayed here in Madison and I went through the Madison school system for my education.

GOMEZ: Okay, so you were. . . Have you lived in Madison since?

CASADO: Yes.

GOMEZ: Okay. All right. So we're going to talk a little bit later about your community involvement. But as you think back about your childhood, were there any one or two instances that you can recall from your childhood that influenced the work that you've done as an adult?

CASADO: Yeah, there's a couple of them. One of the things that I think had a really strong influence on me as we went to a very small house, I started out in Bless The Sacrament, in a small Catholic school. There were one other Hispanic family and then us and we became close friends, but there was a lot of racism that was going on. And I think that the usual response, people either try to blend in or they try to ignore it, or the other option would be to become sort of super Hispanic. And I think that that was the route that I took, that it was, it's like, damn it, and I'm gonna rub it in your face. So, I would be constantly 00:05:00be bringing in music, raising the hand, saying, "Well, we do it differently, we do this." And so I think that that really set a very strong tone for me. The other thing is that the only place that had any kind of Spanish service was St. Martin House, which is now the Multicultural Center, down on the south side of Madison. And that it was the only Spanish service of any kind of religion that we knew. And we were Catholic, so it worked out really well. And so we went to church there and participated in all the social activities. But the reason that it had such an influence is there were people from. . . There were Mexicans, there were migrant workers, there were Puerto Ricans, there were. . . everyone, 00:06:00Chileans, and because there are so few of us, we kind of all hung together, which I think is fairly rare when you look at the context of other large cities where everyone has their own little pocket. And even today in Madison, you see pockets of different groups, you don't see that multicultural crossing as much in other places, and in that situation, we had that. And I think it certainly gave me a different sense of community and of understanding of our culture. And through growing up, I would ask questions like, "Mom, why are people acting this way?" And she would explain class structures and differences and even racism within our own culture and how we view people differently. And why do they talk about Indians that way and things like that. So that kind of experience had a 00:07:00major, major impact on how I sort of viewed the world and saw things.

GOMEZ: Debora, when you mentioned about the experiences of racism were used in reference to a Blessed Sacrament. And these examples of your response to it which was, I think you use the word "rub it in your face" approach.

CASADO: That's what I call it, it was Super Spic, but that was my own private term. Yeah.

ARENAS: Yeah.

GOMEZ: So the super Hispanic hostess [inaudible], was that in terms in all places because you had mentioned of moving to Ashland and Milwaukee and. . .

CASADO: I didn't really think before that. I didn't see it as much. I wasn't aware. I was fortunate, as I see later on, that my mother didn't work. So she 00:08:00made sure that we learned to read and write. And of course it was in Spanish because her English wasn't very good. So, it was a little more insular. I'm sure that there were incidences, but that's where I really sort of became aware of it in a very strong kind of way. The day that. . . [inaudible] must of been in middle school, no, middle school or high school. . . the day that, oh, what's the famous movie? With the Jets and the fighting?

ARENAS: Star Wars.

CASADO: No, no, no, no, no, no, no. Rita Moreno?

GOMEZ: Oh, I know. [laughter]

ARENAS: West Side Story. West Side Story.

CASADO: Thank you. The day West Side Story came out was a horrible, horrible, horrible time. I mean, people literally asked me, "Do you carry a knife?" Right? These stupid kinds of things that you run across. So as you grow older, 00:09:00a certain point you become much more aware of these things and the interactions of people.

GOMEZ: Yeah. So the experiences that you have just referenced were in Ashland, in Iowa, in Madison, and Milwaukee are the places that you were in the United States and cities. [talking over each other] It wasn't just specific to Ashland, that's my question.

CASADO: No.

GOMEZ: Okay. All right. So, that movie, it was sort of exemplifying, I think, the kinds of. . [inaudible] responses.

CASADO: Right. And even in a very nice way, we talk about. . . they now term it the "microaggression", you know, the small comments that make you feel as "other". I've been recently reading some things about that in terms of other 00:10:00cultures that I may not be as aware of but the constant question: "Well, where are you from?" What do you mean, where am I from? I'm from here, right? "Your English is so good." Yeah, I hope so. It's those kinds of things that from the get go. And for me, it was harder because I can pass. So, visibly I'm not. . . it's the small Catholic school. At first they would say, "Well, you're black Irish." And I was like, I remember as a little kid going, I'm not black, what are they talking about? I didn't have any familiarity with that term within their culture that was how they sort of identified culturally from different places that they came from among the Irish population, for instance. And so, you have these very subtle kind of subtexts. And so, there was a lot of these small 00:11:00microaggressions. Even still today you hear a lot of that kind of stuff.

