Filling the Gaps: Mexican oral historian recovers lost stories of Northeast Florida’s Hispanic community

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.

https://www.news4jax.com/features/2025/10/14/filling-the-gaps-mexican-oral-historian-recovers-lost-stories-of-northeast-floridas-hispanic-community/

Filling the Gaps: Mexican oral historian recovers lost stories of Northeast Florida’s Hispanic community

Dr. Rebecca Dominguez-Karimi, an oral historian, is dedicated to uncovering and documenting the lost stories of the Hispanic community in Northeast Florida.

^{Kendra Mazeke (News4Jax | Jacksonville, Florida News, Weather, Sports | WJXT Channel 4)}