Politics/Community Involvement

When I was in high school they were trying to track me into, you know, all the lower tracks and track me to –what do you call that—vocational training ‘cause I really didn’t—I always got really, really, really high grades but that was just ‘cause I worked so hard. I didn’t want to go to college. I thought I had enough of this [laughter] aggravation and enough of this kind of, not feeling particularly confident. But my parents said that wasn’t an option, that I was going to college whether I liked it or not, so that was probably a very good decision. So I went to college. I graduated in the top five and with Phi, Phi Beta Kappa so I guess I wasn’t as dumb as everybody thought [laughter] and then I went to the University of Pittsburgh and got my PhD. I would say that my challenges are also something I really in many ways value because I think that when you sort of struggle to understand something you can really explain it better to other people and I feel like I’m really good at that, you know, that I’m a good teacher, that I have a tremendous amount of respect for other individuals who struggle because I did. And I really do think it’s about hard work in large measure [laughs] and, and really, someone who will support you, people who believe in you, and my family believed in me even though, they thought I was kind of stupid [laughs]. And no one, no one ever thought that I would be the one in the family who wound up with a PhD but somehow I did.

Most important to me is community service—I'm an avid believer. The woman who founded, I believe it’s Save the Children, Marian Wright Edelman, has this great quote that “Service is the rent we pay for living here on this planet.” And I am an avid believer. I do five to ten hours a week of community service. A lot of it is related to vision.

I understand my ethnicity more. I know how I can help other people through what I’ve learned. I've tried to—I have tried for my children to understand our culture, from which they come, the Latino culture, and that they keep it.

Culture is my job. One can relate everything to culture. But not only Puerto Rican, but from other countries as well.

Culturally, culturally, what we Latinas have in common with other women—with Anglo-Saxon women—is that even now the system still is being controlled by men, and the social context in which we live is just the same.  So, we… we as women still need to work, to make the effort, and not to compete against each other in order to arrive at the table where decisions are taken.  Much of… much of the reason why I am still in this office is because I’ve always realized that if one is not seated at the decision-making table when the resources arrive, these resources are not really going to be made available to the people who most need them.  This is because they have not had—the people with the resources have not had—have not met someone who understands the real problems that are out there.  For example, in this office, I am the only person who had children out of wedlock. I am the first person that has been raised as I was raised.  The only person who has, who has been on welfare, who depended on food stamps.  And I… when these issues are discussed I can say, “No, no, no that is not how things really are.”