On February 18, 1951, Fred Wilson interviewed Mary Ellen Osborn Lake (born 1870 in Mercer County, Missouri) and her son, Thomas Lake (born 1889 in Missouri). Wilson first asked Mary Ellen questions about when she first arrived in Las Vegas, Nevada in 1904. Much of the relatively brief interview involved questions related to the first Methodist churches in Las Vegas and the Lakes’ involvement and recollections of the locations and members of the church community.

Sandra Peña’s story begins in East Los Angeles, where she spent her first fifteen years with her parents (both from Michoacán, Mexico), and her younger sister. The father's managerial position at Master Products allowed the family to live rent-free in a company-owned house behind the main factory, because he collected the rents for the company's two other dwellings. In this interview, Peña recalls the family move to Porterville, in California's Central Valley, her return to Los Angeles at nineteen, and her work with Parson’s Dillingham, a contractor for the Metrolink rail system. She draws the link between the Los Angeles and Las Vegas construction communities by describing her husband's move to Las Vegas to find work; a chance Las Vegas encounter with a friend from Chino, California; her ability to gain employment in Las Vegas at Parson’s, a company that had joint ventured with Parson’s Dillingham, and her move from there to Richardson Construction, a local minority-owned company. As Peña says, "It's kind of all intermingled. Even if you go here and you go there, it's like everybody knows everybody." Throughout, Peña weaves her family story into the narrative as she describes her youth, the birth of her son, the illness and death of her father, and her family's participation in her current employment with Richardson. As she remembers the people, places, and events of her life, Peña speaks to the ways one woman of color built on her interstate construction connections and rose in a male-dominated industry.