Interview with Leonor Rosas, November 3, 2012, Milwaukee, Wisconsin

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INTERVIEWER: Can you please state for us your full name, date of birth, and location of birth?

ROSAS: Leonor Rosas, and I was born Leonor Rosas Pinzon, in Colombia. Bogota, Colombia, August 12th, 1947.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you. May you please state your parents' birthplaces and birthdates as well?

ROSAS: My mother was born in Colombia, in Bogota, as was my father. They were both born in Bogota and I believe it was 1925. I'm not sure.

INTERVIEWER: Can you state any siblings you may know of, names, and birthdates?

ROSAS: Yes, I am one of six. I have my sister Patricia Rosas, followed by my 00:01:00brother Gabriel Francisco del Carmen Rosas Pinzon, my sister Alejandra Rosas, Adriana Rosas y Alfonso Rosas.

INTERVIEWER: Thank you. Can you state your children's names and birthdates as well?

ROSAS: My oldest son is Francisco Garrett and he was born May 29, 1968. Then I have Tomas Garrett Rosas, he just recently changed his last name from just Garrett alone to Garrett Rosas and he was born on March. . . oh my goodness, March 25th, 1974. My daughter [inaudible] Guadalupe de Leon was born November 00:02:0018th, 1983, and Bayardo de Jesus de Leon was born December 13th, 1984.

INTERVIEWER: Can you state any additional family members you would like to mention, aunts and uncles, grandparents, that you may remember?

ROSAS: Mi abuelita. Mi abuelita. I love her dearly and everything that I am I believe it's because of who she was. Her name was Maria [inaudible] Franco de Pinzon.

INTERVIEWER: All right, so we're going to start with the story. Would you be willing to share the story of how your family ended up in Milwaukee, Wisconsin?

ROSAS: Yes, I definitely want to share it. I don't think it's anything spectacular, it's just the way we all got here, you know? But it is maybe a 00:03:00little bit unusual. I think when I pin it down, I think it all comes down to my uncle's death in. . . I believe it was 1952. He was in a bicycle race in Colombia. In Colombia, bicycle racing is a big sport, such as football is in the United States and he was competing in the national Colombian race and he went over a cliff and he died. It was traumatic for the family. It was so traumatic for the family that my two aunts joined a convent. They couldn't take the devastation and the pain that they were going through. So they joined a convent and they ended up in a convent here, in the I think Sisters of the Sacred Heart 00:04:00here in Milwaukee. They stayed in the convent until 1956 until one left first, then the other one left, and they started working. One started working as a teacher here, an elementary school teacher, the other was working in a hospital, St. Michael's Hospital, and they wrote home and they said Milwaukee is a nice place to live and at that time it was 1956. There was a lot of political turmoil in Colombia. There was a dictatorship, Gustavo Rojas Pinilla was the dictator at the time. There was martial law, there was a lot of issues. So, my aunts wrote 00:05:00my mother and said, "Sell the house, come on over. There's jobs." So, my mom and my grandmother. . . Actually, my uncle and I came first. My uncle was 21 at the time and it takes a long time to go through the paperwork, at that time. I think it's more difficult now but in those days there were quotas and you actually had to apply for a quota and post money in a United States bank. . . I can't remember, $10,000, there's something you had to post to apply for a quota, a number. It takes a long time. So my uncle and I came first and we came to live with those two aunts who were here. Shortly after that my mom, that would be 00:06:001959, my mother and my grandmother and my little sister and my little brother arrived. Then after that, about a year later, my dad arrived.

INTERVIEWER: What was life like growing up here, school? Did you sense any type of discrimination while being here in Milwaukee?

