Her stories then shift to the nucleus of life in the west side Barrio to her grandmother’s house. Like the hub of a wheel, all family life came from it and especially in the kitchen where they gathered making tamales at Christmas and learning life lessons sitting around the table beneath the light fixture.
“A light socket, a light bulb and a dangling string, so primitive yet heartwarming, it was a sure sign of home,” she wrote. The tales fluctuate from climbing backyard chicken coops and trees, starting her first business of ironing clothes for a nickel a garment, to eating hamburgers at the local car hop with her mother on Saturday night to learning about puppy love in the third grade.
The amount of detail Samarripa remembered in her stories …show more content…
The book is separated into 13 short, yet satisfying chapters telling key episodes that define the important life lessons she learned as a young girl while giving glimpses to significant decisions she made later in her life. However, Samarripa doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of growing up in two culturally different worlds as the U.S. edged closer to Civil Rights and the political turmoil of the 1960s. Then her mother married a soldier, they moved to Killeen’s low-income housing projects called the “Bricks.” Always a creative and active child, Samarripa suddenly found herself one of the few Hispanics in school and she didn’t speak …show more content…
Then love happened — she married a soldier and they moved to Hawaii, where their three children were born and returned to Killeen in 1973. She was a stay-at-home mom, but as her kids grew, she returned to college. Once she studied Latin when she wanted to be a lawyer and was the only family member to learn German when her family was stationed in Germany, so a college counselor told her she would be good at learning a new language — computer science. She received her degree and worked as a computer program analyst for an insurance software company when her life entered another
“A light socket, a light bulb and a dangling string, so primitive yet heartwarming, it was a sure sign of home,” she wrote. The tales fluctuate from climbing backyard chicken coops and trees, starting her first business of ironing clothes for a nickel a garment, to eating hamburgers at the local car hop with her mother on Saturday night to learning about puppy love in the third grade.
The amount of detail Samarripa remembered in her stories …show more content…
The book is separated into 13 short, yet satisfying chapters telling key episodes that define the important life lessons she learned as a young girl while giving glimpses to significant decisions she made later in her life. However, Samarripa doesn’t shy away from the difficulties of growing up in two culturally different worlds as the U.S. edged closer to Civil Rights and the political turmoil of the 1960s. Then her mother married a soldier, they moved to Killeen’s low-income housing projects called the “Bricks.” Always a creative and active child, Samarripa suddenly found herself one of the few Hispanics in school and she didn’t speak …show more content…
Then love happened — she married a soldier and they moved to Hawaii, where their three children were born and returned to Killeen in 1973. She was a stay-at-home mom, but as her kids grew, she returned to college. Once she studied Latin when she wanted to be a lawyer and was the only family member to learn German when her family was stationed in Germany, so a college counselor told her she would be good at learning a new language — computer science. She received her degree and worked as a computer program analyst for an insurance software company when her life entered another