NIX MENDY:

Oliva, I wanted to tell you that I went to Santiago in 2019.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Ah-Huh .

NIX MENDY:

It was perhaps what inspired me to become an archivist to begin with. I was just very excited . To see that you were from there and very excited to do your interview as a result.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Mm-Hmm Okay. So here I am, ready to go.

NIX MENDY:

All right. Sounds good. Usually we just start by asking you to say and spell your name.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Okay. My name is Oliva Espin, and that's O-l-i-v-a. It is not Olivia, it is Oliva. And the last name is Espin, E-s-p-i-n.

NIX MENDY:

Can you also tell us where and when you were born?

OLIVA ESPIN:

I was born in Santiago de Cuba

OLIVA ESPIN:

in December, 1938.

NIX MENDY:

Great. Can you also tell us just about some of your early childhood memories or what sticks out to you about your childhood?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, I actually have written a memoir about my childhood in Cuba. It's 200 pages,

OLIVA ESPIN:

so it's hard to think of just some very small thing. But basically, I grew up in Havana. My father had been fired from the military by Batista, the first time he was president. We moved to Havana and he started a little school there. I grew up in the two rooms

OLIVA ESPIN:

in the back of the school since I was a very little girl. Eventually, rather than going to my father's school, they sent me to, with a scholarship, a school for girls. It was directed by nuns. That's where I did from first grade to high school. I was

OLIVA ESPIN:

somewhat precocious. There were a number of things that happened. Like, my uncle published my poetry when I was 10 years old. You can imagine that the poetry was not too good, but anyway, I was very proud to have a little booklet with my poetry. I remember things from

OLIVA ESPIN:

Cuban politics at the time, and I also remember things from the world. Like, I remember when the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima. It was just before I went to first grade. I don't know. I mean, this is what I can think of. There's probably more I can remember if you ask me more questions, but this is what I could come up with.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I know that you have sort of spoken in your prep interview about your relationship to spirituality, Uh-huh . I was wondering how that develops from a young age, especially going to a religious school to begin with. I wonder what your relationships to religion started building from there.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, it was from going to religious school, but also my father was very Catholic.

OLIVA ESPIN:

He was educated by Jesuits. I don't know. It was something that was very important for me since I was a child, partly because of my relationship with my father, but partly I don't -- I cannot explain. Of course, through the years that has evolved, I do not feel like

OLIVA ESPIN:

a traditional Catholic anymore. In fact, the church I go to here in San Diego is a church with women priests. There's an organization called Roman Catholic Women Priests. And there's about, I dunno, several hundred women who have been ordained as priests legitimately, or not legitimately. I mean, the Vatican says it's not valid.

OLIVA ESPIN:

But since the -- I'm sorry. There was some strange noise there. The sacrament was given at the time,

OLIVA ESPIN:

so these women are ordained as priest, and that in a way it's a rebellion against the official Catholic church. But at the same time, it continues to be important and spirituality continues to be important for me. It's one of my sources of strength, I would say, to have it still there, even though as I said, it doesn't

OLIVA ESPIN:

look like it may have looked to my father when I was a child.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I know that you have written previously about your relationship to the Saints mm-hmm . I was wondering if you could speak a little bit to that. I know for me, personally, as someone who also grew up Catholic, the Saints felt a little bit more accessible to me than some of the mysteries and concepts of God

NIX MENDY:

that were brought up in church. I was wondering if you maybe had the same influence, or how did the Saints sort of influence your life?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Yeah. Well, when I was a little girl in school or wherever the nuns would give you stories of sayings and all of them were nice, quiet, obedient, and good little girls or good little women, whatever. When I started teaching

OLIVA ESPIN:

women's studies there was, the whole feminist movement did a sort of a recovery of women who had been forgotten or looking at some of those women from different angles. I sort of started thinking, well, what about these saints of my childhood? I started doing serious research, including getting permission to do research in the

OLIVA ESPIN:

Vatican Library and the libraries and et cetera. Many of these women were in fact very rebellious and very strong in what they believed and in how they acted. So in a way, they were much more attractive characters than the quiet little girls who didn't say anything or did anything. They were more like real women. And in their context, we would say they were feminists, maybe.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I mean, we cannot use that term exactly. They wouldn't know what that meant in their time for most of them anyway. But they were very strong advocates for what women deserved and should do, could do, et cetera. It was very important to look at them again. That, of course, combined with, I mean, when I was like 10 years old,

OLIVA ESPIN:

I saw Ingrid Bergman film of Joan of Arc, and I wanted to be Joan of Arc. I started jumping on furniture with a broom stick with a piece of cloth on one hand and a ruler on the other. My banner and my sword and et cetera. That was that. Then there was a film about Rose of Lima, an Argentinian film that

OLIVA ESPIN:

was more or less around that time, maybe a year or two earlier. It was a beautiful actress who played St. Rose of Lima. I wanted to be St. Rose of Lima also to be beautiful and an actress and all that kind of thing. And now that I said that, I remember something when my aunts asked me, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" I would say a nun or an actress. Of course, everybody laughed because it seemed like

OLIVA ESPIN:

a contradiction, but I definitely wanted to be both. Anyway, I actually have -- One of my recent books is about women's saints. It's entitled Women Sainthood and Power. It's not, again, women's saints in a pious way, but more an analysis of who these women were, and the things they actually said and did,

OLIVA ESPIN:

and et cetera. It's more a feminist cultural study of what it meant to be a woman in their times and how they responded to that and used their own spirituality to do what they wanted to do, or what they felt needed to be done.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I love that. You grew up

NIX MENDY:

in what would be a difficult economic time, so I was wondering how that influenced your family dynamics and maybe community dynamics as well?

OLIVA ESPIN:

It was not a difficult economic time. It was a difficult political time, but financially, lots of people in Cuba were doing very well, not my father. We lived in a

OLIVA ESPIN:

situation of restricted economic means and I would say even poverty or near poverty, but there was always the pretension that that wasn't true, that we were right there like everybody else in the Cuban middle class. Since I was a very little girl, I sort of was required to pretend that I had what I did not have.

OLIVA ESPIN:

In a way, it was a good learning thing because I learned to -- I don't know, dress as if I had a champagne budget, when in reality I only had a beer budget. I learned to do this very early. But it was very hard to

OLIVA ESPIN:

always keep appearances when everybody else around me was basically really having middle class resources much more than we did. Then what happened was that as soon as I finished high school, when I was 17 years old, I started tutoring children. In a year or so of doing that, I was

OLIVA ESPIN:

making as much money as my father, which both made me very proud and also felt like a burden. Like I had a responsibility for my family because I could earn money that would help support the family. There was a contradiction in there. I don't know if that answers your question, but that's sort of

OLIVA ESPIN:

what I went through at that time.