ROSAS: It was a different Milwaukee then. It was a different Milwaukee in that we didn't know about the south side of Milwaukee. We didn't know that there was a pocket of Hispanics in the south side. So we started living on the east side, which is now called River West, but we called it the East Side and because it was a Polish community, we were accepted. I don't know why, I don't understand why we were really accepted but it was a different Milwaukee. There was a bank 00:07:00on the corner and when my mother was working, she worked for Lappin Electric. I would go to the bank and I was about 11-years-old. I could go to the bank on the corner of Holten and cash her check. I was 11. I could go to the corner grocery store and buy my father cigarettes. I was 11. My mother had two babies and I went through all her OBGYN appointments and I translated everything for her. When they bought a house, I translated all their papers. It was different. It wasn't until I started going to high school, at Riverside High School, that I started seeing discrimination and I started noticing. I know the day that I felt 00:08:00discrimination for the first time and that's on my 13th birthday. We ventured to the South Side. We came to West Allis to the state fair with my uncle and we went. . . I was older than that, because I had a little, so I would say. . . I thought I was 13, no, I must have been 16. Went to the state fair and I went to the bathroom with the little sister and the middle sister and I always told the little sister to put toilet paper on the toilet before she sat down. So the little sister went and she came out and she says, they used to call me Lee, she said, "Lee, I put the toilet paper on the toilet like you told me." I said, "Excellent, mija!" There was a woman who was the cleaning woman of the 00:09:00bathrooms. In my country of Colombia, we didn't have racial stereotypes but we had economic segregation, in a way. So a woman that cleans your bathroom is not the same as someone who works in an office. So there was this woman cleaning the bathrooms and maybe I was looking down on her, maybe. She says, when my little sister came out of the bathroom, my little sister said, "I put the toilet paper down like you told me." And the woman says, "But did you flush the toilet? You people never flush the toilet." I was confused and I walked outside and my sister, the middle sister, says to the woman, "Why don't you flush yourself down the toilet?" Then I came outside and was confused. I said, "What kind of people. . . What is she talking about?" The middle sister knew. She said to me, "She was 00:10:00saying because we're Latino." I was like, "Oh we're Latino!" It was like a revelation. It was the first time I found someone looking down on me just because of how I looked. So that's the first time I found prejudice.

INTERVIEWER: Can you tell me more about your educational background? Any college? 12-year education?

ROSAS: That's a complicated question. I'm going to be very truthful so I hope there's Kleenex around. Okay, we value education. We definitely value education in my family and my plans were definitely to go to secondary education. I did 00:11:00graduate in the upper 10% of my class even though Spanish was my first language, I tried very hard. I always excelled. "I got to get those A's, I got to get those good grades." I even went on a weekend visit to Carroll College, had my heart set on it. November 27th, 1965, my father killed himself. It was too difficult for him to live in this country. He was a mechanic in Colombia, a good mechanic. My mother was a secretary. Those were middle class. When she came here, even though she didn't speak English, she started working at Lappin 00:12:00Electric filing and she was quickly moving up. My dad started working at Donaldson Oldsmobile and he was a janitor, but they made him do all the tune-ups on all the cars and paid him as a janitor. Then my mother got pregnant again, talking about three babies now. It was just too much. My little sister was 2 months old and he shot himself in Brown Deer Park. So my mom and I. . . What we do now? There were three visitors that came to see us from St. Vincent De Paul. They were three men in gray suits with hats, I remember. They came in and they 00:13:00brought us, because it was right after Thanksgiving he killed himself, Friday after Thanksgiving, they brought a basket full of rosaries and they told us, I'm translating all along, I have to, and my mom and I are talking, they told us, "You can go to the country tomorrow and apply for food and go on the county, or you can go to job service." It was not called job service at the time but the employment office, and look for a job. "Here's the address." They gave us the address, they wrote it on a paper, then they left. So my mom, myself, and my abuelita, we sat down and we talked. "What are we going to do?" I had just 00:14:00graduated from high school and was going to be going to Carroll College the following semester. My mom said, "We're not going to the county, that doesn't sound right. We're going to get jobs." So the next day we went to the Plankinton Building and we lined up with a lot of people. There was a little box and to this day I remember the little box. We met with this case manager, I believe, and he took the little box. We went through all the job leads and they had looked quickly and they found a job for my mom at the First Wisconsin Bank downtown in the mailroom. I got a job. Brills Colony menswear store in the unit 00:15:00control, which was controlling and doing inventory. So we started working the following day. There wasn't any school to go to but I still always wanted to go to school. I continued to take some classes at MATC, got some bookkeeping classes. I left Brills. After Brills I went to Johnson Controls and I continued to take some classes. Then I got married, I had a baby, continued to take classes in accounting and bookkeeping and anything I could at night. When my son was about. . . I wanted to go back to school as soon as I could but I had a 00:16:00second son. I thought, "Oh no," but I continued to pursue my education and I did go back to school. Finally enrolled in 1978 when I was 30 years old. Went back to school, got my Bachelor's. I was working all this time at Miller Brewing Company. Miller Brewing Company paid for my education. But as soon as I finished my education I knew that it was not what I wanted to do. I loved it, I loved journal entries and accounting and it was excited but that's not what I wanted to do, that's not what my abuelita taught me. She taught me personal responsibility and helping others and helping a company make millions of dollars 00:17:00is not what my abuelita taught me. So, I left and I sent my resume all over the place. I had an interview at the Guadalupana and I remember Mrs. [inaudible] interviewed me and she said, "No, you don't have any experience." I didn't. I thought, "But how am I going to get experience if no one gives me a chance?" So, I had a college degree and a lot of experience in the private sector; did not have any experience working in the community. So Mr. [inaudible] from Centro Hispano, the council for the Spanish-speaking, gave me an interview and I started working with him. That's where I really started learning about the 00:18:00community and community issues.

