Francisco Segovia

And eventually another friend who used to live in Minnesota asked, hey, why don't you come to Minnesota?

And that's how we ended up in Minnesota.

I was a two-month-old baby.

And there were some nuns that offered us shelter at that moment.

No, didn't speak English, didn't have documents, fearful of a lot of things.

And Minnesota became home.

I eventually was able to get legal representation.

And I had to leave the country, go back to El Salvador to get the visa and entry back again.

So it was in 1991.

I was already with a green card.

You know, when I came, I heard, for instance, that the Reagan administration has given amnesty to a lot of people.

And historically, there has been always hostility toward immigrants if, you know, Mexicans already had been...

They put it in massive numbers before, right?

But there are some, at least when I came, there was a different perspective.

I think the wars in Central America, even the Republicans have a different perspective.

You have people like George Bush and others with different perspective of immigrants than what we have now.

So what I see is that we see

More waves of immigrants from Africa, for instance, from Latin America.

And in Minnesota, when I came in 1990, there hardly was anyone that spoke Spanish.

So, you know, over these many years, I have seen how the community has grown and the Latino business community has grown here, which is something good.