NIX MENDY:

Right. When you did start having your own finances and supporting the family, I wonder how that also changed the family dynamic in any way. Like did your father feel, perhaps, threatened by the fact that you could make as much money as him? Or did your family just feel more supported in you being able to support them?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Yeah, they felt more supported. In fact, my father

OLIVA ESPIN:

felt very proud of me in a way, very proud that I could do more than him. At the same time, that increased the family dependence on me in ways that are not necessarily good for a 19-year-old because at some level it was burdensome, but for the most part, at the time, what I felt was pride. I felt my family,

OLIVA ESPIN:

my father in particular, was very proud of me and all the things I could do and achieve and et cetera. My father and my uncle, also his brother, were always very supportive of anything I could do intellectually, anything I could achieve. I mean, we are talking about Cuba in the 1950s,

OLIVA ESPIN:

and they were very encouraging of me. I don't know if you're gonna go there with the questions, but something that happened that was really a chance, there was a program in Cuba, a question and answer program, so the equivalent of Jeopardy, but it focused more on a particular topic rather than questions all over the place.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I sent in a letter about being part of the program, and they called me in. In 1958, when I was 19 years old, I won 4,000 dollars answering questions in that quiz show, competing against adults who were 10, 15, 20 years older than me. $4,000 in 1958

OLIVA ESPIN:

was a year's salary in the US, so you can imagine how much money that was in Cuba. Suddenly, I had all this money, so I suddenly was rich -- I mean, rich, you know what I mean -- after having lived in a constricted financial situation for many years. What I did with that money was to go to Europe. Initially, my father said,

OLIVA ESPIN:

"No, you're not going to Europe alone." And then, eventually, he relented. I spent more than three months in Europe that summer, traveling by myself. I'm 19 years old, when tourists were not going to Europe every day, and certainly not from Cuba. I mean, 1958 was very close to the end of Second World War. Anyway,

OLIVA ESPIN:

those were sort of unusual experiences that I had. Some of them were just a matter of chance, and some of them was a matter of studying hard, like I did for that program. So, yes.

NIX MENDY:

That's amazing. I am curious, because I've also read about you online that I've seen you talk about how as a child,

NIX MENDY:

you read a lot, you studied a lot, and this sort of gave you a sense of imagination, so like this internal sense of self that you had. But I also am hearing in your childhood that there are these moments of other people sort of bringing you out into the broader world and the uncle publishing your poetry and you being part of this quiz show, so I'm wondering how you sort of negotiated that internal sense of self while also having these experiences that were very

NIX MENDY:

community or broader based. How did you manage those two, balance those two aspects of yourself?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, I mean, I think there's a distinction from what I felt I was doing then and how I can interpret it now, and it's hard for me to separate the two, I think then it was mostly a sense of feeling proud. And in fact,

OLIVA ESPIN:

as a little girl, I was rather pedantic. I thought I knew everything and no one could tell me anything because I was a know-it-all little person. And that did not endear me to my classmates, so that's a part of it. On the one hand, I felt that I could do anything and I was better than anybody else. And on the other hand, I was

OLIVA ESPIN:

very isolated from my peer group because of that. When I look at it now, or through the decades, I think it was a way of balancing insecurities. I may not have as much money as my classmates. I may not be as popular as my classmates, but I'm more intelligent. I have

OLIVA ESPIN:

this capacity to do these things and I can do anything I want, which is something that my father and my uncle sort of instilled in me. You can do what you want. All the adults in my family were very proud of me because I was doing all these things and winning these prizes and even prizes in school before

OLIVA ESPIN:

the quiz show prize. That was part of my sense of what I could do. I haven't mentioned my mother, but my mother, although we clashed very frequently when I was a child and an adolescence, we became friends when I was an adult. But back there and then,

OLIVA ESPIN:

my mother was a very strong woman, and my father adored her. Being a strong woman was something that was okay to do in my family. My mother, for example, walked into the church to get married by herself because she did not want anyone to give her away. From then on, she was a very strong support for my family

OLIVA ESPIN:

and for my father. That also got into me, not just the praise from my uncle and my father and uncles and grandparents and et cetera, but also the sense of being a strong woman is okay because my mother is, and again, at that time, I would not have put it in these words that I'm putting it now,

OLIVA ESPIN:

because at that time I was aware of clashing with her practically constantly, because it was like, who has more to say ? But now I can see that she was also having an impact. Her behavior was also having an impact on who I became. I don't know if I answered your question. There were

OLIVA ESPIN:

other things that happened along the way. I mean, there was a time when I was about 8 years old until I was about 11 or so, when I practically did not eat, I pretty much refused to eat. That was a way in which I sort of tried to rebel and I didn't know I was rebelling. I only knew that I did not like food. But now

OLIVA ESPIN:

again, I can see that, and the refusal to eat was a way of saying, no one is gonna make me do something I don't want to do. It's interesting. I also had scoliosis as a child and had to wear this corset and these things. I think part of the reason why I went into my mind is because my body was not particularly helpful.

NIX MENDY:

All those are great details. I was wondering if you could sort of set the stage for us on your Europe trip. What was Europe like at that time? How did you make connections with other people? What was your unique experience as a woman traveling alone in this place that definitely had not experienced a woman like you come into

NIX MENDY:

the country very often?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Yeah. Well, I made some friends in Spain at that time, and they were a little amazed that I was traveling by myself all over Europe. But for the most part I had been doing things that other girls had not done so big deal if I was doing another thing that other girls had not done. And again, when I think

OLIVA ESPIN:

60 years or more later, I know it was somewhat extraordinary, but at that time it did not feel that extraordinary. Although, it was, I mean, being in Europe by myself for those three months felt like I was completely free of some of the things that may have been burdening me without me being aware even that they were burdening.

OLIVA ESPIN:

It felt wonderful. One of the things I most vividly remembered, it's being in the Louvre, in the museum and seeing the statue of the Victory of Samothrace, with the big wings floating in the wind, with this big sculpture in stone that feels as if it's something light,

OLIVA ESPIN:

when in fact it's made in stone. And I remember looking at that made an enormous impression on me. In fact, many decades later, when I got a tattoo, my tattoo is one of the wings of the Victory of Samothrace. I mean, I don't know if that's relevant, but the rest of Europe or the rest of things I saw in Europe,

OLIVA ESPIN:

it was a very powerful experience to be there by myself. I ended up going back to Cuba, not because I wanted, but because my father sent a peremptory letter saying, you've traveled enough, come back. Even though I was this independent little thing, I wasn't fully independent, so I decided to go back. Yeah, I mean,

OLIVA ESPIN:

it was very powerful. I've kept returning to Europe, and I lived in Europe for periods at a time, et cetera, but probably one of the most important things was some of the people I became friends with, which were all older than me, needless to say, in this trip helped my mother and I leave Cuba in 1961 because my mother and I

OLIVA ESPIN:

did not have visas to come to the US, and I was very glad I was in Spain and hoped to stay there. And again, I didn't, so there you go.