INTERVIEWER: When did you first start becoming aware of social movements among the Latino community?

ROSAS: Right there. I started working with women who displaced homemakers. I was the pre-vocational coordinator, working to prepare people for a second vocation. So, I was working with three groups of people: displaced homemakers, at-risk youth who had dropped out of high school, and ex-offenders. I started seeing that there were so many issues that young people and displaced homemakers were facing. One of the women, for example, that I was working with, to me she was an 00:19:00older woman at that time but I was 33, so she must have been in her 40s. Her husband had abused her and went back to Mexico. Left her here with the children. She needed to find a career, so helping her polish up her resume, learn about a resume, helping her learn how to type, get her in a class, motivating her, and finally placing her in the courthouse as a translator. I saw the barriers. It wasn't just that; it was trying to find childcare for her children and her children were beginning to get involved with gangs. It wasn't one problem; she had a magnitude of problems. Every day we had to deal with one of those issues. Then I had another woman and she was older. She was maybe 50 or maybe 55 but she 00:20:00couldn't qualify for anything else. Her husband had died and she really could not type so we thought she could be a good clerk and I was trying to teach her math. It was really difficult and one day I was trying to say, "How am I going to teach her about fractions?" We start to talk about cooking and she loved cooking and I said, "Okay, how much flour do you put when you make tortillas? How do you measure it?" Well, all of the sudden she had a breakthrough. She got the fractions, she understood math. I was like, "Oh, great!" So we were able to place her as a clerk in one of the bakeries. Life is very complicated for the families; they're very fragile families. I started realizing we had gone through 00:21:00a lot of those things ourselves. What the difference is that my mom had an education, that we had my abuelita, that we could see a way out. Other families couldn't see a way out. I guess I started to think, "I've got to help people see a way out, help them through the maze, through the criminal justice system and poor education and domestic abuse and drug abuse and alcoholism and discrimination and lack of education," just became real complex for anyone much less someone who doesn't have a strong social network or a role model to follow.

[part 2]

INTERVIEWER: So earlier in our interview you mentioned a lot about your 00:22:00abuelita. Can you mention a little more about the values she instilled in you and can you just expand on your abuelita as a person and what she wanted for you?

ROSAS: Abuelita was a beautiful woman inside. She was just everything. She was a victim of domestic violence. Maybe I didn't want to go there, but I will, I have to because that's perseverance and it shows what the family went through. I talked about our family being middle class. My grandfather's family used to own a trucking firm and he was well known and respected in the community but he was an abuser and he brutally abused my grandmother. My mother would always come 00:23:00in-between them and got her fair share of abuse. Broke her nose. They never went to doctors or anything because you couldn't. . . because the family, there's some things you kept at home. But they survived. They survived all that domestic violence, but not unscarred. My mother is not a very loving mother, she's afraid of physical contact and coming close to you. So my abuelita was our mother. She loved us, she nourished us, she hugged us and my mother was detached because she suffered all that emotional trauma growing up. So she was our mother, Abuelita. She taught us everything and I was older in Colombia so my memories are of going to the market with her. We didn't have refrigerators. We had like an ice box and 00:24:00we would go daily to the market to buy what we needed. On the way back, almost always, at least two or three times a week, we would stop at somebody's home, just for a few minutes and check on the kids. I would play with the kids but I would notice my grandmother was talking to the women. She was helping them cook or clean the house or something. I later talked to my mother trying to figure out why we stopped at all these different houses and it seems like these women had had some trauma or had a baby and Abuelita knew and she would stop to check in on them and make sure the kids were okay, that they were fed. I remember one time we stopped and it was a long stop because the children had lice and she had 00:25:00to de-lice like four kids and I had to wait for her. We never talked about that. We never talked about that but it was a lesson I was learning. It was the lesson of compassion and she never talked about it, she just did it because it's the right thing to do. So I guess when I was looking for my niche in life I knew it was not in the private sector. I knew it wasn't at Miller Brewing Company. It was a wonderful company to work for but that's not where I wanted to be. I wanted to do Abuelita's work and I found it. I found it by working in the community and helping and going out of my way to help people. So I guess the lesson is that I, my family, I was put here to help people and I wanted to do 00:26:00what Abuelita wanted me to do.

