I’m a Puerto Rican woman, born and raised in New Haven, Connecticut—a New Havener, independent researcher, picker, and collector of antique, vintage, old, and sometimes wonderfully odd things.
People often ask how I got into picking, and that story begins with my maternal grandmother.
When I was a kid, she would come from Puerto Rico to spend the warmer months with us in New Haven. Every Saturday morning, my mom would take her to Goodwill, The Salvation Army, or whatever secondhand store she wanted to visit—and I always had to tag along.
That’s where my fascination with old things began. I’d look at the objects sitting on those shelves and wonder: Where had they been? Who had owned them? What did they mean to someone before they ended up here?
That curiosity never left me.
Around 2007, a friend introduced me to estate sales, and I was hooked. Estate sales opened up a whole new world. I began traveling across Connecticut in search of antique, vintage, old, and odd things—not simply to collect them, but to learn about them.
Today, picking and independent research go hand in hand for me. I find the objects, bring them home, and dig into their histories—the people who made them, the people who owned them, the time periods they came from, and sometimes the larger stories they can help us understand.
Because every object has a story…and every story has a lesson.
