Oral history interview with Margarita Rebollal conducted by Marcela Rodriguez-Campo and Barbara Tabach on February 28, 2019 for the Latinx Voices of Southern Nevada Oral History Project. Margarita Rebollal is a lifelong community organizer and advocate for Latinx civic engagement and rights. She shares what it was like to grow up in Ponce, Puerto Rico and shares her childhood memories growing up on the island with her siblings. Rebollal also discusses the death of her father and the eventual move of her family to New York City, New York. She also recalls her education and teen years. Later, she would move to California, and eventually find her way to Las Vegas, Nevada in 1996. Rebollal discusses her passion for civic engagement and the many years serving the community, being most well-known for her role in founding the Puerto Rican Association of Las Vegas and the Hispanic International Day Parade of Nevada. Rebollal also discusses her campaign for the Ward 1 Las Vegas City Council seat.

Most Las Vegas residents like living in Southern Nevada, but few make the leap of faith that Ron M. Portaro did in 1994. The business and development consultant gave up a "tenure-track, full time, full-benefits, kids-could-go-to-college-for free job" to keep his family in Las Vegas. He had no local job, so he commuted twice a month to the Cleveland and Toledo areas for two years to complete the consulting assignments that fed his young family. As the Ohio native discusses the dysfunctional family into which he was born and was raised, he also talks about forging his own path as an overachiever, about going to college at Penn State at Altoona on a mining engineering co-op program with Morton Salt, working six months out of the year in the salt mines and attending classes the other six months. After transferring to the University of Toledo, he formed his own painting business to pay his tuition and graduated in management in 1978 and earned his JD and MBA in 1981. His mentor at University of Toledo asked him to teach labor management. While teaching labor relations he also began representing athletes as a player agent in the National Football League and the United States Football League back in the day and the Canadian Football League. From there, he became associate director for the Northwest Ohio Center for Labor Management Cooperation at the University of Toledo and later with the Cleveland State Labor Management Center. It was with the latter that he learned the benefits of the BUILT-RITE model of business relations to promote cooperation between and among the building trades, contractors, and owners. In this interview, Portaro speaks to the BUILT-RITE model for cooperation, his 1993 move to Las Vegas and fortuitous meetings of Pastor Paul Goulet of the International Church of Las Vegas, City of Las Vegas councilman Arnie Adamsen, and Charlie Kajkowski of the Las Vegas Public Works Department. He reveals how these connections eventually not only shaped Portaro's life in Southern Nevada; they also enabled him to turn his life experiences, education, and skill set to benefit his church, his family, and his adopted community. The commitment Portaro made in 1994 to remain in Las Vegas has benefitted Southern Nevada tourists, residents, and business owners in countless ways we can appreciate only when we stop to think about how many people had to cooperate and communicate to make our large infrastructure projects come to fruition.

Group of annual reports for the Jewish Federation of Las Vegas for the years 1989-2012.

Ann Lynch discusses her background - born in Kansas City, 1934; attended Baker University in Baldwin, Kansas; classes at Kansas University; a year in theater; director of PR at Evansville University. In 1959 she came to Las Vegas as director of the clubs at Nellis Air Force Base. Ann shares in depth on her parents and grandparents and on her family today, which includes a brother 14 years younger, her son, and a nephew. She describes Las Vegas in the early sixties, meeting her husband, and her duties as club manager at Nellis. She comments on becoming camp director for the Girl Scout program at Mount Charleston, which led to training scout leaders and board members. When Ann's son Edward went to kindergarten, she took on the PTA job of parliamentarian, then president of Ruth Fyfe ES PTA. She eventually became President of the Las Vegas Area Council, Nevada State PTA president, and finally national president of the PTA. The school named after her (Ann T. Lynch Elementary) has benefited from her other charity organizations. Because of her PTA involvement, Ann became very active in legislation in Washington, D.C., traveling to other countries to help activate parent involvement. She had also worked with Sunrise Hospital during this time and when she was relieved of some of her PTA duties, she helped found the Sunrise Hospital Children's Foundation and the Public Education Foundation. She details the many functions of both foundations. Ann comments on the lobbying she does in the Nevada legislature and in Washington, D.C., medical billing through Medicare and Medicaid, and the ongoing shortage of nurses nationwide. She offers opinions on unions for nurses and mentions robotic surgery, the stroke center, neonatal center, and breast cancer center as evidence of recent developments in medicine at Sunrise Hospital.