INTERVIEWER: You also mentioned earlier about displaced homemakers, ex-offenders, working with different groups of women. . . I wanted to know a little more about the issues that the women faced such as health care. Did they have access to health care? Did they have job placement, anything of that nature?

ROSAS: Some did and some didn't. We had women that were coming from Mexico and they were undocumented. If the person is undocumented, almost every door is closed to them. They are not able to apply for many services: health care, 00:27:00dental care, they don't like to go to the police if they were robbed, they don't like to go to the police if they were abused domestically, none of those issues because the fear of deportation is worse than whatever they're living through. Landlords abuse them and charge awful prices, maybe thousands of dollars for a two bedroom that they have to share five or six families. We saw things that were atrocious because of the inability of someone to call the police or report it because they didn't want to be deported. Then we saw other people, like people coming from Puerto Rico. They're not here illegally but their education level sometimes if very low, so they don't have a second grade, third grade reading level. They have dropped out of school. The economic conditions in 00:28:00Puerto Rico are also very bad. So we would see them even though they could legally apply for things. They didn't and sometimes there were issues with drug and alcohol abuse and sometimes the children fell into the gang issues and very quickly they fell into the system and they couldn't pay for or access an attorney. So we saw sometimes a young man who would go in with the wrong crowd and quickly end up in the juvenile justice system and can't get out of that system. It was always trying to help people see that there was a way out. I guess I remember one day, things you remember, it's because they were a shock to you the first time you saw them. So at the Spanish Center I saw two things that I had never personally seen before. I saw a young man in a room being taught. 00:29:00There was a classroom of the dropouts and then there was this young man being tutored by himself in a classroom and as I passed by I noticed that the book he was using was very similar to the book that my 7-year-old son was using and later on I asked the teacher, "Why is he using a second grade textbook?" and she said, "It's because he doesn't know how to read." I said, "No, he didn't come from Mexico, he came from Puerto Rico." He didn't know how to read. I had never seen in my lifetime a young man, 17 years old, who didn't know how to read. Then later I saw a young woman also at the Spanish Center and she was bruised, I 00:30:00mean, completely black and purple all over. I had never seen that before. The trauma of sitting there and saying, "What do I do now?" And knowing that you have to have the answers and you have to be cool and you can't lose your composure and just walking through taking her to the police, taking her to the hospital. Those were the things that I saw and the need to make it easier. In the back of my mind it was always, "Yes, let's do this today because we're going through this crisis. But let's formulate a plan so it'll be easier for the next people." What if we don't have translators? All of these places that I'm talking about finally now have bilingual counselors. We have bilingual police officers. 00:31:00We didn't have that then. There was the issue of languages and translation and services that weren't available so trying always to advocate. I think my role has been mostly from the inside advocating to make those positions bilingual so that people could move through the system easier.

INTERVIEWER: You mentioned about undocumented women and different women trying to work through the system. During that time, we have the women's rights movement going on as well. Do you feel as if Chicanas/Chicanos/Latinos had a voice in the women's rights movement? Or do you feel as if Chicanas had to have a different movement to have their voices heard?

ROSAS: That's a very tough question, it's very difficult for me to say, but 00:32:00sometimes white women have not been our best friends and I just have to put it out there. The exception, Mary Anne McNulty, who was a very wonderful woman who helped us through a lot of the movement, but we had to do a lot of things ourselves. There was the ERA movement, there was the voter's involvement issues that white women were fighting for, the glass ceiling and all of these things, but it was their movement and ours was different because we do value our families and we do value men in our families but our wishes were different. We had to find our own source of support and our own nucleus to move forward. So we 00:33:00didn't do it together, not from my perspective, not from my viewpoint. We didn't do it together.

