Author Nylda Dieppa Presents at Orlando Remembered, January 2026

My book is part of the celebration of Hispanic culture at the Orange County offices… Excerpt from an oral history presentation by Nylda Dieppa for the Orlando Remembered organization on January 21, 2026 at the Orlando Public Library.

Listen:

My presentation is based on my life experience which is probably very different from what you experienced growing up and living here all these years.

“Trigger Warning”, a Poem by Nylda Dieppa

So my book starts with a “Trigger Warning” it says: I wrote and I wrote and I wrote to tell an old story. MY story. My own damned personal story. I don’t know how I was able to tell it but I had to- because my story would come out whether I want it to or not. I WARN YOU: you WILL be triggered if I did my job right, if I opened my heart truly to you, my reader. My work may make you cry, have a panic attack, anger you to an extreme, leave you trembling with raw emotion. And that means I used the right words to reach the (dark) pits of your heart- passions you probably didn’t know until today were lurking there. Please forgive me if you become discombobulated. I didn’t write to make you feel that way. I did because I had to to be true to myself and my own terrible depths. May my words help you discover your own.

“En Mi Viejo San Juan” a Song by Noel Estrada

There is a song that is very popular throughout Latin America. Anywhere there is a town called San Juan, they think that they own this song. But it was actually composed in Puerto Rico and the author is Noel Estrada and the title in Spanish is: “En Mi Viejo San Juan.” I told you it was famous. So, always in my heart.

“Always in My Heart”, a poem by Nylda Dieppa

July 4, 1979 I left my island for a new life in this big, strange country that I thought I knew so well without hope or promise of a new and improved life or a better love. Alone, I lugged with my three kids one of them in a straw basket, the other two tied to my waist so I wouldn’t lose them through two airports, two airplanes, a mass of luggage. Yes, I brought a lot of baggage with me, but I left my heart behind floating in the warm waves of Luquillo beach, behind the thick walls of El Morro castle in the moist, pungent earth of El Yunque forest. My family grew to seven with a kid born in Georgia and another in Texas. Then we ended up in Florida where my parents died and I felt lost without the mountains at my back and the seashore so far away. Like yesterday’s poet sang, “My hair has turned white and destiny has made fun of my terrible nostalgia.” And though I have been back “to the San Juan that I loved,” I am who I am because of my patria. Patria means homeland.

Maitland

So I arrived in Maitland in 1986. So I believe that if you’ve been here for more than 15 years you’re a native. So I guess I can consider myself a native of Florida. So I was devasted because I grew up with the mountains at my back and the ocean in front. And not having that gave me a sense of being lost. I didn’t have the water ahead of me that would give me a hope and a sense of openness and then the mountains being solid and backing me up and supporting me. So I was devasted in that sense. By that time I was 31 years old and had five children under twelve years old. And my husband was working 25 hours a day so I was like a single mom.

1986

We were the only Puerto Rican family in the Winter Park school. Only two other families of color at that school. So it was different. We had no one to speak Spanish with and for me Orlando felt like a Mickey Mouse kind of town compared to New York City or to San Juan. There was not a cosmopolitan feel to it. It was very much a small, southern town back in 1986.

Capilla del Cristo (Chapel of Christ) in San Juan, Puerto Rico

So what happens to memories without monuments? So this little chapel back here was constructed because in the 1700s – this is a very steep hill and they used to have horse races going down that hill. And there was nothing at the end of the hill, it was a precipice. And one day the horses spooked and it looked like they were all going to fall into the sea and people starting praying and miraculously the horses stopped and nobody died and everybody was saved. And it was a miracle. So they built this chapel to Christ of the Miracles. [Capilla del Cristo (Chapel of Christ), also called Capilla del Santo Cristo de la Salud].My great grandparents used to live on that same street on the opposite side of the road about two buildings this way. So,we remember this story because the architecture that’s sitting there reminds us of that story. If it had not had happen they would not have built that chapel and it would not be what today is a tourist attraction.

