Collection is open for research.
Gift of The Immigrant Story, June 2021 (RL2021-057).
Xiomara Y. Torres was born in El Paraiso, El Salvador, in 1971. When she was nine years old, she and her family fled during the civil war in El Salvador and crossed into California. At age 13, she was placed in the U.S. foster care system. She earned a bachelor's degree in sociology from University of California, Berkeley, and in 2002, she earned a degree from the Northwestern School of Law at Lewis and Clark College. That same year, she became a U.S. citizen. She worked as a family law judge in Oregon, and in 2017, she became a judge on the Multnomah County Circuit Court. A play based on her life, "Judge Torres," premiered in 2019.
Oral history interview with Xiomara Y. Torres, by Lisa Cohn and Sankar Raman, SR 12329, Oregon Historical Society Research Library.
This oral history interview with Xiomara Y. Torres was conducted by Lisa Cohn and Sankar Raman on September 12, 2019. The interview was recorded for The Immigrant Story, an organization that documents and archives the stories of immigrants and refugees in the United States.
In this interview, Torres discusses her family background and early life in El Paraiso, El Salvador. She shares her reasons for talking about her former status as an undocumented immigrant. She describes her family's journey to California in 1980 and talks about the reasons her family fled El Salvador during the country's civil war. She discusses her early life as an undocumented immigrant in Los Angeles, including learning English, and her education. She speaks about her experiences in the U.S. foster care system. She talks about the process of receiving her green card, her experiences at the University of California, Berkeley, and about how her experiences in foster care influenced her choice to attend law school. She also talks about receiving U.S. citizenship in 2002, and speaks about her work as a family law lawyer in Oregon. She discusses doing interviews about her experiences, and a play written about her life. She closes the interview by talking about her plans for the future.
Joint copyright for this interview is held by the Oregon Historical Society and The Immigrant Story. Use is allowed according to the following statement: In Copyright – Educational Use Permitted,
An article about Xiomara Y. Torres, "Going Public with My Story" by Lisa Cohn, was based on this interview and published on The Immigrant Story website at