What's in a Name?

Linda Vasquez-Rivera

Linda Vasquez-Rivera- Cuban-American ancestry; The mother of Mia Vasquez-Rivera and Mandy Suarez, Linda is generally a very kindhearted and loving woman with a jovial spirit. She is incredibly nurturing and protective of her family, particularly her younger daughter Mia, whom she shelters due to her more sensitive and impressionable nature. She was known for being very cheerful and free-spirited as a young woman, with a penchant for dreaming and creating fictional stories with romantic plotlines that Mia would come to inherit. It is clear to everyone in the neighborhood that a lot of Mia's imagination and artistic ability came from her mother and that she is most definitely her "mother's girl". Like her daughter, Linda saw Valentine's Day as an excuse to show elaborate declarations of love that should otherwise be shown to that special person every day, regardless of the occasion. She nevertheless wrote secret love letters to those she admired that she stored away in a hidden compartment and never mailed and had a fondness for reading romance novels for pleasure in her early adolescence. The third youngest of 6 children, she formerly attended a boarding school for girls in her native Havana throughout her adolescent years and aspired to become a nurse from a young age. This dream would be hindered once she fell pregnant with her first daughter Mandy at 19 after being courted by her first boyfriend, a working-class 23-year-old young man named Raúl Suarez who made his living as a mechanic. As a child, Linda was insecure and highly self-conscious about her large forehead, choosing to cover it up with her bangs. It was not until she met Nelly Caceres, whom she referred to as "Pompa" that she became more self-confident, as she defended her from bullies and became her friend.

When she was an Academy student, she succeeded through studying alone to the point of pride, able to avoid physical trials and thus allowing her to focus on her physical appearance in a bid to appeal to boys. At the start of adolescence, she typically gave the outward impression of being polite to her superiors, considerate of her peers, and confident in herself. Linda had occasional moments of bashfulness around her crushes and a slight competitiveness around her friend Minerva, but otherwise appeared quite collected. This reservation, though never disingenuous, frequently masked how Linda felt however, as in certain situations, she had pronounced feelings of delinquency, jealousy, and anger. Rather than display these emotions to others, she projected them inward, allowing a manifestation of who she truly was called "Inner Linda" to have the opinions she wanted to keep to herself. She later became increasingly exposed to the realities of the world, difficulties for which she could not rely upon Inner Linda to cope with alone. Despite a brief marriage with her first love, Linda's union with the father of her first child ultimately culminated in divorce as a result of Raúl irresponsibility and struggles with alcoholism. With Raúl's lack of involvement in young Mandy's life, Linda would come to become certified as a nursing aide soon after graduation and worked several odd jobs throughout the years to help sustain her daughter. She worked as a hospice for over 13 years, as well a cake decorator and bread baker at a local deli and an airline stewardess at one point when unable to find work. She was able to ensure nothing was missing out of her first-born daughter's life with the help of her mother, a fair-skinned woman with curly brown hair of Cuban descent named Irma Cónde. 

Linda was always well-liked and well-received by many of the people she encountered, making friends easily of all backgrounds with her sanguine personality and hopeful demeanor. Although vowing to never marry again or conceive another child, she continued to have short-lived flings and casual relationships with several suitors. The most serious of the romances was the one she had with a swarthy man named Felipe, whom her daughter Mandy mistrusted. She doesn't think couples have to live together before marriage and often fantasized about wearing a red clingy nightgown with spaghetti straps draped across her shoulders on her wedding night. Linda came to unexpectedly fall in love however with Lester Vasquez, a darker complexioned Afro-Latino man of Puerto Rican descent while looking after his sick mother at a local nursing home. Despite her mother's surprise, she quickly married Lester and conceived a second child, a biracial daughter she named Amelia but referred to as Mia out of endearment. She and Mia would come to develop a very special bond with one another over the years, with Linda vowing to protect and nurture the sweet, delicate baby girl that she came to refer to as an "unexpected gift". Mia wouldn't drink breast milk from the time she was born, as her mother had to feed her baby formula to make sure she was well nourished. Linda could tell that she was going to be a very special child early on and realized she would require more attention that most other children. The years that would ensue would prove rather difficult for her however after her mother Irma's passing from a massive stroke, which would lead her to become estranged from her siblings and extended family in the years to come.