GOMEZ: Thank you. So, kind of coming back to, you started talking about ethnic identity. Could you share with us how your identity, how did you see yourself as when you could first define yourself, and how did that evolve over time?

CASADO: I identified as Hispanic. And I think that my parents are from Spain so I would also identify as being Spanish. And as I, through my church experiences, I learn some of these different differences. I think that that's one of the 00:12:00reasons that it was so strong with me is I sort of grew up thinking we were all as one group, right? One for all, all for one. And really had a hard time with some of the differences. And when I made the comment before of being able to pass, I think that that really came to the forefront when I started in college, that that is where we had some really strong. . . people were strongly trying to identify who they were and I didn't really have a place to land that would have been just people from Spain. And so, I also went to West High School. That was 00:13:00pretty international, because it had a lot of students from the University. And so again, the social group, the Hispanic group at that time was Spanish Club. And that's where we all hung out. And again, it was a very multicultural, international, including Brazilians and whatnot, students that we hung together, we identified together, and we sort of set up our secret, cool language, and all those little words that we could identify with each other. Say, like, yeah, that was really stupid. We'd code switch and go into Spanish and a lot of those kinds of things that people do that kind of feel sort of protective. So, there had been some incidences. I remember much younger at one point, there was a woman who was using the very formal usted even to me, and I recall asking my mom, "Why 00:14:00is she doing that? You don't do that with kids. I don't understand." And that's the point where my mom had to say, look, there's this history here of Columbus unfortunately, too, and the racism that existed in Latin America, and you have to realize that people may look at you differently growing up and at the time, it didn't make any sense to me. But it did later. She would just say, "You just plow forward, you do what you think is right", and "be who you're going to be", and that's kind of the way I did. So when I got to the University, the first thing I did was to look for my folks, and at that time, it was the Chicano movements. So, I joined that on campus and was part of that [inaudible] and I 00:15:00remember being in a women's group where here we are in a circle, we're saying "what do you want to do", and it was, "I want to be a doctor", and everyone would cheer, and this kind of thing. And so, I went through all that, and occasionally there were some people who weren't accepting of me being there, so it caused a little. . . It was hard. I feel like I was on edge a lot, because I also had been aware of white privilege and know that I was in a different situation than other people who wear the markers on the outside. And how that's different and how people will react to them differently to me than say, to them. I think that's part of the whole idea of passing. And so, I always kind of petered in terms of saying, I want to honor that and respect that and understand 00:16:00the differences. But I'm also in this place. When I had to go with my mother to a store and I had to translate as a kid, that's the same experience, right? But from the outside white world, they didn't make these little distinctions of "oh, you're Chilean" versus being from Puerto Rico, they didn't get that. Right? At that time, they just saw us as a whole group. So, hence, were we carrying knives as in the Puerto Rican gangs in the movie versus the migrant movement and everything else. So, they didn't see that. They saw us as black. As a black. We were just "them", the other.

GOMEZ: So, what would you define your ethnic identity today?

CASADO: I still identify as Latina and Hispanic. And that's how I define myself.

GOMEZ: Right. Thank you. So we're gonna move on to the discussion around your community involvement. And I know you've completed the profile form. And the question was, how do you define community activism? And would this be the word to define your community involvement? Or is there another term that would define your community efforts?