NIX MENDY:

Still on mute. I was wondering if you could tell us more about -- I know that you mentioned, your prep interview that

NIX MENDY:

what was expected to come out of the Cuban revolution did not come to be mm-hmm . I was wondering if you could speak to what the expected outcome was versus like the functional reality mm-hmm of the situation.

OLIVA ESPIN:

We all -- Well, I don't know that all, but many, many Cubans believed that Fidel was a hero and things

OLIVA ESPIN:

were gonna change in Cuba for the better, and there was gonna be more of something social justice maybe . What ended up happening progressively is that what started as justice started becoming authoritarianism and controlling things.

OLIVA ESPIN:

While at the beginning, it made sense to nationalize a lot of the sugar mills, many of which were owned by American persons or corporations or whatever, or by very rich Cubans, that felt just, but then a year later, they were also

OLIVA ESPIN:

nationalizing little things like people who had a dry cleaning or people who had a sewing little business or different things like that. Suddenly it felt like, wait a minute, how can those people be enemies of the revolution and enemies of the country? Something that many people don't know is for those first few years of the revolution, whenever anyone

OLIVA ESPIN:

said there's too much communist influence here, whoever said that was put in prison sometimes some of the people who had fought with Fidel, people who had been very influential in changing the course of history at some point were put in prison because they did not like the communist influence in the country. That also was

OLIVA ESPIN:

sort of a contradiction and a difficult thing to deal with because obviously that influence was there, but they did not want to admit that it was there until they really had a firm grip on the country. Progressively, it became evident that there was something that was not what we were told. It was

OLIVA ESPIN:

that it was moving in a direction that many people were not comfortable with. That's when eventually people started leaving the country. Many times, I wonder what would have happened if we would all have stayed rather than going away. But you cannot reconstruct history. So that's what happened.

OLIVA ESPIN:

What prompted me immediately to leave is that I was teaching adolescent girls. I was working at a junior high school, and all teachers needed to become carriers of the new ideology. And I thought, I cannot do this with young people

OLIVA ESPIN:

because I'm not agreeing with this, I will not be comfortable doing this. That's what prompted me to decide to leave.

NIX MENDY:

Great. That's actually just what I was about to ask you, but I also wondered, you ended up leaving with your mother because you didn't have the visas that your father and your siblings had at the time mm-hmm . I was wondering how that separation sort of

NIX MENDY:

affected you and you moving to Spain versus moving to the US.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, my father and my sister had visas. They're still now people from other countries in the world who get tourist visas for several years when you can come in and out of the US without problem. They had that kind of visa. My two little brothers were sent with the Peter Pan program,

OLIVA ESPIN:

which was a program that ended up taking about 14 -- I mean, getting about 14,000 children who came to the States. Their parents were afraid that the children were gonna be indoctrinated or sent to Russia or et cetera, like it had happened. I mean, remember it was very close to the Second World War, so people were afraid about what could have happened with children, so what is gonna happen to children here, et cetera.

OLIVA ESPIN:

The four of them were able to come in different places. My father and my sister were in Miami. My brothers were sent by this program to Ohio. My mother and I needed to go to Spain. I actually never truly wanted to come to live in the U.S. People think that everybody in the world is dying to come live in

OLIVA ESPIN:

the U.S. Well, I didn't want to, I wanted to stay in Europe. Europe had been the place where I had enjoyed myself most, where I thought every wonderful thing in the world happened in Europe, so that's where I wanted to be. Of course, I didn't, I couldn't. The responsibility of helping my family financially made me come back

OLIVA ESPIN:

to the States when I would have preferred to stay in Spain. Something that was happening, of course, is that with all this revolution and thing, universities were getting closed. I did not have resources or time to do anything else. So my college education was being interrupted with all these interruptions I went through. It took me 13 years to finish a BA. Since I was a bookish person,

OLIVA ESPIN:

I wanted to study, but I couldn't. That was a very important thing for me in wanting to stay in Spain, to go to university. But I couldn't, because of my financial responsibilities to my family. I ended up -- I came to the U.S. and then almost immediately went first to Panama for about two years, and then took

OLIVA ESPIN:

Costa Rica for about seven years as part of an organization of college women who were working with college women, first in Cuba and then in other Latin American countries. I went as part of that and lived in those countries for all through my twenties, basically.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Then when I was 30 years old, from Costa Rica I went to Belgium with a fellowship to start a doctorate in psychology. By then, I had finished my undergraduate, my undergraduate degrees from Costa Rica from the University of Costa Rica. I went to Belgium for a doctorate and made a few bad decisions in terms of

OLIVA ESPIN:

getting married to a man. Anyway, it was not a good decision. I came to the States and finished the doctorate at the University of Florida and immediately got a job in Canada. I was in Montreal for a while and then finally got a job in Boston and came to the States. There was a period of time when I was living in other places

OLIVA ESPIN:

in Latin America or in Europe after I left Cuba before coming to the US. Now it's been so long that I don't even remember how one lives in other parts of the world.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I wanted to just backtrack. I think through this time period before you went to the U.S. because there are a couple of things that were really interesting to me, particularly your comment

NIX MENDY:

about how there's a difference between being an immigrant and being a refugee, and you specifically classify yourself as a refugee. I wanted to give you the space to talk about what your sort of exodus from Cuba looked like in that context.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Basically, the difference, I think-- I've written a number of books about migration and women and that--so basically the difference is immigrants

OLIVA ESPIN:

tend to be people who are moving for financial reasons, and refugees are people who are moving because of political reasons and what do we call political reasons requires definition sometimes. Sometimes it's actual political persecution. Sometimes, when we are talking about women,

OLIVA ESPIN:

it's violence in the home, which is political in the sense that the abuse of women is more than something that happens in one family, it's a more dangerous political context specific to women or to people who -- Well, okay, we can talk about that later. But the difference is immigrants want to go to a new place.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I mean, I'm over simplifying, okay? But immigrants tend to be people who want to go someplace else because they have the hope that their life would be better. Refugees tend to be people who feel they cannot stay where they are, regardless of how much they want to stay, because it is dangerous for them. To avoid the danger, they go someplace else,

OLIVA ESPIN:

even though it would not have been their first choice. Another way of putting it, immigrants are pulled out or pulled by some hope, some interest over there, while refugees feel pushed out, have to run away, have to get out of there. So that, again, is an oversimplification, but that would be basically it.

