JACKSONVILLE, Fla. – A gut-wrenching moment as an 8-year-old Mexican-American child growing up in San Antonio, Texas, paved the way for a lifetime of advocacy and prideful representation of her heritage.
It’s a vivid memory that Dr. Rebecca Dominguez-Karimi could never forget.
As a little girl playing at school, she was doing what came naturally to her: speaking her native language.
But that moment was shattered when another classmate reported her to their teacher, and Karimi was called into the principal’s office.
“I didn’t know why,” Karimi recalled. “He said, ‘I heard you’re speaking Spanish on a school ground, that’s not permitted.”
As a child, Spanish was her first language.
“We were just playing children, playing in the schoolyard,” she recalled. “I was chastised for that.”
She said the principal warned her to keep the Spanish-speaking at home.
Many decades later, the flame ignited on that day still burns vigorously as she works to uncover and tell the lost stories of the Hispanic population in Northeast Florida.
“I shrank back into complacency for many years until I realized that this was not right,” she said.
Karimi has a storied career as an oral historian. She works to conduct interviews that capture the life stories of people from a particular group. Of course, her focus is the Hispanic community.
“My goal is to let the community know we’ve got all these wonderful, great people here and they need to be thanked, acknowledged and appreciated.”
READ: HISPANIC HERITAGE MONTH COVERAGE
She has called St. Johns County home for nearly eight years.
“It doesn’t seem like that long because I’m still exploring and learning so many new things,” Karimi said, noting how the Hispanic population is vastly growing in Northeast Florida.
Back in 2021, she took a trip to the Jacksonville Historical Society to browse the archives and learn more about local Hispanic history. But to her surprise, she was met with a small manila folder with only a few articles inside.
She was shocked.
“It was 18 pages max of information over the last 50 or 60 years, maybe,” she recalled.
This was during the pandemic, so she was limited to Zoom calls, but she didn’t let that stop her. She immediately made it her mission to fill the gaps of lost history by connecting with the community and documenting their stories.
She sat down with the former president of the Duval Hispanic Caucus, Mario Decunto, for her first interview. He was instrumental in helping her get her feet off the ground.
“He was the first in the Latino community that listened to me, to what I had to say, and took me seriously,” she said.
He connected her with other people who were willing to share their stories, and about four months in, she went from zero to 45 oral history interviews in Northeast Florida.
“I ended up getting a good overall view of the area and the different immigrant communities,” she said.
Some uncovered stories are marked by trauma, while others showcase the triumphs achieved later in life through persistence.
She’s talked with business owners, refugees, artists, political and community leaders, veterans and many other people shaping Northeast Florida’s growing Hispanic population.
Press play below to watch the full interview with Karimi
Overall, Karimi has collected 60 stories from Hispanics and Latinos in Nassau, St. Johns, Duval and Clay counties since starting her mission.
Hispanic Heritage Month holds special significance for Karimi, particularly amid a tense political climate and heightened, controversial immigration measures.
“I just look at it as a way to celebrate our heritage, the culture, our culture, and of course, the Hispanic or the Latino population is not a monolithic population,” she said. “I think it’s a great opportunity to recognize the different facets of the Latino and Hispanic communities, and celebrate what we’ve given to the United States while we’ve been here.”
Her work has opened doors for Karimi to speak at many events hosted by organizations seeking to learn more about Hispanic culture.
“They realize that there is a lot of injustice going on. I know that I’m making an impact on them, that they know that they can come to me and I will at least follow through and get it to the powers that be or the different communities that need that information,” she said.
Her latest collection of oral histories, called the Rebecca Dominguez-Karimi Oral History Collection, is featured at the St. Augustine Historical Research Library.
All in all, Karimi hopes her work will leave a lasting mark on Northeast Florida and inspire the younger generations to not only appreciate their heritage but also continue to move the needle.
She also looks forward to meeting future generations of LatinX historians and oral historians who are looking to take up the mantle to add to the area’s rich history.
Her message to the younger generations is simple:
“Yes, the Hispanics and Latinos in the Jacksonville area did have a profound impact.”