Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin (AKA ‘Regi’) was featured on The Story last week in a piece titled The Fight to Farm. (The Story is distributed by American Public Media (APR), the parent of MPR.)
He’s Executive Director of the Rural Enterprise Center (part of The Main Street Project) and he wrote about being on The Story on his blog, including this:
Although a lot of what came out in The Story was about some of my encounters with racism and discrimination, all of those events happened before I moved to Northfield…
I took this photo of Regi last Saturday while he was having coffee at the GBM with Greg Carlson, Justin Stets, and Rick Estenson.
See all our blog entries tagged with "Reginaldo Haslett-Marroquin."
I am glad to hear that the “encounters with racism and discrimination” which Regi described were not in Northfield. I caught pieces of his interview on MPR while moving boxes to our new home, and was particularly distressed to think that those experiences had happened here. I hope that the ‘Story’ was more clear to those who heard the show in its entirety.
Northfield is a great place to live, I lived here first as a fresh new arrival from Guatemala, imported by my wife Amy who figured it would be easier for me to get used to life in the U.S. than for her to Guatemala’s ways.
Going from living wild in a war torn country to peaceful Northfield was such a positive shock that I figured the U.S. must be an awesome place to live and it was all good and dandy. After experiencing all kinds of things in other places, and learning that there is no such thing as free passes anywhere, I am happy to live here and share well over 200 friends, over 600 people in my personal local database and at least 25% of my friends on facebook from Northfield.
I have only had two racist incidents in Northfield, they were not pretty, but pale in comparison to other situations. My work with farming enterprises is going much better than I ever thought, this community is the one to credit for a lot of this success. I can say that Northfield has a very well educated population but most importantly than anything, this community struggles to find a way to not be racist and discriminating against those of us of darker color of skin, or lesser economic status and although some do say racist and discriminating things, many times is just as a result of living and working in structures that are by nature designed to discriminate, and they are everywhere and affect more than just minorities but folks with different disadvantages in our society.
Northfield is not free of racism and discrimination, I have encountered it here and I know of many families who have been affected by racist comments, and bigotry, but these are isolated situations and easily controllable, if they ever get out of hand, I have over 300 other people that I can communicate with and I trust will not permit this town to fall to rotten apples.
I am happy and love living here among you all. Thank you for being such a welcoming community.
Regi.