NIX MENDY:

I was also wondering if you could talk about the college group that you were encouraged to start in Panama and then Costa Rica, where you were facilitating this program for young girls. I wonder if you could talk more about that program.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Yeah. It was a Catholic organization that looked to

OLIVA ESPIN:

sort of provide contexts for women going to college either because -- There was a residence, so like some girls from the provinces of whichever country were living in these residences that facilitated their going to university, or

OLIVA ESPIN:

even women who were living in the capital city. It was a way of having friendships with other young women who had a similar interest. Their Catholic education was increased. I mean, there were very few Catholic colleges, so people were going to public

OLIVA ESPIN:

universities. Whatever they had learned about religion was for children, not for adults, not for young adults. So this was a way of creating some religious formation that was commensurate with the other levels of education they were getting at the university. It was a network of friendship and connection, et cetera with other young women. So

OLIVA ESPIN:

the organization in Havana had about 300 women going from 17 to 30, basically. The organizations in other places were different. In Panama, it was more successful, it grew to be a larger organization there. In Costa Rica, it never

OLIVA ESPIN:

really caught on. I was in both places, so I don't really know why. Well, one of the reasons was that the Vatican Second Council, or Vatican Council II, that happened in the early sixties, sort of gave a different tone to religion. A context like the one we had was not as relevant as it

OLIVA ESPIN:

had been even five years before. There was less interest, on the part of young women, of being part of this organization. But, as I said, we had a residence, there was Mass every week, and there was also circles of study where we read books

OLIVA ESPIN:

collectively and discussed ideas, et cetera. At some level it was very interesting. Certainly, was very significant in my own life. Some of my friends of decades are people I met in that context. So there you go. I hope I answered your question.

NIX MENDY:

I also know that you mentioned in the prep

NIX MENDY:

interview that it didn't always entirely feel like just a religious organization, but also an opportunity for feminism or for women to have self-determination and self-fulfillment. I was wondering if you could speak to that and how that aspect kind of showed up in the program.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, yeah, I mean, what I said before, it created friendships. It created opportunities for study and formation

OLIVA ESPIN:

and those kinds of self-growth. It was not, I mean, when you say religious organization for women, you think people who read the Bible and keep their mouth shut and are obedient little wives. On the contrary, it made women want to study, want to learn, want to self-develop.

OLIVA ESPIN:

That was very positive and productive. Nobody would say, this is a feminist organization. That was not what they were saying. But in reality, it was creating what a feminist organization would do, which is: help women learn more and be more self-sufficient and able to think by themselves.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I was also wondering if you could speak to your relationship with your mother when you were living in Spain. I know that you were saying that you didn't really have a strong relationship with her until you started coming into adulthood. I was wondering

NIX MENDY:

what challenges or barriers did you experience in your relationship with her and how'd you start overcoming those things with her?

OLIVA ESPIN:

When we were in Spain, I mean, it was a very difficult period. I mean, both of us had lost everything that grounded us. She was away from my father. For her and my father, that was a tragedy. They loved each other and wanted to be

OLIVA ESPIN:

together. Being separate was terrible. I mean, we had been fighting since I could remember, and we continued fighting during that time there, and at some points, we would be together in our feeling sad and crying together and et cetera. Then at other points, she was pulling me to come to the States and I kept resisting. All that

OLIVA ESPIN:

was part of the struggling. As I got -- And this was many years later, it was already in this country. I was already in my thirties. I started realizing that a woman like my mother, from her generation, in her social context, et cetera, had some particular challenges. I started not just thinking, this is my mother, which of course I kept thinking,

OLIVA ESPIN:

but it was also, this is a woman with a particular set of circumstances, and I can see why she behaved in some ways that I did not like, because this is the context in which she was, and this is how she understood reality and her life and et cetera. Sort of seeing her as a woman of her generation

OLIVA ESPIN:

with the particular circumstances of her life, I sort of learned to appreciate her and connect with her. And then we even, I mean, in decades after, until she died, we traveled together, we did a number of things together. It became a much better relationship. Also, my father died, so she was more

OLIVA ESPIN:

independent then and more by herself, like to be able to travel or do other kinds of things together. So, yeah.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I was also wondering if you could just tell us what drew you to the field of psychology. I know that's kind of a big question but I'm curious about -- It seems

NIX MENDY:

to me, throughout some of the moments that you've shared, that I can see the psychologist's mindset, right? I can see this ability to see the person as not just who they are, but beyond who they are, and understand the context of the life that has made them who they are. Mm-Hmm . I was curious about how you got into psychology.

OLIVA ESPIN:

The first time I took a psychology course was when I was in high school.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I was 15 years old, and the teacher who taught that course was my favorite teacher. I thought psychology was extremely interesting because I like how she taught and et cetera. That was the first time when I thought, oh, I like this. I like trying to understand what makes human beings tick. Then after my

OLIVA ESPIN:

uncle died, and it was right, I was barely 20 years old because it was right at the beginning of the first year of the Revolution. A few months into the Revolution, my uncle died and I started having panic attacks that were very scary. The director of the organization, this organization I talked about,

OLIVA ESPIN:

of college women, the director of the organization was a psychologist, and she realized that I was having a very hard time. She started basically offering me psychotherapy for free and sort of helped me out of that. When I said panic attacks were very scary, of course, panic attacks are about fear, but part of it is

OLIVA ESPIN:

the fear of the fear, "Oh my God, when am I gonna have the next panic attack and am I going to be able to continue functioning?" I needed to work, there was no alternative to that. I had to find a way of continue working no matter how afraid I was that I was gonna have a panic attack in the next five minutes. She was very helpful with that. It was a very practical demonstration that this thing I had sort of liked in the

OLIVA ESPIN:

abstract when I was in high school could produce very concrete effects and benefits in people's lives. I started then studying psychology very concretely, and my BA from Costa Rica is in psychology, so I went in that direction very early.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I was wondering if you could speak to, perhaps, what you felt the field of psychology was, perhaps, like the beginning of your career or when you entered the field of psychology versus what you know now as someone who has gone through a career in psychology. I wonder, what have you sort of learned on that trajectory?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, the field of psychology was, and in some extent, but smaller now, very rigid in what is scientific and what is right and how you have to do things and you know, that kind of thing. In the last 40 years, maybe, maybe a little bit more than that, it's become much more

OLIVA ESPIN:

aware that the social context, number one, is not something that you can always measure with statistics and numbers. Number two, the social context is influencing what is happening inside the person. It is not just something that happens in your brain as if nothing else was going on in the world. There's much more awareness,

OLIVA ESPIN:

and some of it is part in part because of feminist psychology, but also cultural/multicultural psychology, LGBT processes within psychology from being an illness to just being just one of the ways human beings are. There's been a number of variations, or I dunno, opening up

OLIVA ESPIN:

to the influence of social forces, political forces, cultural context, et cetera, that wasn't there before. And in whatever small way I may have contributed to that, I feel very glad to have done it. But in the process, those of us who were beginning to

OLIVA ESPIN:

say this a number of years ago, sometimes were told "You're not a true psychologist," "You're not doing what's appropriate" and things of that sort. But eventually here we are. And after a few awards and things like that, it seems that there's a sense that these things needed to be part of the psychology of individuals or our understanding of the

OLIVA ESPIN:

psychology of individuals. So it's been progress, if you wish, I don't know if progress is the word, but certainly an opening up.

