Mr. Roosevelt

A village of 75 people, an outside kitchen, a large mango tree overshadowing the house, a pet jaguar — this is where he grew up.

Urban and metropolitan studies senior Antonio Molina, 26, was raised in Honduras, two hours from the main city of San Pedro in central America.

Molina says his village wasn’t like what most picture, like little huts. His grandfather worked for a large cement company that provided housing. His grandfather was also a fisherman, carpenter and hunter. “He would come back with exotic animals from the jungle like a jaguar and a monkey,” Molina says.

Molinas lived in a place where his kindergarten class was five houses down from his house. “When you live in a small village, everyone knows who you are, everyone knows what you’re doing,” Molina says. “But we were living in a third world country — we needed that to coexist — so for me its not a bad thing, and even now I search for that.”

Molina’s mother moved to Los Angeles when he was two months. “She was basically forced by my grandpa to move because she was not married when she had me, and that was a definite no-no,” he says. “So he forced her to come to the states to work and provide a better life for me.” His mother would send gifts from the U.S. “I remember my first pair of Nikes, the one that had the little balloon that would pump air, I loved those,” he says. “And my favorite toy was a Tonka Trunk.” With his mother in California, Molina grew up with grandparents and four aunts and an uncle. “So I had four moms plus my grandmother,” he says. Meanwhile, mom met her current husband, had four boys, moved to Tempe, and went back to Honduras to get Molina when he was 12 to move to Arizona.

“I wasn’t forced, but I wasn’t asked,” Molina says. “I remember being in a plane not wanting to come here because I was leaving everything that I knew, everything that made me.”

He started 7th grade without knowing any English in Tempe. He eventually learned English from a teacher who did not take a lunch break and instead taught English to children. Molina says he lived in a world of support with friends, teachers and family helping him with English and adjusting to American life.

High school came and went, and Molina started at Mesa Community College without a plan. “I didn’t know what to study and stayed for two or three years,” he says. In his late teens and early twenties, Molina collected a number of jobs: he worked at Honeywell as a machinist, then as an intern for a teacher, then practiced real estate. He was even approached at Phoenix College by a local fashion designer and asked to be a model. Molina says after the first show, he began meeting local artists and designers and is currently a freelance model.

“It has been all these different things that just find me, or I find them,” Molina says.

He then collected a number of possible majors. Molina started as a Spanish medical interpreter. “I was very interested in becoming a doctor,” he says, “and I loved the idea of me going back to my country and opening a clinic.” He went from pre-med to wanting to become an artist, then he wanted to go to ASU’s College of Design, but then decided he couldn’t bind himself to architecture.

It wasn’t until Molina met with Nan Ellin, a professor at ASU’s School of Public Affairs downtown. She told him about the Urban Metropolitan Studies Program, telling him, “The city is our classroom.”

“Antonio combines a deep affection for his small village upbringing in Honduras with a cosmopolitan flair,” Ellin says in a e-mail. “What has most impressed me is his ability to bring the sense of community and love of nature he imbibed as a child into his efforts to build community and a sense of place in larger cities such as Phoenix.”

Molina’s response to the program: “It calls me.” He transferred to the downtown campus moved to a hostel on Roosevelt Road. He says he feels he is in the right space and in the right field.

“I have always been intrigued by cities,” he says. “How cities grow, how cities develop, how people’s relationships are affected by the growth of the city and how people live in the city.” Molina plans to graduate in December.

As a requirement of the Urban Metropolitan Studies Program, he began interning for Arizona Citizen Actions for the Arts in October. That’s where he began his project Rubbish Revolution, “Where art and sustainability meet to give your trash a happy home.” Molina says he realized there is no recycling program for businesses in the city of Phoenix. He got his hands on some disposable trash boxes and had them decorated by downtown artists. First Fridays became the most appropriate venue. Those in the program will place the decorated, disposable boxes on street corners to collect recyclable material to be gathered and disposed of at the premiere on April 4.

Molina says he will collect all the information from the project and send it to the city of Phoenix with the goal of the project becoming statewide. “It’s been a fun project,” he says, “I want people to realize that the arts are still important.”

As for now, Molina’s only solid, future plan is wanting to retire back in Honduras. “In fact, the house that I grew up in is still there, so that’s the place I want to go back to,” he says. Molina is not sure what he wants to do after he graduates, but it’s almost certain to not be boring.
“I look for change in my life,” he says. “When there’s nothing changing in my life, I worry.”

Reach the reporter at lauren.cusimano@asu.edu