INTERVIEWER: Were there some groups you were associated with, some more than others, such as La Raza Unida?. Can you expand more on different groups you were a part of?

ROSAS: I wasn't involved officially with any group. Most of the groups I was involved with were unofficial groups. We were just a group of women that got together and did stuff. We heard about issues that were taking place, the atrocious conditions that were taking place in the labor camps, the way that 00:34:00young people of color were being treated by the police force. Those became issues for us and we would just get together and get a group of women together, then we became involved with political campaigns. We became involved in supporting those political office candidates that supported our views and would help us with what we wanted. What we wanted were more jobs for our families. We wanted better education. We wanted bilingual education. We wanted bilingual, bicultural teachers that would not offend our kids but help our kids come forward. So we not fought really but tried to set meetings with public school 00:35:00systems to try to get bilingual education. We tried to work with parents to educate them on parent's rights. Many of the parents didn't know that they had rights to have their children tested or not have their children expelled from school because they didn't come in or whatever. We wanted to meet with educators to have equal access to education, equal access to schools, equal access to jobs. Housing was a big issue for us because there was segregation. There were landlords who just told you, "I'm not renting to you." You would show up, you would look at a paper, you would see an ad, you would go, and the landlord would say, "No, I'm not renting to you." So all those issues, but I wasn't officially affiliated with a group, just a group of women who talk like me.

INTERVIEWER: How did the community you came from view the Chicano movement, so how did you view the Chicano movement?

ROSAS: Well, I fell in love with a Chicano. The Chicano movement was a cry for justice. I'm going to talk about Alex now. Alex de Leon was one of twelve children and he went to Vietnam because it was the right thing to do and fought in Vietnam and he received quite a few awards for fighting in Vietnam. That's where he said he learned about racial injustice, was when the Vietnamese people 00:37:00and Vietnamese children would go up to him and say, "Same. Same. Same." They would show him their skin. He said they would rub his skin and show their skin and say, "Same, same." He started seeing that we were in Vietnam for the wrong reasons. So when he came here, back to his old job, he only worked at his old job for a little bit, he says maybe one or two months. He said he went to look for the revolution. So he went to Denver. He was in Denver maybe two years working with the schools, in the action, in the movement. Then he came back here. The Chicano movement was the awareness that came in the 60s. It came first 00:38:00with the African American community and the injustice and Martin Luther King and it quickly, simultaneously woke up the Chicanos, which are Latino Mexican Americans that were born in the United States. That's what a Chicano is, who finds him or herself lost because of the injustice and wanted to do something to better life for their children and the children that would come after. Some of them sacrificed themselves. Some of them went to jail and some of them died but the Chicano movement that Alex was involved in was not what I was involved in. 00:39:00Mine was more passive, definitely more passive. Maybe I didn't have the passion that he had, but I had the same philosophy.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel as though the Chicano movement had a lot of support? Mainly from the youth or adults?

ROSAS: Oh, no. I have to tell you, and I don't want to mention him by name because he is still alive but there was a. . . one of my bosses, who was Mexican, from Mexico, who took me out to lunch one day and he said to me, "Chicanos give Mexicans a bad name." I was really confused. I thought, "I'm just learning about Chicanos now. Now you're telling me. . ?" But he told me that. I later discussed it with Alex and it was a generational issue. The Mexicans who 00:40:00were here had found their way. Don't make any waves, be nice. You can get a job at the tannery. You can get a good job at Green Foundry. [Unsure of company name] You can get a house, you can get a car, just shut up. Then here come these children and these children are the second generation. These children are saying, "But Papa, I can't get a job. I can't go to school. The police are arresting me just because of the way I look." That's where the Chicano movement came from. The young folks who were not complacent, who were saying, "This is not fair!" We can't live, you're telling me the United States of America is a nation where we're all equal but we're not. We can't go into that part of town, 00:41:00can't go into this part of town. We get arrested if they just see us hanging out together. So no, there wasn't support from the established Mexicans who had been here for a while. Definitely wasn't support from the white community. There wasn't any support except from within.