Architectural Landmarks

So what happens to stories that don’t have monuments that help them be reminded? So Orlando Remembered was built to protect a building because memories were important. You’ve probably seen this picture before. What has officially been documented is grand hotels and civic leaders, architectural landmarks and a reporter that was talking about this picture many years ago said that the hotel catered to the highest class. So these are the people that got their stories written about, reported and immortalized. What was overlooked? Immigrant experiences, women’s daily lives, working class neighborhoods, cross cultural encounters, stories from kitchens, back rooms, offices, laundry rooms, farms. Those stories didn’t count because they were from people that were not the upper class. So those stories are not in the records they used.

Stories from Grandparents

So what official history misses, when you see that grandfather telling stories to the grandchildren and you see how entranced they are and they are so excited about these stories. Official records and monuments like the maps on the table, they center dominant voices. The people in power. They marginalize the perspectives of everyday experiences. And the formality of these documents do not show the emotions that are part of the story. And the expressions of the little grassroots people that are a part of those stories. So it leaves a gap in the context and the meaning of the story. We have a historical record, but it is a partial record. Even though we assume that it’s complete because that’s what the book says, you know. But in reality there is a part of that that is missing, that has not been incorporated into that.

Personal Narratives, Oral Histories and Community Stories

On the other hand, personal narratives and oral histories, memoirs, oral traditions and community stories, they bring back that texture and that voice and emotion to the past. And they capture the lived experience in culture memory that formal archives miss. The formal archives appear authoritative, but yet they are incomplete. But together with official records, the personal narratives create a fuller more inclusive history. Let’s talk a little bit about Boricuas in the the Orlando area. Have you heard the term Boricuas before? Boriquen is the name that the Indians gave to the island of Puerto Rico. And if you are from Boriquen you are a Boricua so that’s what Boricua means.

2019

So, by 2019, the Orlando Kissimmee metropolitan area was home to the second largest concentration of Puerto Ricans in the entire United States. Osceola County is the only county in the United States where Puerto Rican is the largest ancestral root. If all those Puerto Ricans were a city, they’d be the tenth largest in the United States bigger than San Jose and bigger than Austin. I never thought that could be true.

Hurricane Maria

So what are the numbers behind the silence? This is an avocado tree that survived Hurricane Maria. Two years past Hurricane Maria 220,000 to 250,000 residents of Puerto Rico relocated to the United States. Orlando became the second largest Puerto Rican population in the U.S. and Florida became the new center of the Puerto Rican diaspora. But there is a human cause invisible in those statistics. Statistics say 220,000 to 250,000 were relocated. That sounds cut and dried. It’s just that’s what happened, that’s it. But the reality is that mothers were watching their children flourish here but they missing their families in Puerto Rico and the sense of family that is so closeknit that doesn’t exist here.

Relocation

Professionals that had Master’s degrees or were physicians in Puerto Rico, or had doctorate degrees, they couldn’t find jobs because their English was not very good. So they had to take menial jobs in order to survive. Families were splitting because those that came after Hurricane Maria came here and they didn’t find jobs. And they had to return back. So they left the families that they had here in Orlando to go back. So families were splitting back and forth. And then there was the emotional burden of trying to find a job without the requisite skills but having the technical, the professional skills but not having the language. And dealing with temporary housing in hotels or living in a relative’s living room on the floor, whatever they could find. And the fact again of leaving family that was very traumatic. So, the statistics say, they give us a number, but they don’t tell us the stories behind those numbers.

Family Experience

So in my family’s experience, we were navigating a lily white school, okay. We were the first people of color, or maybe the second family of color in that school. And the classmates parents were surprised that my oldest daughter was so beautiful. They could not imagine that a brown girl could be so beautiful. They had imagined that everybody had to be totally white to be pretty. So there was a degree of racism that was hidden in those compliments. They didn’t know they were being racist, it was natural, it was something spontaneous, but it was underneath there.

1990s

So in the 1990s as more people from different countries started arriving here, there was a shift in the culture and in the situation here. So there was Spanish in education, in politics, in business, in social life you could hear Spanish more often. So Orlando fundamentally changed in that sense because there was so many people from other countries here.