NIX MENDY:

I know you've also spoke in your prep interview about how this rigidity also made it ... You were creating curriculum basically kind of without

NIX MENDY:

anyone else to sort of speak to, like you were creating curriculum by yourself. I also wanted to give you the opportunity to talk about what it also meant like to -- I know that we always say it's so great to be a pioneer in the field, but I wanna talk about the realistic challenges of being someone who is moving the needle against the way that the field interprets itself. I think that that's a really important point to make.

OLIVA ESPIN:

It's great to be a pioneer 40 years later, where everybody's giving you awards and congratulating you for being a pioneer. But while you are pioneering , it's not easy. In fact, as I said before, there were things like being told you're a social activist, you are not a psychologist or things of that sort, not being taken seriously. I mean,

OLIVA ESPIN:

the first time I organized a course on counseling in multicultural contexts in the department where I was working, I was in a meeting saying, "Students need to learn about cultural influences, not just about all the other things", and somebody said, "Oh, Oliva, we all have our pet issues, big deal." Then several years later when I got an award, that same

OLIVA ESPIN:

guy say, "Oh, it was so wonderful, what you were doing." I thought to myself, "Not thanks to you jerk, but okay" . So it's hard when you're doing it because it's not just what people are saying to you, it's that those things that are being said to you make you self-doubt. Like, am I really not good?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Am I compensating for weaknesses? Am I not really a good psychologist? Maybe I'm not what I'm supposed to be. Maybe I don't know the things I'm supposed to know, you know? It creates self-doubt. The first time I got an award in 1991 actually I had to give a talk for receiving the award, and I started saying,

OLIVA ESPIN:

"This award has changed the meaning of my career," because it's a way in which the organization is saying what you have been doing that several of us rejected for several decades, we are now saying was a contribution. So it created a different meaning for the things I had been doing. But while I was doing it, as I said,

OLIVA ESPIN:

it was not only hard in terms of whatever concrete rejections, but also in terms of self-doubt and insecurities that it created.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I'm also looping back a little bit, but I was also curious about --

NIX MENDY:

We've talked about the refugee experience of being pushed out of a country. I was wondering about what is like to be a person of that experience, but still within this Latin American community where you are living in other Latin American countries who perhaps have some of the same context as your home country, but you're not able to exist in the place that you want to call home. I was wondering,

NIX MENDY:

is there a conflict there, are there challenges there? How did you feel being in other Latin American countries?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Some of it was easier than being here because you were speaking in the same language, officially at least. Some of it you see the differences between yourself and the people

OLIVA ESPIN:

you have learned to love and like, and live with in that country. And some of my friends from those two countries, particularly from Costa Rica where I lived longer, are still very close, deep friendships. But it sort of makes you feel strange because you may be

OLIVA ESPIN:

speaking Spanish, but you are not, you don't have the same historical or political understanding of the different kinds of contexts at the same time being there gives you a perspective that had I stayed completely in the Cuban community in the U.S., I may not have some of that perspective.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I was in Panama when there was some shooting in the Canal, in the Canal Zone that ended up leading, eventually, several years later, to giving the administration of the Canal back to Panamanians. People, Cubans, but other people in the States were saying "It's the communists who are doing this," and I knew the people who had been part of that,

OLIVA ESPIN:

so I knew very well that it was not the communists. Yeah, they may have been communists, I don't know if they were, but these people I knew were not, they were just Panamanians claiming the right to their own country. I sort of then started looking at Cuba even from a different perspective. Like, okay, so what I thought was absolute truth

OLIVA ESPIN:

may not be, there may be a situation in which there are things that needed to be done. I started seeing more and more some of the things that the Revolution did that were not so bad, although overall, the cost for doing those things has been very high on the same people that it supposedly was helping.

OLIVA ESPIN:

We are seeing that today. But so I do not have the rigid views about Cuba or about Latin America that I would have had if I had stayed only within one Latin American community, living in those other countries and seeing other circumstances made me see Latin American countries, but also Cuba,

OLIVA ESPIN:

sort of with more nuances and more variations of what is the truth and what was needed and what isn't and what's just, and what's it unjust that I might not have seen if I had stayed only one context. I think that's true for anybody. When you start meeting other people who come from other cultural groups, if you are a person

OLIVA ESPIN:

who wants to learn about reality and human beings, I mean, there are some people who get very rigid, but if you are a person interested in human beings, and you see these variations and you understand that there's a variety of different experience that you had not understood before, you start seeing that things are not just: this is the truth. Yeah, well, this is the truth, but this is also truthful,

OLIVA ESPIN:

even though it's a contradictory.

NIX MENDY:

I know that you also mentioned that you were doing your doctorate in psychology and that's when you got married. I know it may not be something that you particularly ,

OLIVA ESPIN:

I was a big mistake, .

NIX MENDY:

Right. But I wanted to give you the space

NIX MENDY:

to talk about that and perhaps the societal pressures that informed that marriage as well.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Okay. I think the societal -- I was 30 and I didn't want to be a solterona, as we say in Spanish, an old maid. I got married to a man and I shouldn't have, and it was a very bad decision and he was not a good choice.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I think, okay, something I learned in that context, and it did not happen to me, but it could have, I sort of understand how women who get abused stay in situations that are harmful for them. As I said, maybe because of whatever my other background experiences, personality, et cetera,

OLIVA ESPIN:

as I've said before, I had the ability to get out. But I understand why some women are incapable of getting out and it's a very insidious, dangerous situation that many women get in. Luckily, I was able to get myself out of there before it got really bad. It was a brief marriage.

OLIVA ESPIN:

And after that, a lot of my life changed, so, yeah.