CASADO: Right. I saw that on the form. And I think that's part of the reason why it took me a while to send it to you guys, because I really had to ponder to say, is there a difference? Usually when we talk about activism, we talk about being involved, right? And when we look at community aspects particularly I 00:18:00would say of people of color, we tend to look at leaders. They're those Martin Luther King, right? They're those [inaudible]. And we see that. We see leadership as community activism, many times as we define the term and I see them as different. I think that there's certainly a role for people to take leadership and to become the Congresspeople and run for President and things like that. I don't know that they're necessarily community activists. To me, community activists are really not just being the figurehead or the leader that is helping make change, but it is truly trying to work in the community to create groups of people, to enable groups of people to create change. And so for me that was a pretty important distinction and one that I think is tough to do. 00:19:00Because my experience is through being involved with multiple different kinds of activities, particularly in the school district. Because you have certain skills, lots of times you get thrust in the role of being the leader or the face of an organization or a movement, and then it becomes very easy to kind of be enchanted by that and forget that there's a whole series of people that are behind you. I don't know if that kind of makes sense. I see that both of them as being different. Yes, we need leaders, but we also need people to organize and to organize in the communities. And it's a little bit like the saying "you can give a man a fish" versus "you can teach them how to fish". Right? To me community activism is teaching them how to fish so that there will be other 00:20:00leaders in self-sufficiency and movements and change that is much more broader base. Because once you take out the leader, that's it. If you have community activism, you have a core. You have a base there and another person will rise up to be the front person or to lead that movement.

GOMEZ: So, given the distinction you've drawn between leadership and community activism, what term would you use to define yourself?

CASADO: I would say that I have played both roles. I have been on panels. One of the things that I did very early on, I was in somewhere in college, just finishing college. So that was in 1980s. I was asked to serve for the city on 00:21:00the Mental Health and Human Services Committee. It was probably the first sort of involvement in terms of government. So we sat on a panel, and the city committee, so we would overview policy and set up to take testimony and things like that. So that, to me, would have been a role of leadership. And so I've done some of that. But I would say that the majority of my work, and again, I would point back to my early experiences in terms of the church was really to try to organize in terms of community. And even within, my first examples would probably be when I got to college, they tried to impose a rule saying that if 00:22:00you came from a bilingual school, you had to take an English exam, a special English exam, to get into the university. So if you were in an area where they would define it as a bilingual school or bilingual area, they wanted an additional test for English to get in. And so we organized all kinds of protests and did committee hearings and did a whole series of things, lots of marching up Bascom Hill, so I had strong calves from that. So that to me, we really were organizing. We went to as many Hispanics as we could. They wouldn't give us data. So we started taking our own data. We try to identify through as many people as possible, seeing what was their experience, what area were they coming from, and then we went through and kind of said oh, okay, so these folks may not 00:23:00have gotten in or had to take additional remedial classes if they had come from certain areas, and we saw that as discriminatory. So there's lots of different kinds of activities.

GOMEZ: Was the work that you had done with at college, was that one of your first community organizing experiences? Because you mentioned the church and I'm wondering, did you do any community organizing before that through the church?

CASADO: No, I would say that the Catholic Church, particularly in this area, was not very progressive. I think that that helped create a base of people within the Madison area. So part of this is sort of numbers, me outside of the university, and there were like, 30 families that were known Hispanics. We 00:24:00didn't have a store even to get goods. If you needed to get anything you had to either drive to Milwaukee or to Chicago at that time when I was growing up. Obviously there were other people there but of people who were visible at dances, at activities, at social kinds of things, if a group came to town to play. Some people were pretty much connected to about 30-40 families. So we're talking about really outside of the university, excuse me, a really small kind of population. And at that time, I don't think that there was a lot of awareness. I mean, they were just starting the Civil Rights Movement. That was 00:25:00just starting to take off. Right? We didn't hear about the Brown revolution much at all until I got to the university and said like, what? This has been going on? Because it didn't go on. There weren't any Spanish language newspapers, there was no TV, there was. . . none of that stuff was available. So it was a pretty isolated pocket up here in the Upper Midwest, I would say.

GOMEZ: So your community activism, because that's what we'll focus on but feel free to add in any kind of leadership roles that you've had as you define that. When did it start? Did it start in college?

