Alejandrina Torres - Early Years and Personal Life

Early Years and Personal Life

Alejandrina Torres was born in Puerto Rico in 1939. Her family emigrated to the United States when she was 11 years old. During the 1960s and 1970s, she was a leader in her community. She was a founding member and later a teacher at the Puerto Rican High School in Chicago. She later helped found Chicago's Betances Health Clinic and was active in boycotts of public schools which continued to mis-educate children and were hostile and racist towards their students' parents. At the First Congregational Church where she worked, she organized a variety of community programs. She also participated in the Committee to Free the Five Nationalists and later became a member of the Committee to Free the Puerto Rican Prisoners of War. At the time of her arrest in 1983 she was married to Reverend Jose A. Torres and had two daughters, Liza and Catalina, who were 16 and 11 years old respectively.

Read more about this topic:  Alejandrina Torres

Famous quotes containing the words early years, early, years, personal and/or life:

    If there is a price to pay for the privilege of spending the early years of child rearing in the driver’s seat, it is our reluctance, our inability, to tolerate being demoted to the backseat. Spurred by our success in programming our children during the preschool years, we may find it difficult to forgo in later states the level of control that once afforded us so much satisfaction.
    Melinda M. Marshall (20th century)

    The secret of heaven is kept from age to age. No imprudent, no sociable angel ever dropt an early syllable to answer the longings of saints, the fears of mortals. We should have listened on our knees to any favorite, who, by stricter obedience, had brought his thoughts into parallelism with the celestial currents, and could hint to human ears the scenery and circumstance of the newly parted soul.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)

    Theoretically, we know that the world turns, but in fact we do not notice it, the earth on which we walk does not seem to move and we live on in peace. This is how it is concerning Time in our lives. And to render its passing perceptible, novelists must... have their readers cross ten, twenty, thirty years in two minutes.
    Marcel Proust (1871–1922)

    In our personal ambitions we are individualists. But in our seeking for economic and political progress as a nation, we all go up—or else all go down—as one people.
    Franklin D. Roosevelt (1882–1945)

    Intellectual tasting of life will not supersede muscular activity. If a man should consider the nicety of the passage of a piece of bread down his throat, he would starve.
    Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)