Story Library

The stories below are brought to you by people who live or grew up in the city and believe in the power of stories to bring Bostonians together. In their free time, these story ambassadors go out into their neighborhoods and across the city to record the life experiences of people they might not otherwise know. Story by story, we're building community across a divided city.

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YENNIFER PEDRAZA, WEST ROXBURY

"My dad was such a hard worker. He really wanted the American dream. I think about how it must’ve been for him not really knowing the language, and still trying to navigate through the systems, and not let people take advantage of him."

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Karen Osarenkhoe, East Boston

"His mom came back when I think he was in third grade, and they were moving out of the city, and she's just like: 'I just remember that you cared enough to work with him and nobody else had done that before.'"

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Carl Dellorusso, East Boston

"I like to tell the rednecks that hate blacks and stuff like that: Hey, you want to know something? They checked out DNA to one black guy walking out of Africa 10,000 years ago. And every person on this earth has his DNA marker in it...So we all ARE brothers and sisters. So that’s how we have to look at it."

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Doug McDonald, Dorchester

"Someone opened the door and there were four or five people sitting around the table, all Chinese. And they looked at me in a curious way, you know, 'Who is this person?' And I said, 'I'm here to learn Chinese.'"...

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Rita La Serra, East Boston

"When I was back there, before we went on, I could have thrown up at any given moment. You couldn’t grab the script out of my hand, I just kept reading it over and over and over."

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Kathryn Yee, Dorchester

"From what my mom has told me, the number one seat, the first seat in a factory, means that you’re the number one seller. And my grandmother sat in that seat. She made clothes for us, just from her scraps and remnant fabric."

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Sister Bárbara Gutiérrez, Brighton

“When I told my family I was going to enter the Congregation of Sisters of Notre Dame de Namur, they were very surprised. My mother said, “Well, if that’s what God wants for you, what are we going to do?” But I don’t think they really understood.”

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Abner Bonilla, Roslindale

“I’m a spontaneous, last-second guy. I’ll be sitting here right now, and I bet you in about an hour and a half, I’ll be in the middle of New Hampshire just because I want to try a pastry I saw on a TV show or something. That’s me.”

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