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See a video and read more stories of immigrant and refugee families through the generations at Dispatch. com. You can leave feedback or ideas on the website, email CbusNEXT@dispatch.com or tweet using #cbusnext. provided at the ranches, but the family usually lived in a small cramped room without a bathroom or kitchen, surrounded by mostly single male workers.
Throughout it all, Santos and her brother and sister always attended school.
“My mother’s priority was for us to learn English and eventually get out of that situation,” she said.
Just before her 18th birthday, Santos told her mom she was moving to Columbus to live with an uncle who had told her that jobs were plentiful here.
After a year of working two fulltime jobs, Santos earned enough money to bring her mother, and her 3-year-old niece, Cathy, to Columbus. She eventually adopted Cathy.
Surprised by the great number of people in need, Pablo began using the money she made selling tamales to buy food for them, which she distributed from the back of her minivan. She often parked at the former Lincoln Park West apartments that were filled with first-generation Latino and Somali immigrants.
“My mother always said that our situation was only temporary and that every bite of food that she was given she would someday give back, and she did,” Santos said.
Catholic Social Services noticed Pablo’s work and eventually turned her efforts into the Guadalupe Center, a food pantry that also offers English classes, job training and other services. Santos became the center’s coordinator in 2010 and recently helped see the community center through an expansion to a 3,500-square-foot office, nearly three times its previous space.
“My family history is very humbling and reminds me that anything is possible,” said Cathy Trinidad Santos.
Trinidad Santos graduated high school with an associate degree through an early college program, is earning a bachelor’s degree in biology from Ohio Dominican University and wants to get a doctorate so she can become a college science professor.
“My life is what it is today because of what they went through,” she said. “I want to give back someday and am inspired to be as strong as my grandmother and compassionate as my mother.”