User:Eureaka

My name is Erica Azorin, and I was born in Tampa, Florida on April 6, 1987. My father is from Cuba and that is the part of my ethnic background that I know the most about and has had the biggest impact on me. I have always been curious of my Cuban and Spanish roots which have mostly led me to learn about my father’s life in Cuba and why most of my family left.

First, I must start with how my family got to Cuba. My last name is Spanish, and both of my paternal grandparents’ families were originally from Spain. My paternal grandfather was born in Madrid, Spain. When he was two, his family moved to Cuba during World War I to seek a better life. In Cuba, my great-grandfather started a brick plant. When my grandfather and his brothers were young boys, they used to work in the brick plant and help their father by making bricks and tiles by hand and helping to put wood in the kiln to fire the bricks. He would go to school in the evenings to learn how to read and write and how to do mathematics. Since he already knew that his occupation would be to take over the brick plant when he was older, my grandfather only finished school through the eighth grade, but in his experiences he became very smart nonetheless. He took on this responsibility even sooner than planned because my great grandfather died fairly young, the exact age is unknown, and my grandfather and his two brothers had to run the plant.

My paternal grandmother was born in Camaguey, Cuba. Her mother, from Valladolid, Spain, moved to Cuba when she was young and met my great grandfather there. My grandmother lived on a ranch, but her family also had a house in the city where they lived some of the time. While they lived at the ranch, she was home-schooled with her siblings by her mother who was a teacher. She went to the equivalent of a college where she studied accounting, art, and music. My grandparents met through some mutual friends, who used to socialize at a country club in the city Camaguey where they lived. As part of Spanish and Cuban custom, it was not acceptable to go alone on a date. Dates had to be chaperoned usually by siblings, so my grandmother would always have to take her sisters along on dates. They married young and had two children. My aunt was four years older than my father.

While they were living in Cuba, the unstable government was going through a series of dictators, coups, and overthrows. Fulgencio Batista took power in the 1930’s. Baptista’s rule was full of corruption and a close relationship with the Havana Mafia, so even though Cuba’s economy was improving, most opposed his rule especially the upper and middle classes. After previous attempts and a guerilla war, Fidel Castro overthrew Baptista in 1959 and has ruled since. Castro held the support of many Cubans when he first took power, but after failing to reinstate a democratic regime as he promised and forcibly turning Cuba into the first communist state in the Western Hemisphere, he has lost most support. The nationalization of industries, imposing of reforms, and fear of indoctrination led many Cubans to flee to the United States. This is what most of my father’s family did. He and some of his family were able to fly to the US, but others were not as lucky. My granduncle and his wife payed a shipman to allow them to stow away on a ship to Canada. After they were let off, they had to find their way through the US and back to their other family members, knowing very little English. In many cases some families or parents could not get out of the country or did not have the money to go all at once. This led to Operation Pedro Pan in which thousands of Cuban children were sent by themselves to the US. Most of them lived with family or friends until they could be reunited with their parents. My father talked about how some “Peter Pan kids” had stayed with his family for a while.

After coming to the US, his family and many other Cuban families had to learn English and start over. At first they lived in a big house which they shared with many of my father’s cousins and their families in Harlem, Georgia. My grandfather and his brothers worked on making a new brick plant. After finding a good new location, my father and some of his family moved to Plant City, Florida while some moved down to Miami. My grandfather and his brothers opened up the new plant there, and it gradually grew into a successful business. His family became members of the same small Catholic church that my mother’s family attended. My father grew up in Plant City, graduated high school, and then went to the University of Florida. He got his degree in engineering and business and then went to the University of Georgia to get his Masters in ceramic engineering.

When my father moved back home from Georgia after graduating, he worked at the brick plant and lived with his parents for a year before he bought a condo in Tampa. He became an executive in the company, and when my grandfather died, the presidency position was passed to a close family friend who was vice president of the company because my father was too young to take over at the time.

My mother’s family has been in the United States for a very long time. The exact amount of time has not been traced yet, but we do know that my grandfather’s descendants were linked to Abraham Lincoln. This knowledge has always given me a sense of pride and patriotism that I cannot really explain except perhaps in saying that I have always admired Lincoln (even before we discovered the family link). The rest of my mother’s ancestry is a bit uncertain, and I was only able to discover bits and pieces of it when I recently researched. My maternal grandfather’s family has proved hard to research, besides the link to Lincoln, all I know is that they lived in the United States for a long time. One of my maternal grandmother’s grandfathers was from Germany and came to the United States where he met his wife who emigrated from Ireland. My grandmother’s other grandfather was Scottish and supposedly was a descendant of King Robert Bruce of Scotland.

