Elsie Hernandez was born in Puerto Rico in 1958 and with her family, including eight siblings, moved to Dorchester in 1968 to join her grandparents. Arriving prior to bilingual education, she arrived in a school system which actively discouraged Spanish. As she learned English, she made sure to help other Spanish-speaking students. The family moved around to many apartments, discovered through word of mouth, looking for affordable places for a large family. She raised two sons and their children with many Puerto Rican traditions. She can sit in her son’s house, built on the formerly vacant lots, that was between her and her husband’s apartment buildings before they married. A project of the Dudley Street Neighborhood Initiative and supported by a Mass Humanities project grant, Neighborhood Voices is an oral history project documenting the stories of families living in the Dudley Street neighborhood.
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