American Coffee

When I arrived, my mother said there was no decent cup of coffee here. She said, “What the Americans consider coffee, their national drink, is a very weak tea that they call coffee but it’s not real coffee.” But, later on thanks to Starbucks and all those places, we opened up our idea of what good coffee was and of other things that we’re not apprised of because if you haven’t been exposed to it, it doesn’t exist. So there was a lot more cultural diversity than there was when I first moved here and the food evolved from the restaurant here that you were talking about, Ronnie’s, it evolved from that type of food to something mulitcultural. We can have Japanese or Puerto Rican or Thai food or whatever. We have a diversity that we wouldn’t have had when Ronnie’s was here. So it is what it is.

School

So there’s stories that don’t make the history books and I have an example. My kids were in this school like I said that was very different from what we experienced and the principal had a lot of power. And she did several things that were not correct and I pointed them out to her. I was standing up for truth and justice. So she got angry at me and she started yelling at me so loud that the people in the other office could hear. She said, “You better take those kids out of here. Put them into another school.” And I said, “You know what, the only perfect school is here. The perfect school does not exist.” So she had to wait seven years for my youngest daughter to graduate from the school before she could get rid of me.

Integenerational Stories

So these moments shaped Orlando’s integration story, but they’re not recorded, you know. If I don’t sit down and tell the story, if I don’t share with you, nobody else will know that that happened. There’s another story here, and that young girl is my mother kneeling by her mother, at that point children were taught that their mothers were to be worshipped. And my grandmother was not able to walk because she had promised God that if her daughter, my mom, who was very sick survived her illness she would never walk again. And because she promised that she never walked again. So these stories don’t compete with the historical record, they complete it. They add something that you wouldn’t know. In this culture where my mother grew up, this is how they did things. If you promised God something, God delivered what you asked for, so you now have to pay back.

Poetry

So how poetry and memoir become historical documents? By documenting emotions, situations, things that happened. A poem reveals social dynamics of integration, details that the official records miss, like the expression of that grandmother’s face. The expression of the children. Those things, the way they’re dressed, the slang that they use, the class differences, those things are not a part of the record. And the poem can express emotional truths, that statistics can’t capture. You know when I say that I miss Puerto Rico, you know my heart was left in the El Yunque that’s something very powerful. There’s a cultural collision when things that kind of don’t make sense because we’ve never used them before and we see them in somebody else, that’s something that needs to be expressed.

Memoir

So my memoir which is this book, is an effort in historical preservation. There is a poem about me and my father, it’s a long poem so I’m not going to read it. But it’s a tearjerker. And there’s poems about growing up and how I started to see life differently and culture class and all these things. So these documents try to preserve the language, the culture, and it also chronicles my personal growth through trauma. And it captures generational tensions between traditions and assimilation. How do you keep what you were raised to be, and at the same time adapt to a new world, a new situation. You know there’s a tension there.

There is another poem, this is another poem I am going to read.

“The Lifespan of a Song”, a poem by Nylda Dieppa

Warm humid nights in a Guaynabo carport singing wholeheartedly with my friends as my boyfriend plays his Spanish guitar. We sing and sing and sing until the milkman shows up! A houseful of friends, children, and relatives in Orlando celebrating a birthday, a graduation, a holiday… perhaps our love. My husband plays the piano or the guitar. I join in the singing after I do the dishes. Toga night, the last one of the cruise, my husband drags me to te stage appropriately dressed in bed sheets. Terrific stage fright strangles my vocal cards. Our children are mortified to see me. A Christmas party at our home, eleven days after my hysterectomy, we dance a slow song while my doctor says I’m his star patient. My birthday is in four days, but I don’t feel like singing. More parties at home as the years go by. Better singers take over. Our little girls sing so sweetly, in perfect key. No one invites me to join them, the hostess with the leastest. I don’t sing anymore, not even in the shower. The years have silenced me.

San Juan Culture

So you can see in the poem what ways we used to behave and do in San Juan, different ways of doing things. My personal history and also again how I try to navigate culture in these different places while life interferes and things happen and you can’t deal with it. So, the social realities of the era. And also the emotional landscape where as a young girl I’m very happy and singing my heart out and then married for a bunch of years, with all these kids, the situation and I can’t sing anymore, you know.