NIX MENDY:

I know you also mentioned in your prep interview that you started realizing that your friendships with women were perhaps more intense than you originally thought. I was wondering if you could speak to what was that quality of intensity that existed in those relationships, and

NIX MENDY:

how did that inform your identity moving forward

OLIVA ESPIN:

In a way that had always been there, and looking back, I wanted more from some friendships that you can expect or get from a regular friendship. The feeling was there, but I could not name it

OLIVA ESPIN:

or I could not understand it. As I've been saying about political experiences in Latin America, well, other experiences in life, once you have more experience, and once I had been married, somehow I was able to distinguish when I was looking for friendship and when there was something in there. There were

OLIVA ESPIN:

always women, there still are now, in my life that are purely friends and there's nothing else there except friendship, but there are other things that had a quality or that I noticed had a quality. That was subtly and not so subtly different. Again, after that marriage, I sort of was able to pinpoint what was

OLIVA ESPIN:

going on with some of these people that were different than just wanting friendship. In particular, I met someone who very clearly something was going on there that was not just being her friend.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Eventually we got involved in much more than friendship . That was a transformation. Initially was: "Oh my God, no, because I'm a psychologist and this is a sickness." Well, I did not feel sick at all, but okay. Eventually, that changed, pretty much a couple of years after I had started this relationship.

OLIVA ESPIN:

And that was completely transformative. I mean, my life changed completely after that moment.

NIX MENDY:

I also found it really interesting in your prep interview that despite being a religious person or a spiritual person, you didn't seem to have any

NIX MENDY:

real shame around your sexuality. I was wondering if you could speak to why you felt that sense of comfort and also Dignity as an organization who also gave you that sense of self-validation as well.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, there were several things there. One is that I've always looked for

OLIVA ESPIN:

intellectual cognitive understanding of things. I went to literature that talked about homosexuality in a religious context, or religious understandings of homosexuality that were never, particularly -- John McNeil, "The Church and the Homosexual," that was one of the first things that appeared at that time. But there were

OLIVA ESPIN:

other things. First, there was an intellectual understanding of what the Bible was really saying, and in what context was the Bible saying this? Again, you can apply the same idea of the political circumstances when you look at what's going on and have a different understanding of what's going on. That was the intellectual understanding of what was happening. But also, at a gut level,

OLIVA ESPIN:

there was this -- I mean, remember I was an adolescent in the 1950s, so my understanding of what a woman is and how she should behave was very much an understanding of whatever men say is the truth about you. I'm over generalizing, I'm simplifying, but that's there.

OLIVA ESPIN:

It was like, I don't need to wait for any man's opinion about who I am. I don't need to have men's approval for who I am. Also, God understands things at a level that human beings, including priests

OLIVA ESPIN:

for that matter, don't necessarily understand. I know God knows that this is right. I know this fits in a way that is good for me. I know that this is enhancing rather than diminishing, and it does not feel like a sin at all. Around that time,

OLIVA ESPIN:

actually, relatively soon after, I mean sometime, but relatively soon after I had gotten involved with this person and come out, at least to myself, I wasn't really out in the world, but my father died. The first reaction I had in connection to this after my father died was, "Okay, so now you are there with God, so

OLIVA ESPIN:

now you understand what you would not have understood while you were alive. I know you know that, and I think you're happy for me." All this contributed to a sense of comfort. I have never felt guilt, religious guilt about being a lesbian. Never. That's a blessing because I know

OLIVA ESPIN:

other people are tormented by this. But understanding intellectually what the Bible really says, my own personal gut reaction, and then I joined Dignity, which provided both much more comfort at the gut level and much more intellectual understanding. It was really good. It was really

OLIVA ESPIN:

very positive that way. Of course, the thing about being a psychologist and being sick disappeared relatively soon after that also, because all the official definition of homosexuality as an illness completely disappeared, so it's been fine. I really cannot complain.

NIX MENDY:

I also loved when you mentioned in your prep interview that you had a student who did a dissertation around lesbians coming out in their thirties and fifties sort of like the conclusion of her dissertation around presentation. I wonder if you could speak to that.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Yeah. What she found out -- I was

OLIVA ESPIN:

the director of this dissertation, and what she was looking at was women who had come out after a certain age. Some of them had been married, some of them even had adolescent or adult children, et cetera. What she found out is that women who looked appropriately feminine,

OLIVA ESPIN:

lipstick lesbians, if you wish, I don't know, women who look appropriately like society thinks women should look, came out later because they were not confronted at an early age with people challenging their looks.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Women who behaved, acted, looked in a certain way that contradicted appropriate gender role behaviors and looks and et cetera sort of had to confront themselves earlier, so tended to come out at an earlier age. Also, women, again, who were religious tended to come out a little later. But the most

OLIVA ESPIN:

important thing is what you look prevents you from challenging yourself. I think that's what happened to me. I mean, I came out in my early thirties because I had never confronted that I might not be heterosexual until that moment. Nobody challenged me on that. You can see how I look even now when people look at me, they ask me, "How many

OLIVA ESPIN:

grandchildren do you have?" None. Not that being a lesbian means have grandchildren, but you know what I mean. I mean, the assumption is, and of course, in this society, a Latina woman of my age, of course, is a little abuelita and the expectation is that I would have some grandchildren and great grandchildren. So that's it.

NIX MENDY:

I was wondering if you could speak to some of the professional discrimination that you've experienced in teaching psychology. I know that you have mentioned that when you were working at a university, you did not get tenure because of your sexuality. Mm-Hmm . I was wondering if you could speak to that experience. Mm-Hmm .

OLIVA ESPIN:

I don't know that there's much to say about that, except it caught me by surprise because I had been at another university before, in which things were not very easy, but many people knew and nobody ever brought it up

OLIVA ESPIN:

in this particular institution. Some combination of factors. I was the director of a program where the rest of the faculty were men, and several of them, particularly one of them, was not terribly happy with me. That was part of it.

OLIVA ESPIN:

There was, again, a confluence of factors. There was a vice president who wanted to do away with this program and other programs, not just this one. I, years later, actually found out that he had, at a meeting, said, "Does anybody have any dirt on this woman so we can find a good excuse to deny tenure?"

OLIVA ESPIN:

Somebody said, "Well, I know this, I know she's a lesbian." It was never said that this was a reason. In fact, the dean said, "Well, your teaching is mediocre and you really haven't written anything of value." Speaking of devaluing things.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Couple of months after this is when I got this award, this prestigious award from the American Psychological Association, so it was almost funny. If anything was good, always, is that my teaching had always got good evaluations. They gave me excuses, and I thought seriously about suing.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I knew women who had been struggling suing, and I thought I don't want to put my energy for the last 5, 10 years into fighting these people in court. I want to put my energy into producing something better, and that's what I'm gonna do, rather than suing them. I don't want my energy to be swollen by this or swallowed by this negative

OLIVA ESPIN:

struggle against them. In fact, the next few years I started, thankfully, making enough money, I mean financially, et cetera, that may have been the equivalent of what would I have gotten in a legal battle and done it in a much more pleasant way.

OLIVA ESPIN:

That was that. I'd rather not name institutions, although I'm tempted to do it, but better not.

