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History and the people who make it: Hernan Vera

Transcript edited by Pierce Butler

This is the 29th in a series of transcript excerpts from the Samuel Proctor Oral History Program collection at the University of Florida. 

Hernan Vera was interviewed by Diana Gonzalez-Tennant [G] in 2009.

V: I was born on February 16th, 1937 – seventy-two years ago – in Santiago, Chile. I went to several schools. By age 16 or 17 I was fluent in both Spanish and English and had a limited fluency in French. My second school was St. Georges College—Colegió San Jorge. I started there around 1946 and graduated in 1954. Then I went into Law School of Universidad de Chile, became a lawyer in 1962, got married in 1963 to Maria Inez Concha Gutierrez, my wife of today, and we had three children. I am retired, after 33 years of teaching sociology at the University of Florida.

I was getting ready to return to Chile, after getting a PhD in sociology, when a military coup on 9-11-1973 took place, and it was advisable in the view of all of our families and friends that we should stay in the US. We had come here in 1968 with a residence visa so we could work and stay without any problems.

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