So and this is the last one I am going to read. It’s about my grandmother who is in the chair because she can’t walk. She’s paralyzed by a promise she made. My mother who is paralyzed by her fear of sin. And then me paralyzed by cultural conventions.

“Lineage”, a poem by Nylda Dieppa

Three women fearing the Lord: Abuela in a wooden wheelchair, Mami in her personal prayer room, me in my hidden home office. Abuela, giving up walking (to save my mother’s life) and fixing broken toys for poor children as she repaid her promise to God. Mami, praying for the redemption of humanity and the forgiveness of her own sins, worrying about her loved ones’ salvation because her God was a god of justice. Me, studying and going on medical missions, serving my family, fighting domestic violence, crying for lost chances and unused talents as I waited for God to remember me. Strong in our weaknesses, giving glory to God, paralyzed by fear, united in love.

2024

I’m going to talk really quick about different situations we are having in Orlando at the same time. It can be a destination city for tourists, but also for arrivals that are looking for a place to survive. There’s a tourist Orlando, the residential and the segregated Orlando versus the integrated Orlando. And all of this is happening at once. In1986 I considered Orlando a Mickey Mouse kind of town. But at 2024 things have changed greatly. It is a vibrant cultural metropolis that celebrates arts from diverse populations. And here, my book is part of the celebration of Hispanic culture at the Orange County offices. So, Orlando grew and matured and became more cosmopolitan than it had been. And so, from a neighbor that insulted me because he saw a scratch on the wall, and he assumed I had made ugly the hallway, and he said, “This is not Kissimmee you know.” So to be recognized that my book had value and that I was part of the community that was a big jump from one accusation of being a dirty Kissimmee person, you know that was a big thing.

Preserving Stories

I really want to tell you that we really have to preserve things beyond buildings. We have to preserve stories that have intangible cultural heritage, emotional landscapes, community memories, and voices that shaped the city, but weren’t in power. And your stories matter. I want you to take a second, we don’t have time to share this, but what’s the memory of Orlando that you carry that might not be in the archive? Maybe you can think about a moment of cultural encounter, cultural clash, maybe a place that no longer exists, a tradition that has changed, a voice that wasn’t recorded. And you all have one of those things in mind that you can relate to and maybe want to preserve those memoroes before you’re gone.

How do we preserve our stories?

So how do we preserve our stories? We have to document them now before we forget them, before we pass away, before the people that we interview pass away. Sometimes I wonder why didn’t ask my grandmother this or that. So we have to document that, because that’s very important. We can write it down. We can do an audiorecording or a video and that’s what we have our phones for now. You know, there’s no excuse because we have our phones with us all the time. We can record these stories in different ways. And we have to approach it as historical preservation for the next generation. It is a gift that we give the next generations.

Writing a Book

And some of the resources that you can use: OrlandoMemory, StoryCorps. Have you heard of StoryCorps? Here is a picture of me recording when StoryCorps came to the Orlando Museum of Art. And it was a really great experience and that recording is saved for history. Patricia Charpentier, she has a lot of materials if you go to WritingYourLife.org to support people that want to write their memories whether you want to do just a little thing by hand you copy it and you give it to your grandchildren or you want to write a book that’s going to be published by Random House. You know whatever it is that you want to do she has little ways of helping you get into there.

Coaching

And also, I do coaching. If you go to my website you can see how I could help you… So our larger mission would be to expand Orlando’s historical record by collecting oral histories from diverse communities. Making space, by you inviting me me here you’re making space for me to be able to express myself and tell you these stories that you would never have heard otherwise. That’s very important. And then to recognize that all voices complete the revord. They complete history and your memories are historically significant. That’s very important. So let’s end with this thought: that buildings can be demolished, but stories once told and preserved become indestructible monuments to who we were and how we became who we are. And I want to thank you for helping to preserve Orlando’s history. Thank you so much!

Oral History Presenter:  Nylda Dieppa

Oral History Presentation Recorded by:  Jane Tracy

Date:  January 21, 2026

Place:  Orlando Public Library