Interviewed by Monserrath Hernández and Barbara Tabach. Jahaira Farias is a graduate of Western High School, a Marine Corps veteran, and a founder of a local chapter of the Women Marines Association. At the time of this oral history, Jahaira worked for US Congresswoman Susie Lee. Jahaira Farias was born in Las Vegas, Nevada, and grew up on the west side of town. She has summertime memories of her travels to Mexico, where she was able to connect with her family's heritage and language. During her years at Western High School, she participated in varsity sports and was the armed drill team commander. After graduation, Jahaira enlisted into the Marine Corps, where she specialized as a transport operator and hazardous material transporter and served two deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan. Her transition to civilian life included work in security at Caesars Palace. When she took a position with as district representative for Congresswoman Susie Lee, her focus was to assist veterans and immigrants. She helped Rep. Lee develop community outreach towards the Latinx community and Veterans. Jahaira is the president of the Las Vegas NV-3 Sagebrush Marines chapter of the Women Marines Association, an organization she helped establish and rebuild. The WMA helps veterans find their footing again through mentoring and support, and conducts community engagement by fostering the same camaraderie found in the Corps. After surviving a motorcycle accident, Jahaira's recovery is nothing short of miraculous, going from being in a wheelchair to competing in Tough Mudder. Now extremely active, Jahaira is an avid hiker and certified yoga instructor, specializing in trauma recovery. A polyglot, Jahaira formally studied Arabic and Russian, and speaks English, Spanish, and Pashto, and received an associate degree in Russian from the College of Southern Nevada.

Las Vegas tourists who stop to admire the Mirage volcano, the Bellagio conservatory, the Wynn Las Vegas mountain, the Encore gardens, and the iconic Welcome to Las Vegas sign’s surroundings on the Las Vegas Strip likely do not realize that in each case they have sampled a unique landscape environment conceived by Don Brinkerhoff of Lifescapes International, Newport Beach, California. It is for producing work of this caliber that in 2016 the American Gaming Association selected Brinkerhoff to be the first designer inducted into the Gaming Hall of Fame. In this interview, the Los Angeles native and son of a working-class father and an artist/schoolteacher mother, explains how he spent his youth in an owner-built house in the modest suburb of El Monte, where he tended the family truck garden. Despite earning his degree in ornamental horticulture at California Polytechnic (Cal Poly), Don felt unschooled in the arts because the small school did not teach them. To fill that educational gap, Don took his wife and four children to Europe for two years, where he affiliated with the American Academy in Rome and worked for TAC (The Architects' Collaborative) in Greece among other adventures. The family spent another six months in Hawaii, where the children attended school and Don worked with a local landscape architect. The family’s unusual work, school, and travel experience more than completed Don’s arts education and shaped his world view and that of his daughter Julie in countless ways that came to silently benefit the Las Vegas built environment. Upon returning to California in 1968, Brinkerhoff opened his Orange County office, and Lifescapes International became the “go-to” firm to create water features for condominium projects. This work led to his first hotel-casino project at a Sun City golf course condominium project in South Africa, which in turn led to a telephone call from architect Joel Bergman inviting him to become one of three candidate landscape architects to work with Steve Wynn on what would become The Mirage hotel-casino in Las Vegas. Here, Brinkerhoff speaks to his design philosophy as ninety percent problem-solving and ten percent inspiration even as he describes organizing the signature tree for The Mirage, building the Mirage volcano, taking the idea for Bellagio’s conservatory from the DuPont family’s Longwood Gardens, of creating faux banyans in the Mirage atrium, of creating the model for the Las Vegas Strip median, and of building the mountain on Las Vegas Boulevard in front of Wynn Las Vegas to conceal the Cloud at the Fashion Show Mall. While the fortunes of Lifescapes International continue to grow and succeed worldwide, both Don and Julie credit Steve Wynn and their Las Vegas work: “Las Vegas has totally changed our lives.”

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.

Oral history interview with Cindy Baca conducted by Barbara Tabach on May 22, 2019 for the Remembering 1 October Oral History Project. Cindy Baca, born and raised in Las Vegas, talks about her family and occupation as a librarian at Escobedo Middle School. Cindy's twin daughters were present and injured during the Route 91 Festival and October 1 shooting. She describes their experiences and the Random Acts of Kindness project she piloted at her school after the incident.