INTERVIEWER: Can you touch on other activities you have been involved in beyond Wisconsin or in other states that you have possibly participated in? Any other women's rights or Chicano activist things in other states?

ROSAS: No, I have mostly been centered in Wisconsin and worked mostly from the 00:42:00inside, so I'm not involved in any national scope.

INTERVIEWER: Going back to talking about the generational gap of the Chicano, this new identity to what it means to be Chicano, can you explain to me what does it mean to be Chicano in the United States of America?

ROSAS: It's gone. It was just a time and you had to be at the right place at the right time. The Chicano movement was there because it was needed. It's called the "Decade of Discontent." It came out of the 60s and it was the awakening of the Baby Boomers and Baby Boomers come in different shapes and colors. The Baby Boomers were saying "This isn't right, this isn't fair for the African Americans 00:43:00and it wasn't right for the Latinos." So it took place in the 60s and you needed to identify yourself as something, that word "Chicano", because you weren't Mexican, you really weren't Mexican. People sometimes ask me, for example, do I like Mexican music? Alex and I didn't listen to Mexican music. My Abuelita did. She listened to [unclear], Jorge Negrete. She did. Alex and I listened to The Beatles, The Who, and The Doors. That's who we were. We didn't really have identities with Mexico or Colombia. We had identity with our people, our neighbors, our friends who looked like us who were going through the same issues 00:44:00we were going through.

INTERVIEWER: Do you feel as though Chicanos/Chicanas have changed over time? How do you view them now?

ROSAS: Yes, we are now all Chicanos. Most of us that come from that era do not like to identify as Hispanics. "Hispanics" is a word that was made up for the census. It did come out of the '60s because we demanded to have some funds channeled for our needs, so they decided to allow this "Hispanic" category, but that's not who we are. I think we identify more with being Latino, a more cosmopolitan look at what makes our culture very family-oriented. We value 00:45:00education, we value our culture, and we value respect. We help one another. So it's different. I can't find too many people who will call themselves Chicanos anymore. We more closely identify with a broader perspective of "Latino."

INTERVIEWER: While we were researching, we were able to find a lot of great things about you and we would like to know, how did you determine to work in the civil service, specifically the job service sector in labor development 00:46:00branches? We know you worked in economic development fighting against discrimination within the city council. Can you tell us about that a little more?

ROSAS: I think Mary Anne McNulty was very helpful with that. I worked at the Spanish Center, went to work in Racine and when I was working in Racine I was commuting back and forth and I had just adopted my little girl so it was hard to go back and forth. So Mary Anne was a good friend and I called her up and I said, "Mary Anne, I need to find a job in Milwaukee. Can you give me some leads?" She was the alderwoman of the district; I had helped in her campaign. I found early on, if you help people with their campaigns it's a good thing because you can get your issues addressed. So I asked her if she knew of any 00:47:00jobs. She said, "You can come work for me." So quickly I came and I worked for her as a legislative assistant but I was really involved with helping her pass resolutions, introduce resolutions. I spoke before the Common Council, got to know all the aldermen in the area. I helped her with her reelection, helped the political movement learn how they form their caucuses and their clusters, how they voted together, how they passed each other's resolutions. So that was very helpful. From that I met her network of supporters and network of advocates and most of us started working in Dave Scholl's [unclear] campaign. Those were 00:48:00progressive issues. I've always been involved with progressive issues. His campaign was definitely not old school. The old county executive, the money, the services, all went to the same people all the time. We needed money coming to our communities, money coming and jobs being available for our folks. So a big cluster of us worked diligently in Dave Scholl's [unclear] election campaign and through my work in his campaign, he asked me to be his assistant chief of staff. That was exciting. It was an exciting thing. I was put in charge of the private industry council. It wasn't called the private industry council, but it was the office that dealt with the dollars that came to the county for the area of economic development. I also worked with veteran's issues. The office of 00:49:00veteran's issues reported to me, the emergency government reported to me--economic development. So one of the first things that I did that he asked me to do when I worked for him was to detach the office of employment or economic self-sufficiency or the arm of the county that deals with, in those days, [unclear] dollars, to detach it from the county so it could become its own 501C3 and not have patronage because that's how the old county executive had dealt with the dollars that came in. It was people that supported him. Their agencies received the money. The county executive that I worked with wanted to detach it from the county so it would be independent, have its own board and there would 00:50:00be no patronage. So that was a difficult thing to do but I got it done. He was the best supervisor I ever had because he always empowered me to do it. I used to say, "I'm just a little kid!" He'd always be like, "You got to do this. You got to get out there. You can do it!" Whenever I brought him a problem he always told me, "You don't bring me a problem without a solution." He empowered you to research that solution and form possible outcomes and work forward, so that's what I did. Then, at the end of four years, he said, "I'm not running for reelection." So that is when I applied to civil service to work with job service to become the district director because I had had the experience he had given 00:51:00me. I also ran the private industry council once I had separated it from the county. He put me there alone until the board did a national search and found a director. So I ran the private industry council for eight months. That experience helped me to become job service district director for Milwaukee County. I did that for eight years but during that time, those eight years, every position that I could make bilingual, I did as a skill. You can make it as a skill and if you show need, you can make it. So I worked really hard, diligently, to make positions bilingual as often as possible. I was appointed by Governor Lucey to the criminal justice council. I was appointed by Tommy 00:52:00Thompson, twice, to different councils and I was appointed by Doyle also. So I've been on state councils by different political parties. Through my employment and training I ended up back in the community. Even though I did my part with the government, I always wanted to finish the circle and come back to the community. So I've been with UMOS for ten years.