CASADO: Yeah, I would say that it started in college. I wanted to continue to have a group that I could identify with and Carlos Reyes had been on campus and 00:26:00had brought so many students with the work that he had been doing to bring folks up in that, and I think that there was a strong community of Hispanics, because we didn't have the term Latino then and Chicanos that were from here. We were American born. We were not just foreigners that in some respect still had really strong ties from home. And we were here to stay. And so we started meeting and organizing and trying to build our own space on campus and doing activities and trying to do cultural activities and bring groups and shortly after Mecha and that, there was another more grouping that were more involved with more of the Caribbean area called [inaudible] Americano. Right at that time, the university 00:27:00decided to have representatives that would help advise the university. And I was able to become, for several years, the representative on there and sort of watch for policies of the university. And from there, we use that information to help organize. Juan Lopez and I would talk all the time and he was part of Mecha and at that time was working through [inaudible] Americano and we would be able to bring both sides of the equation in to make change on campus. So, there were lots of social events that marked on campus that were I think important in 00:28:00creating a space for us to be successful, to say here is part of home and this is how we can do things and from that time period, I also created deep working relationships with [inaudible] and Juan who I mentioned and other folks that we then were able to build as we decided to stay in the community, in the Madison community were able to build and say, well, now we're not necessarily part of the university. We are now part of the community. What needs to change here? And in my case, we started doing lots of organizing within the schools. So we had, for instance, we contacted. . . at that time there were probably maybe about 25 or so Latino teachers in the school district. We contacted everyone and formed 00:29:00our own sort of. . . it wasn't a union, but more of a teacher group, Latino Teacher Association, to really start looking at curriculum and create information that could be used in the schools that could help our kids. We organized to. . . we build sort of culture boxes, because one of the things that we didn't want is we didn't want other people defining who we were and we were afraid that it would be too. . . I don't want to say the word dangerous, but yeah, we just wanted to define what those symbols would be and that would be appropriate. So we have these culture boxes. So, we had one that a number of us 00:30:00started building contacts around the country to send us things to talk about, the migrant movement and Cesar Chavez and Dolores Huerta and inclusions of. . . we had a flag, a farm workers flag, and things like that. Then as teachers would teach that kind of curriculum. They would bring it into their classrooms. And so we knew for a fact it was authentic. It was something that not someone else had to find. So we had maybe about. . . we had created maybe about 10 of those. We really started pressuring the school district to say, "You have to have translators." I know that in my workplace, I would get pulled out to translate for the nurse to say, hey, here's what you do when you have head lice. Here's what you do when you do x. And so we were actually doing double duty. We're doing a double job. And we turned to the school district and said, "This is not 00:31:00okay. This is not okay from a worker's perspective in terms of how you're asking me to do two jobs and I still have to go back and then finish my first job. Because I now have provided this work for you." And we wanted it to be valued. It was not that we didn't want to help out. But we said, look, as the population is growing, because now we're talking about exponential growth, you really need to be aware of this. We started talking to kids and saying, "What is it that you need?" Internally in the schools, one of our very, very successful campaigns that took us probably about a year and a half is we organized kids to go to the school board and say: "We want a bilingual counselor." This was at East High School.

GOMEZ: And what year was it?

CASADO: That would have been. . . [counting out loud] So we're probably talking about '91 or so.

ARENAS: Okay. Thanks.

CASADO: So, we organized kids, the kids themselves. They were scared. But we helped them, said, "Well, what do you want to say?" And then we wanted to. . . we help them say, "Okay, this is formal. You're going to be standing up there, this is what you do when you go to do a presentation." So we, again, that's where you see that sort of mixed role between the leader and the face and the community activism. Through that process, we got parents and we showed them how to use the system, how if they had a complaint this is what you do, when you go 00:33:00speak before them, you have to sign in, you have to do these things. Right? "It'll be okay, I will stand next to you." And yet, when the press would come out or they wanted the formal speaker to do it in educational speak, those of us who were the "leaders", quote unquote, they would call on us to play that role. And so sometimes we sort of became the face of the movement. But what we were really trying to do was to build the capacity to say if I'm not here tomorrow, I know that there's like, now fifteen people who know how to do this. And if something else were to come along, they've now had that experience. They now know how to do that.

GOMEZ: Let me pull us back to sort of early times. And as you think about the thread of your activism over the years, what was the root of your desire for 00:34:00building community capacity?