This is all I learned about the more distant descendants of my mother’s side of the family. Part of the reason is because my maternal grandmother never really got to know her grandparents, and her family moved around the US a lot when she was younger. Her parents grew up in Louisville, Kentucky where they also got married and had their first three children. Some of my grandmother’s cousins are still in Kentucky. Her father was a newspaper columnist in Louisville and then in Macon, Georgia after they moved. This is where my grandmother was born. Her father changed jobs again and she moved to Chicago, Illinois where her two younger brothers were born. She was raised Catholic and went to Catholic schools in Chicago (which her father insisted upon). After about six years her father changed jobs again and they moved to Atlanta, Georgia. She went to another Catholic school in downtown Atlanta. For a short time she lived in Forsyth, Georgia before moving to Plant City, Florida for yet another job for her father. In Plant City, he developed a mail order business and began with selling magazines and books about farm, pet, and breed animals. He gradually went into the field of horses exclusively because it was bringing back the most commission. My grandmother and her family stayed in Plant City where she went to middle and high school and met my grandfather. After her graduation she went to Barry College a Catholic college for women in Miami (now Barry University) despite the fact that her father did not think college was necessary.

My maternal grandfather was born and raised in Plant City, Florida. He was raised Methodist by his firmly believing mother and father who was a chiropractor. He attended elementary, middle, and highschool all in Plant CIty. He was a year older than my grandmother, and they met when she was a freshman in highschool. They dated for a while, broke up, got back together again, and dated while my grandmother was at Barry and my grandfather was at the University of Florida. My grandmother decided she was not going to stay there for four years to be a teacher, so she came home and went to work for her father. My grandfather stayed at Florida for a few years before he decided to quit and get a job.

They got engaged right before he went to Atlanta looking for a job. Eventually they got tired of that arrangement and wanted to get married. This is where they ran into a problem. My grandfather’s mother did not want my grandfather to get married in the Catholic Church. At the time, there was a law that required both parents to give consent to a marriage if the bride or groom was not 21. They could not change my great grandmother’s mind. My grandmother came from a devout Catholic family and did not want to leave her church. Then, they learned that in Georgia only one parent must give consent for marriage, so they went to Georgia and got married in a Catholic church near where my grandfather’s sister lived.

When they got back to Florida, may grandfather found out that he was offered a job at an electric company in Plant City. He worked for the company until his retirement. Besides working for her father, my grandmother had various jobs as a saleswoman, part-time substitute U. S. Postal worker, and a teacher’s assistant. She stopped working when she was diagnosed with chronic fatigue syndrome.

My maternal grandparents had seven children and my mother was the third oldest and the first daughter. She grew up in Plant City only moving to a few different houses within the city. She was raised Catholic like my father, and she went to Catholic schools up through high school. I attended the same elementary, middle, and high school as her and her siblings. She went to University of South Florida in Tampa where she got a degree in chemistry.

My parents met each other through church, but because my mother was five years younger than my father, they did not really get to know each other until later. While my mom was at USF and my father was living in Tampa, they met Mom at a dance club. My father played on an adult church softball team with two of my mother’s brothers, so they would see each other at games and at church in Plant City. They dated, got married, and not too long after had my sister. Two years they had me and started building a house in Seffner, Florida. We’ve been living in this house since I was one. My brother four years after me, and my parents often joke they needed recovery time after I was born because I was a handful. I was jokingly nicknamed “Destructo” when I was little, and I have always been a klutz. Because she had a house and three kids to keep up with, my mother became a housewife and never really got to put her chemistry degree to good use. As the middle child you learn many things from how to be the peace maker to how to do things on your own. I have always been an independent and easy-going type of person.

My parents brought me up to be hard-working and involved in school, church, and community. This is what also kept my mother busy while I was growing up. She always seemed to be involved in something. My father is a very hard working man and this past year he became president of the brick plant company. This past year he became president when the former one retired. In middle and high school I was in as many sports as I could be and I have been a “tom boy” for as long as I can remember. I have always had a shy side to me, yet never had a problem making friends perhaps because I am so involved. Coming from a family of faithful Catholics who went to church every Sunday religiously (literally), I attended Catholic elementary, middle, and high schools (the same as my mother). I was one of the first girl altar servers at my church, and I continued serving until I left for college which I have always been proud of. Naturally, I became a Catholic myself, not only because it has been pounded into my head, but also, because I identify with it on my own. In my mind, no religion is perfect, and I do not except every belief of Catholicism, but for the most part it is what I believe. My high school was very small- there was only 42 in my graduating class. I enjoyed knowing everyone at school and having the chance to be involved in everything. I participated in Student government, honor society, drama in my senior year, and pretty much everything I could. I have had two jobs both because of family connections. My aunt got me my first job the summer of my sophomore year at new store that she helped to open. The next two summers I worked at the brick plant.

This summer my family took a tour of Europe with my maternal grandmother. I loved the experience and exposure to new and bigger things. That is part of the reason I wanted to come to UF. It has been a big change for me because I am a small town girl and am used to the small school feeling. I am an architecture major which I am really enjoying despite the huge amount of time and commitment it takes. I hope to get m So far I think the experience has been good because I gotten even more exposure to new things and have learned to adjust.