NIX MENDY:

I understand. But I thought it was also interesting that your male colleagues seemed to be intimidated by the fact that young women were drawn to you. I wonder if you could speak to that.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Yeah, yeah. Well,

OLIVA ESPIN:

this guy said once to me, "Why do they have to see you as all giving, and me as all depriving?" of the students, whatever it was. And I said, "Well, maybe it's true." Of course, he didn't like that. So, yeah.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I wonder if you could tell us about this professional shift from psychology in training therapists, working with women researching about Latin America and women's issues and moving more into women's studies mm-hmm and how that and broader sort of understandings of feminism and how that expanded your career into something else.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Yeah. Well, again, when this thing happened at this institution in Boston, I started looking for a job. A number of the jobs that were open were within psychology. There was this job in Women's Studies here; the Department here at San Diego State is the oldest Women's Studies department in the country.

OLIVA ESPIN:

There was this opening, and when I came for the interview, I thought, "Oh my God, I want to work here" . What happened was that in this context, I was able, as long as I was writing about women, it was okay.

OLIVA ESPIN:

It was not like it needs to go through the filter of: is this psychologically appropriate or not? I had been writing articles and giving presentations about women refugees and women and migration, gender and migration, et cetera. In a very short period of time, all those things started becoming books.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I mean, I was at San Diego State, officially in this Department, teaching for 17 years. I have nine books on women and migration, some of which may not have materialized. They are on psychology. I mean, it's not like they're not, it's mental health

OLIVA ESPIN:

and psychology, but the sort of barriers, the judgment of what's appropriate or not what's different because in this case, it had to be Women's Studies. I continued working in Psychology. I mean, after I was here for about a year with Women's Studies, I was hired by the California School of Professional Psychology,

OLIVA ESPIN:

and I started teaching. First, one course, and then more, and then dissertations and et cetera. The first course was about cultural issues, and I continued, and for a while we had gender roles and psychology. I don't even remember what the title of the emphasis was, but it was an emphasis on that kind of

OLIVA ESPIN:

study here. That allowed me to continue within psychology, teaching psychologists some of the things that I would not have been allowed to teach in a strict psychology program before. Part of it is I knew I had a full-time job, and I knew that in Women's Studies, this was okay.

OLIVA ESPIN:

If I brought the things I learned in feminist studies from history, anthropology, sociology, politics, you name it, into the context of Psychology, to talk about how human beings, how the psychic is constructed with the social context that is around them into my teaching of Psychology,

OLIVA ESPIN:

it would enrich it. In fact, it did. I mean, I learned a lot that I would not have learned had I been just in the field of Psychology. What I learned, of course, I transmitted in my teaching. So it was very enriching.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I'm very, very glad that I supposedly got out of the field and then brought all these things into the field. Of course, I was hired because there was someone who did a history of women and someone did women and politics, and someone did anthropology and women. I was the one who was doing psychology and women. That's how I was hired here. Now they have blurred the context a little bit more, but

OLIVA ESPIN:

anyway, it was very productive for me and I hope for my students also.

NIX MENDY:

I love that. I also know that in some of your scholarship in Women and Migration, you also put more of a focus on sexuality. Especially since in some cultural context, there is this belief that

NIX MENDY:

queerness is an American made sexuality. Mm-Hmm . I thought that it was very interesting that you had sort of embedded that into women's immigration experience from Latin American countries and from other countries coming to the U.S. and I wonder if you could speak to that as well.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Yeah. Soon after I came to San Diego, I stopped

OLIVA ESPIN:

seeing people clinically because I had this job and a half, and doing clinical work would have been too much. But during my years doing clinical work in Montreal and in Boston, it was very clear that there were some of these things that were happening in the context of women who were immigrants, refugees themselves, or the children of immigrants, refugees,

OLIVA ESPIN:

et cetera, that had a lot to do with sexuality for women. It was like the sexuality of women was a big to-do in terms of what they came with to therapy. "My parents don't let me do this, but my brother can do it." "I have to be careful about that, my brother doesn't have to." These kinds of things

OLIVA ESPIN:

that were constantly very present. I decided to start doing some interviews about that, and it coincided with a year in which I was on sabbatical in the mid-nineties. It was relatively easy for me to go places for one reason or another, and interview people in different places in the U.S. I particularly wanted to make sure that I also interviewed lesbians, not just

OLIVA ESPIN:

heterosexual women. I took that and it became a book, a monograph. It's entitled "Women Crossing Boundaries." It was published in 1999 when no one -- In fact, I remember a colleague at San Diego State who said, "What's the big deal about women and migration?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Everybody has the same experience." And I said, "Oh, no, there's something very different in how gender roles, specifications of how women should behave and how men should behave, that creates particular circumstances, plus the things that make women want to migrate may be different than the things that may some men" -- I mean, not a hundred percent, but there are

OLIVA ESPIN:

differences in all that. Then the effect of migration, like how your life gets transformed by the process of migration, and sometimes it's not good. I'm not saying it's always marvelous that you're an immigrant and come to a new country, sometimes it's not so good, but there's a transformation, that's the point. That transformation is different for men and women and that's

OLIVA ESPIN:

something that I wanted to look at. And again, looking at sexual orientation in the process. And that book, just a few months ago, people from the University of Toronto and an agency in Toronto that works with immigrant women have asked me to present to them, to consult with them, to look at

OLIVA ESPIN:

projects they are doing with immigrant mothers and daughters and et cetera. Somehow that book continues to be relevant. And one of the people from Toronto said, "When I discovered your book, I knew this was going on, but I had not had any proof, any content of immigrant women saying that in a context that was a research

OLIVA ESPIN:

kind of context." It's one of the things that I'm more proud of, opening up the fact that the sexuality of women interacts in unique ways with the immigration process and both for heterosexual and non-heterosexual women. It's there, very present. Something that also came up very clearly

OLIVA ESPIN:

is the connection between sexuality and language. What are you allowed to say in your original language versus what you feel you can say in English? Sometimes, there are no words in your language, but sometimes the words in your language are bad words, so you don't want to have to use it, it's easier to talk about sexuality in English. It was an interesting thing, and it's something I had noticed in therapy that whenever

OLIVA ESPIN:

the conversation turned to sexuality, it always happened in English, regardless of what language we were using before. It was a very interesting thing that also came out as a consequence of that research study.

NIX MENDY:

I love that. I also wanted to discuss, you mentioned,

NIX MENDY:

in your prep interview that sometimes it is easier to come out now as a lesbian than it is to come out as a religious person. I wonder if you could talk more about that. Why do you feel that sort of aversion to religion and how do you think that that has maybe shifted in over the years?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, I don't know exactly how much it had shifted through the years, but the thing is, when you say

OLIVA ESPIN:

anything religion, people think you're talking, as I said before, about obedient women who read the Bible, and I'm nothing like that. Whenever you talk about being religious or having these kinds of interests, you sort of have to qualify it for a half hour until people realize that you're not talking about traditional religiosity.