CASADO: [sighs] Well, I think there's two things. I think for me personally, I felt sort of tired. Well, let me backtrack here. When my parents got divorced, my mother didn't have a degree. She became a single parent. She worked as a seamstress. She worked part-time jobs. We always had what we needed. But in today's terms, we would have been at the poverty line, making it from paycheck to paycheck kind of thing. And we were also very lucky to be able to live in a community that was fairly well off. We rented a house from a professor. We were 00:35:00caretakers of the house of this professor who had part of the house, and then we have the other parts. So when she would leave, we would be there taking care of the house and whatnot. So we lived in a fairly affluent area. The contrast and the differences became painfully obvious. Everyone else was going to do horseback riding. There were no horses for us. Everyone else was taking gymnastic classes, there were no gymnastic classes for us, because we couldn't really afford that. So no, I would say that those kinds of experiences really made me super aware of how things function. Also pretty common is that as an 00:36:00adult, you're not aware of how the system works and don't manage the language well, you depend on your kids. You take the oldest kid and you say, "Hey, guess what, you're translating for me. You're making sure that I get it, that I get all the information I need." So I became very aware of all the things that my mother didn't know how to do. I was very lucky in being able to get these resources, to be taught in lots of different ways. Okay, I'm gonna stop for a second, because I'm going to try switch phones, I don't know if you're hearing the beeping.

GOMEZ: No, I don't but okay. That's fine.

CASADO: Yeah, let me just see if this works here. Hello?

GOMEZ: Yeah.

CASADO: Okay.

GOMEZ: Yeah, we're here.

CASADO: Okay. So, being able to. . . all right, so it was this awareness of all 00:37:00the things that my mom couldn't do and didn't know how to do. And if something went wrong, we had no idea how to fight back. Right? We weren't sure how the system worked. And so you kind of learned that along the way. So that really made me decide that what I really wanted to do was to be able to make sure that skills were built. That it wasn't going to be just me carrying that knowledge, growing up, going to university, getting a degree, making way much more than we would ever have dreamed at that time when I was little, and then walk away. So I kind of felt like I really needed to give back. This was something that was absolutely critical. I got these opportunities because people picked in the 00:38:00field. People protested, people went and demanded that the government provide programming and grants and give us opportunities and all these kinds of things. And so I felt honorbound to make sure that the next generation, that whatever I did, would help the next generation be able to do better to have more opportunities, et cetera. So, for me, it's always been about building capacity. Making sure that people learn how to do things independently on their own in case I was not there or whoever the leader of the time was not there.

GOMEZ: Thank you. So were there any other key influences that shaped your activism, the root of your activism?

CASADO: I would say that the migrant movement was very influential and I had 00:39:00placed Dolores Huerta on my list because she is many ways the forgotten leader. She was the person who was really doing the organizing in the background. Everyone always lists Cesar Chavez, which they well should, a great man, but how many other leaders were there in the group that carried as much burden as he did? And yet he became the face. And so to me, she was, as a woman, as an organizer, as an example of the kinds of change that people can make even though they are in poverty. I think sometimes we do look at people who say, "Well, you 00:40:00have poverty, you don't have skills, you don't have this, you don't have that." And yet they were able to organize and make such dramatic change historically for us. So for me growing up, I think that it was that movement that really gave me direction as to how do we need to create change? How do we build capacity? Yeah.

ARENAS: And did you know Dolores Huerta had eleven children?

CASADO: Yeah.

ARENAS: Eleven children. And she did what she did.

GOMEZ: Amazing, yeah. Debora, would you say that your community activist role evolved? And if so, how did it evolve?

