I thought I would introduce myself for my first post for those

[Cleita]

who don't know me.

I was born in Chile from a Chilean mother and and American father.My ethnicity besides Latina, a mixture of Spanish and Native American, is also German, Dutch, Scottish and Irish from my father's side. I grew up bilingual but forty years of not speaking Spanish has made me a bit rusty. Until I was eighteen years old my time was divided between Chile and the USA, in San Bernardino, California where I went to school and had an opportunity to learn about the Mexican culture from my Mexican American classmates.

My father worked for forty four years in the Chuquicamata copper mine, in northern Chile, so he also spoke Spanish and was immersed in my mother's culture as well.When he retired in 1961, I was already attending college up here in the USA. Since the company wouldn't pay him his pension if he didn't return to the USA, he and my mother relocated here in Santa Monica, California. I never had the opportunity to return to Chile to visit.

Of course many bad things happened to Chile since then when Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon backed the overthrow of that Democratic nation, the assassination of President Salvadore Allende and the installation of dictator Augusto Pinochet. This new government that took over after the coup tortured, disappeared and murdered those who disagreed with them, complete with the backing of the American government. I'm glad my father died before he had to see what happened to the country he adopted in his heart at the hands of his country of birth.