Ricardo Rosenberg Part IV: Setting Records

If it were not for his adoring family, Ricardo would never have told me that he was the first Salvadoran to earn a PhD in the United States. In this excerpt he discusses his glorious childhood and his reasons for making the United States a permanent home.
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I want to backtrack a little bit, because I want to tell you from somebody who chose to leave—I think that I had a wonderful childhood in El Salvador. Sometimes it was sort of like a Tom Sawyer-Huckleberry Finn-like kind of existence. I mean, it was just great. You know where our house is, and just how much the city has grown is incredible. When we moved to our house was pretty far from downtown, and there was nothing going on in that part of the city. The Colonia Escalón ended only about two blocks up where Plaza Beethoven is now. That was the end. The rest was absolute farmland or brush or whatever. My best friend was Ricardo Poma--we were buddies, he lived across the street when we were born and then later on two or three blocks away and we’d see each other all the time, we were in the same grade. He lived only two or three blocks away. If I remember correctly, I think the Sagregras, Fernando and Eduardo Sagrera lived up the block. And they had horses there. I remember the Sagrera guys riding horses bareback to the American school and hitching them at the American school and riding back home. That’s just incredible. In a place where the climate was wonderful like that, we were always outside playing soccer, baseball, etc or swimming in a pool, a lake or an ocean.

I think another terrific memory was my father’s farm not far from the city, maybe 20 to 30 minutes of so at the time. We would go out there and ride horses every Saturday, take friends, often play cowboys and Indians with real horses. What a great time particularly for a boy to be having that kind of experience. This was fifty years ago, but it sounds like a hundred years ago. I remember the train tracks went through the property, and most of the farm was on one side, but there were five or ten acres on the other side of the train track. And once or twice we took something called the Bala de Plata--the silver bullet. It was a single railcar. It was sort of squared up. It wasn’t kind of a sleek car like they are today. It was one car. I guess it was some kind of electric power. It was like taking a bus on rails. On weekends my parents had rented a house at Ilopango. So we would go to the lake every Sunday and water ski. It was just fabulous. So when we came back during high school and college, it was like instant good times. You’d go to the lake, you’d go to the ocean. It was great fun.

So the idea of leaving, before we get into the idea of leaving, I want to say that it was just a—I mean, what a place to grow up in. Fun!

(Did that ever—I’m just trying to think, it’s so different from life in the US, how people are so divided in Salvador, and life here in the US. Is that something you thought about a lot when you were growing up?)

I’m sure—I mean, I don’t know how I would articulate it, but I certainly would notice a difference, particularly because the difference was very marked when you went to the rural areas in particular and to the farm that my father had. Along the way you saw poverty that is pretty extreme, kids barefoot, barely clothed, not healthy. It was—and then I guess as time went by, you become more aware of it.

(Did it ever bother you, or it was part of the landscape?)

It was part of the landscape. It’s part of what I said earlier, that you sort of absorb these things and later on you start thinking about how things might be different, but not as a very, very young child.

(I have a question about the family business. Was it assumed that you would go into the family business, or were your parents very supportive of you pursuing this other track?)

I think it was sort of expected, but not in a pressured way. I would say there was space waiting for me. I was welcome, but there was no insistence on it. I think as time went on, one thing I remember is my father saying that if I was going to study economics, I better get a Ph.D. It was sort of like, “All right, if you’re not returning to El Salvador, then you better—” It wasn’t in a threatened or any kind of way, which there was no way my father was like that, but in a way of encouraging me to go through with it.

(So your parents were supportive. What about other people in Salvador? What did they think of you getting not just a Master’s but a Ph.D.? How did people react?)

It wasn’t so much to that. I think people were surprised that I would want to leave El Salvador and live in the US full-time. They didn’t understand what it was that I couldn’t find in El Salvador and what it was that drew me to want to be in the US.

(What was it? Can you put a finger on it?)

I think I liked the idea of—I liked what the US had to offer in terms of the environment, in terms of how interesting life was here. It’s probable that as time went on, it became more emphasized because—OK, Putney was an interesting experience. Then I went to Wisconsin, which was a good educational experience. I made good friends. It was such an interesting environment. And then I went to Columbia, and once again, you sort of felt that you were where things were happening, where important things were—you sort of had a front-row seat to what was happening of importance to the world, and that kind of appealed to me, I guess.

(And I understand that you defended your dissertation?)

Actually, I had already come to Washington to start work with the IMF. I was finishing my thesis in ’73. We planned our wedding for a Sunday. I came to New York and defended my thesis on a Friday and we got married on Sunday, so it was a busy weekend.

Transcript by Sandy Adler, Adler Enterprises LLC