CASADO: [sighs] . . . I would say that. . . at the start, there was certainly 00:41:00wanting to be a leader in the traditional sense, to run for office, to be named, that kind of thing within organizations and things like that. But how we went about doing things is a learning process. One group that I learned a lot from was Committee Against Racism on campus where I really picked up a lot of tools of, how do you do propaganda? How do you organize to be able to march? What are the kinds of elements and things that you need to do? How do you do the interchange of the politics of saying, we're going to push here? We're going to then hang back a little bit. How do you negotiate to make change and things like 00:42:00that. So, I learned a lot about that group. And also that group also put things in a larger context. So it was not just among the Latinos or the Hispanics on campus, it involved rights for African Americans, for Asians, et cetera. And so I learned a lot from the Committee Against Racism just in terms of organizing skills, that kind of thing of you don't know how to do things, how do you do it? And how can you put things in a way that make sense for the white world? So I learned a lot from that. I think that as an adult, the fights that we had to get interpreters in the schools, that would have been much more of a formal kind of thing. How do you create petitions, how do you document, how do you gather data 00:43:00to be able to prove your case? Learned a lot through those kinds of efforts. Really began to see what does it take to organize kids and to organize families to get a bilingual counselor. Really changed, and I think really helped me put forward that it was the community and the kids that needed this. It was not me sitting on a committee. So I think there were small micro changes you go through and you try certain things, and then you go, "Oh, let me think about that. Is that really how I want to do it? Is that really how I would go?" I think that we certainly. . . Juan for instance, Juan Lopez, he very much went much more the 00:44:00route of getting elected and making change through being elected officials. Whereas I sort of opted to say I want to do more the organizing of people and while he was sitting at late night school board meetings, I'm sitting late nights in my home or in other people's homes or in schools and saying, "Hey, what do you think? What kinds of change would you like to see? What would be in a perfect world? What would you want?" And then helping to translate that. So I think that I began to learn to say, "How do you take people expressing their needs? How do you change that into something that can be legislated, that can be changed in a more official way?" And I think that that's where I sort of tried 00:45:00to learn to be that role of a bridge. And then relying so when Juan Lopez and I worked a lot on some of those initiatives, he did it from one perspective and I did it from a different perspective. And so probably the thing that I'm most proud of and the one that took the most energy is being able to have the first immersion school, charter school, in the district that was basically run by a board of parents.

ARENAS: It was amazing. It was amazing.

CASADO: Yeah. And so it's interesting that, for instance, now the school district has changed its policy in terms of how they're going to run. Well, because after Nuestro Mundo started, they now opened four or five other 00:46:00immersion schools in the district, but they're run by the school district. They don't have a parent board that helps guide what they want. And so I found it interesting that in all the other classes, because they have a shortage of certified teachers that are bilingual, that they're now going 50-50 immersion. So only half the time are they immersed in the Spanish versus the original 90% of Spanish and kindergarten. And then they would move, they would grow into the 50-50. Except for Nuestro Mundo because the parent board has said no, we feel that this is the best programming and data and research. And that's the kind of thing that I would do. I would go out and get the data and research and then present it to the parents and say, "What do you think?" And I think that that's where I can use, and that to me is the ideal. I can use my expertise, my 00:47:00learning, my degrees to be able to translate things to parents, so that they can help make decisions of how they want to run the school.

ARENAS: I just wanted to point out that it's 9 o'clock, or 9:02 depending on what clock I look at. And you have a time constraint. So how are you feeling right now about your timeline?

CASADO: Yeah, I can technically, yeah, maybe another 10 minutes or so would be fine.

ARENAS: Okay.

GOMEZ: I don't think we need to. . . [talking over each other] . . .questions by then?

CASADO: We can do a follow up if necessary.

GOMEZ: Yeah, there you go, because I would say we probably would need about 30. . . at least 30 minutes. So. . .

ARENAS: Right. Yeah, I agree.

GOMEZ: I'm just kind of. . . I don't want to start on a heavy duty topic and then have a cliffhanger moment.

ARENAS: Yeah.

GOMEZ: Maybe this would be a good time to stop. Because I feel like that next batch of questions are fairly intense for you. And really, this has been so wonderful.

ARENAS: Absolutely.

GOMEZ: Yeah. So this might be a good time to stop for now and then should schedule a part two.

ARENAS: And I'll do that. I'll follow up with your desk.

CASADO: Okay.

ARENAS: I just tried to call you earlier today and my number said it was disconnected. So could you send me an email with all phone numbers, including yourself?

CASADO: Okay. I'll do that right now.

ARENAS: I'll do the same for you.

CASADO: Okay, sounds good.

ARENAS: All right.

GOMEZ: Thank you so much and hopefully we'll connect before Thanksgiving. It would be great to go into part two by then.

CASADO: Okay, sounds good.

GOMEZ: All right. ARENAS: All right.

GOMEZ: Thanks so much.

ARENAS: Bye-bye.

GOMEZ: Bye-bye.

CASADO. Bye-bye.

[Part two of the interview with Debora Gil Casado was completed on November 30, 2015. At this time, only a written transcript of part two is available.]