An Untold Story

Arches, Students

Bella Rodriguez ’24 has uncovered the history of 1960s Cuban refugees in the Pacific Northwest.

Growing up in Portland, Ore., Bella Rodriguez ’24 was struck by the absence of Latino stories in the narrative of the city’s history. It wasn’t until she started studying history, environmental policy and decision making, and Latina/o studies at University of Puget Sound that she started to ask questions about the history of Latinos in her hometown. That curiosity led her to dig deep into the city’s complicated racial history and uncover the story of the Cuban refugee community that sprang up almost overnight in the 1960s.

“My family is Dominican, but there’s a lot of shared community in Portland between Dominicans and Cubans,” Rodriguez says. “I knew I wanted to research the history of the area, and my dad told me that there used to be a lot more Cubans there when he was growing up. In fact, he said, there were a lot of Cuban women who would watch him when he was little.

“That’s when I first heard about Operation Pedro Pan.”

Following Fidel Castro’s rise to power in the Cuban Revolution of 1959, Cubans who opposed the new communist regime started to look for ways to get their families off the island. In response, a group of Catholic charities organized Operation Pedro Pan—a massive effort to evacuate children to the United States with the tacit approval of the U.S. government.

Rodriguez’s research led to an oral history of Operation Pedro Pan, a massive effort to evacuate Cuban children to the U.S. after Fidel Castro came into power.

“A lot of families were afraid that their children would be indoctrinated [if they stayed in Cuba],” Rodriguez says. “When the government started shutting down religious schools, they were desperate to get their kids out of Cuba. That kicked off the largest exodus of children traveling from a foreign country to the United States in history.”

Between 1960 and 1962, more than 14,000 unaccompanied minors arrived in Miami from Cuba. Some went to stay with relatives in the United States, and the rest were sent to foster homes around the country until they could be reunited with their families. Eventually, many of them ended up in Portland, where they formed a tight-knit Cuban American community in a predominantly white city.

To learn more about this chapter in Portland’s history, Rodriguez interviewed the now-grown unaccompanied minors, known as Pedro Pans, still living in the area, relying on referrals within the community to find her subjects. With help from her summer research advisor, Assistant Professor of History Andrew Gomez, Rodriguez developed questions and a research framework to create an oral history of the Pedro Pan program.

“It’s important to capture these stories while we still can,” Rodriguez says, pointing out that many of the people involved have died or no longer live in the Portland area. Rodriguez asked her interviewees about their childhood in Cuba, what they know about their parents’ decision to send them to the United States, what they remember about the trip, how they ended up in Portland, and what the Cuban community in Portland was like.

That kicked off the largest exodus of children traveling from a foreign country to the United States in history.

Some also talk about how the experience has shaped their politics: “There is this aspect of fear around communism that a lot of these people have, understandably,” Rodriguez says. “That explains a lot as to why today a lot of Cuban people lean more conservative. If you look at the history, you can see why their experiences have made many of them afraid of more leftist politics. I think that’s a really nuanced, interesting thing that’s important to look at.”

In her research, Rogriguez also has found books, monographs, and a thesis, as well as smaller snippets of the story of Portland’s Cuban community, including a news article from 1967 profiling a Cuban refugee who was crowned queen of the annual Portland Rose Festival, and a business license for a Cuban social club that has since closed. These records, combined with Rodriguez’s oral history project, help to paint a fuller picture of the brief period when Portland’s Cuban American community flourished. Even though the community shrank as people died or moved away over the years, Rodriguez still sees its mark on the fabric of her hometown.

“The history of the Pacific Northwest is very centered on white people, but there have always been other groups here. When my family came to Portland in the ’60s, the majority of Latino people that they met were Cuban. They laid the foundation for the Latino community in the Pacific Northwest today.”

A stack of books for Bella Rodriguez's summer research project on Operation Pedro Pan.

Rodriguez was one of nearly 100 undergraduate students who participated in Puget Sound's long-running summer research program.

Rodriguez—who chose University of Puget Sound in part because it offers a chance to study environmental policy—still has another year of college to go, but is starting to think about future plans. She’s considering law school, specifically environmental law. Which isn’t as unrelated to her summer research as it might seem: “I think there’s a lack of understanding of marginalized communities and their histories in environmental policy and environmental law more generally,” she says.

“I think that the fact that I’m spending this time learning this history will be important.”

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