Pictured, above: Rachel Rangel in 2021. Photo: Elizabeth Leonardsmith

We send our heartfelt condolences to the family and friends of Raquel (Rachel) Rangel, a beloved West Side neighbor who recently passed away. In 2021, we had the honor of interviewing Rachel for our Stories from the Flats oral history project, which focuses on neighbors who were displaced from their homes on the West Side Flats in the 1960s. Below is Rachel's interview.

Raquel, who went by Rachel, was born in 1943. Her mother and father immigrated from Mexico in 1927 by train, eventually arriving in the West Side neighborhood in Saint Paul, Minnesota. In 1962, the Port Authority purchased their home at 175 Eva Street as part of the demolition of the old West Side Flats to create the Riverview Industrial Park.

“I was born November 28th in 1943 on the West Side, the old West Side that we're going to talk about, by the river. My full name is Inocencia Raquel. My maiden name was Rangel, but now I'm married. I go by Rachel.

It was very close [on the West Side]. Before we arrived, it was a place where many immigrants came. Before us there were other European immigrants: there was Jewish, there was Lebanese, there were some Germans, and I forget what else. And then we came. 

[My parents] came up here, and that's how [my father] got a job, even though he couldn't speak English very good. The train was tough for them, especially him, because he did the communication. So, for example, he would hold out his money and then he would go like this [gestures] for eating, you know? So things like that were pretty rough. But they made it, and that's how they came to stay up here. 

We were renting. In the late ‘50s, [my parents] did own a home, but then soon after that, everybody in the old West Side started getting letters that we had to move because they were going to make what it is now.

I don't know if you’d call it a manufacturing area or what, some kind of business. If you go over there, that's all it is. There are no houses there. But as we go down there, we know exactly where we lived. And we tell our kids, and they tell their kids.”  

“We used to have a lot of floods there. We lived upstairs. We lived on the corner and it was a big building. Downstairs was all kinds of businesses, there was a pool hall and there was a beer joint, a shoe store, and a bakery. And upstairs there were two apartments. But they're nowhere like the apartments you know now. They were big. They were really big apartments. And that's where we lived that I remember.” 

You mentioned that you had moved into a home and then shortly after had to move. Do you remember your family ever receiving any sort of compensation to be able to leave?

“Yes, they did. And so did many of the others. I remember them talking about– they didn't even get, it wasn't even worth what they give ya in those days, you know? They just wanted you out, you know? I'm thinking, they wanted that [land] because they want to make business stuff there, which it is now. 

But during the time we lived there, there was always floods because of the river, and some of them were pretty bad– and we still get them, but back then there was no nothing to help that, you know? But once we all moved out, they fixed it all up.” 

Click here to view the full interview

Above: letter from the Port Authority to Fancisco Rangel, informing him that his home would be taken for the creation of the Riverview Industrial Park. Photo: courtesy Rachel Rangel

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Our work to uncover the hidden history of displacement in our neighborhood and address the harms it has caused continues today. Click here to learn more and get involved.