INTERVIEWER: Leonor, throughout your professional years you have played so many instrumental roles in reshaping government and working on the community behalf. Of all the roles you have played in the Milwaukee area and Racine, what 00:53:00political action or activity are you most proud of and why?

ROSAS: I couldn't think of just one thing, but when I believe that when I look at what I enjoyed and I've liked and seen results has been being involved in political campaigns and working for political change and identifying those candidates and politicians that we could work with and listen to our issues and support our issues and advance our agenda, then working to get them elected. Working, whether it took mailings, phone calls, doors. Bayardo reminded me the other day, we were walking; Bayardo is my cognitively challenged son who lives with me and we were walking down the street to go to a restaurant and he said, "We've been down this street before, remember? When we did doors for Gore." So I 00:54:00think that's what I'm most proud of, that I have voted consistently since 1972 and I have been involved in political campaigns continuously since that time. I look for a candidate that supports what I believe in and work to ensure that person gets elected so that there are more opportunities for our community.

INTERVIEWER: That's a great role as a mentor that you can play, sharing that wisdom about the importance of political campaigns. Earlier on you mentioned that you work with a group of women who just seem to find each other when there were community issues. Can you talk about what brought these women together and who they were?

ROSAS: I have to go back to Mary Anne McNulty. Mary Anne brought us all back and we were her network. We met her and she met us through different associations and affiliations. I met Mary Anne through my sister-in-law, Alex's sister. She had a network of women that she worked with and we started working in campaigns at her house and we would do mailings in her house, a tiny little house and we would set up in the kitchen with long tables and we did it old school, you know, with food and wine. There would always be Maria cooking her beans and rice.

INTERVIEWER: That would be Maria. . ?

ROSAS: Maria Rodriguez. She would have her little kids and I would have my 00:56:00daughter on the table, just running around. It was fun. I would look forward to that. Then we'd be like, "Next week we're going to do one for Tom Dunn again and next week we're going to do Pat McMahon." We did. Through those networks we became close. We became friends. Still my best friend in Maria Rodriguez.

INTERVIEWER: The final question is the role of mentoring. Did you have women that were mentoring you and have you been a mentor to other women?

ROSAS: Yes. Definitely Mary Anne McNulty was my mentor. She was a white woman with a very good heart and Latinos had a huge place in her heart. She showed me the political system. She showed me the ropes, helped me, counseled me; 00:57:00definitely a role model and mentor. Do I do that? Yes. I do believe through mentoring you can help young women advance and move forward, even women that are not so young. I have some success stories. I had one young woman I mentored, she's in Washington now, and she still sends me emails and comes to see me and says I influenced her life. I don't remember, I just know I listened to her and helped her and let her see her options. She knew her options, I just helped her see them. So I do try to mentor as many people as I can.

INTERVIEWER: Well, that really wraps up the gist of our questions. You've done a 00:58:00fantastic job of sharing your life with us this afternoon, Leonor, and thank you very much.

ROSAS: Thank you.