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Rita Hooper came to U.S. half-century ago
As Hispanic Heritage Month approaches its Oct. 15 conclusion, we caught up with a Caney Fork woman who will mark her 50th year in the United States on Friday.
Rita Hooper, a name well known to regular Sylva Herald readers from frequent appearances in “Caney Fork News” and reports of her biscuit-making prowess at Golden Age Center breakfasts, came to Ohio from Mexico City on Oct. 6, 1956.
Though Rita’s mother was born in this country, she did not become a citizen until 1973, one year after husband Wade brought her to his Caney Fork home.
“I learned about the Bill of Rights and passed an oral exam,” Rita said of her road to citizenship. “They make you write a sentence to be sure you can write English – I learned the Pledge of Allegiance, but they didn’t ask us to say it.”
When Rita came to Jackson County, she was one of a very few Hispanics and people weren’t quite sure what to make of her, she said.
“People thought I was from the Phillippines, or from Cherokee,” she said.
Keeping up with her Spanish roots was difficult, since she had no one to have conversations with, so Rita turned her attention to learning mountain ways. With the help of Wade’s mother, Jane Hooper, she learned to garden, can and make jelly.
“I’m pretty good at those things now,” she said last week.
Rita also learned to cook from her mother-in-law, but she said Jane Hooper wasn’t interested in a culinary cultural exchange.
“She liked her cornbread and green beans,” Rita said.
Learning to cook American-style led Rita to her two cafeteria jobs – first at the old Camp Lab School and then at the N.C. Center for the Advancement of Teaching.
The thing Rita says she remembers most from her early days in this country was seeing snow for the first time.
“I never had seen snow except in the movies,” she said. “I was like a little kid playing in it.”
Rita learned to read by watching television and reading newspapers. She was helped along by her first father-in-law (Rita’s first husband, a Navy sailor, died in Japan in 1959; she married Wade in 1962), who would sit her down each night and go over the words in the headlines and comic strips, she said.
As her English improved, her Spanish-speaking skills declined, but that trend was reversed in 1984.
“Wade bought me a satellite dish, and I started watching the Spanish shows,” she said. “I thought I was in heaven.”
While Rita tried to raise a bilingual child, daughter Marie, now a nurse, wanted no part of it.
“She wishes now she had learned,” Rita said. “She can understand Spanish, though, even if she can’t speak it.”
Rita is taking a more active approach toward sharing her personal Hispanic heritage with grandsons Owen, 7, and Warren, 6.
“I talk to them in Spanish and English so they can understand,” she said. “I want them to learn.”
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