OLIVA ESPIN:

That makes things complicated in a way that saying, "I'm a lesbian." Okay. At least people think they know what that means. They don't need to be doubting what you're saying or something, particularly in psychology contexts to talk about being religion is usually not welcome because it assumes --

OLIVA ESPIN:

It's interesting because it's like the influence of Freud is there, even for people who are not Freudian, if you say anything religious, oh, you must be an immature person who wants a daddy to take care of you. So you have to sort of qualify this in a way that you don't need to qualify when you're talking about sexual orientation.

NIX MENDY:

Interesting. . coming into it is very fascinating to me. Mm-Hmm . I also wanted to ask you about, you mentioned having this realization that you're a lesbian, you say that your entire way of being sort of changed after that point. Mm-Hmm I wonder if you could talk about

NIX MENDY:

what changes specifically you went forward with, because I think that we don't always talk about what your life looks like once you sort of make this shift in your life. I wanted to give you some space for that as well.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I felt a lot freer. Basically, I was more comfortable with myself. Even though I was not conscious of struggling with something,

OLIVA ESPIN:

obviously, the struggle was going on at an unconscious level. Once that struggle was not there, I had energy for other things. It's interesting because when you are doing things at an unconscious level, you don't know you're doing them. You don't know that your energy is being sapped into dealing with, "I don't want to feel this way", or whatever it may be. Then okay,

OLIVA ESPIN:

the door is open, "I'm free, this is it. I feel like an integrated person in some way, so my energy's available for what I want." That was something that I think happened as a consequence of that.

NIX MENDY:

Great. I think we are winding down into our last couple of questions. But I was wondering if there was anything that we haven't talked about

NIX MENDY:

that you absolutely want to talk about?

OLIVA ESPIN:

No, I think you even reminded me of some of the things I said in the prep interview that I didn't remember I had said . So, no, I'm fine.

Nix Mendy:

So these are the last four questions that we kind of ask every interviewee. Mm-Hmm . These are kind of like just our lightning round questions. Whatever feels comfortable and intuitive to you as the answer is

Nix Mendy:

the one that you should go with.

OLIVA ESPIN:

Okay.

NIX MENDY:

So my first question is, if you could tell your 15 year old self anything, what would it be?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Something like everything is gonna be okay. Just relax and wait. That's what I would say, because the poor thing was so overwhelmed with so many things.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I think like all 15 year olds are, in some way, so to reassure that it will be okay, it will be okay. They will be hard moments, of course, but everything will be okay in the end. Just wait and keep going.

NIX MENDY:

Great. Okay. Do you think

NIX MENDY:

there is such a thing as a superpower for lesbians, for LGBTQ people? And if so, what do you think that superpower is?

OLIVA ESPIN:

What do you mean superpower?

NIX MENDY:

Like a quality that you think is specific to the LGBTQ community or specific to the lesbian community, if that helps.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I think the capacity to challenge norms,

OLIVA ESPIN:

to envision what it could be in a way that when you are within the norms, you sort of cannot see it. If there is a superpower, it will be the capacity to envision a world that it's freer and different and more -- What would I say, reassuring, more accepting of the reality

OLIVA ESPIN:

of each human being. I don't know. But that would be what comes to me intuitively, as you say.

NIX MENDY:

Okay. Why is it important for you to tell your story?

OLIVA ESPIN:

Huh? Well, for different reasons. As I said, I've written a book, I've written a memoir, so

OLIVA ESPIN:

obviously it is important beyond what we are doing here. But there's so many misconceptions about what the lives of people are, and particularly for young people, my 15 year old self or any 15 year old for that matter

OLIVA ESPIN:

and twenties and thirties, which for me, even forties is very young. There's this torment about everything that it's not right. I think it's important from the perspective of -- I'm gonna be 84 in two weeks, from being from this side of the

OLIVA ESPIN:

whatever, to say in the end, if you are true to yourself, everything turns out to be fine. Everything gives you more satisfaction that if you continue to deny things that are true and meaningful for you. I can say, no, that's the lesbian part, but that's also the

OLIVA ESPIN:

religious part and that's also the Cuban part. All the different things that you could say constitute who I am or make me who I am. I think also for people who are either immigrants, young people, I guess, or who are children of immigrants, this whole thing, like you are getting,

OLIVA ESPIN:

I guess Latinos in particular, but anybody for that matter, this thing like this is the bad influence of the American culture and that's why you feel this way and whatever. It's like, no, no, no, I could be your abuelita, it doesn't have anything to do with American culture. It has to do with who you are. If anything American culture does is that it has a bit--not always,

OLIVA ESPIN:

but usually--more freedom to be that person that you want to be, not just the person you are expected to be by your culture or your family or those things. It's not quite what you're asking, but one of the most significant moments for me was to be able to tell my mother,

OLIVA ESPIN:

"This is truly who I am." Her response, within the fog of whatever cultural prejudices she had in her head, was actually very positive. I mean, I could summarize what she said, "This is not what I would have wanted for you, but what I want is for you to be happy and this makes you happy, I want it for you." And in a way

OLIVA ESPIN:

you end up educating the parents and grandparents who say things that you should or should not do about this. If you can show them that you're a fulfilled person who feels good about themselves and who's successful, or whatever it is you are around that. I mean, you become an educator of your ancestors, so to speak.

OLIVA ESPIN:

When you show that you are happy and you're fulfilled, as I said. Okay. I'm repeating myself.

NIX MENDY:

No, I love that. I think about that a lot too. That's how I probably would've answered the queer superpower question is that you teach people how to live authentically mm-hmm and a lot of times reparent your parents into understanding

NIX MENDY:

how to live authentically and how the culture around them has not given them the ability to do so. I find that to be a really amazing concept. But my last question is, as you know, OUTWORDS as an organization captures and shares LGBTQ oral histories through in-depth interviews. I was wondering what, for you,

NIX MENDY:

is the importance of a project like OUTWORDS? And you could also use the word OUTWORDS in your answer .

OLIVA ESPIN:

Well, initially I didn't know anything about the organization. It was a colleague who put me in touch with you. But I think it's wonderful that whatever I'm saying, whatever other people are saying gets there and stays there. I mean,

OLIVA ESPIN:

I'm not gonna be on earth much more, maybe, I don't know, if I'm lucky, 15 years, 20. It's important to know that there's an organization like OUTWORDS, that it's keeping my life experience in their archives to be used, offered to younger generations.

OLIVA ESPIN:

I think it's enormously valuable and I'm very thankful that you're doing things like this.

NIX MENDY:

Great. Well, thank you so much for your time today. That is the end of the interview.