Early Years and Personal Life
Ricardo Jiménez was born in Puerto Rico in 1956. His family moved to the U.S. when he was still an infant. He attended Tuley High School in Chicago when the school was in the midst of a crisis brought about by a racist principal and the lack of a relevant curriculum for Puerto Rican students. As a member of Aspira and the student council he was a leader in struggles which ultimately led to the creation of the Roberto Clemente High School. Ricardo was also Vice President of the Senior Class, a member of the national Honor Society and in 1974 was chosen by the mayor as the city of Chicago's Senior High School Student of the Year.
In his community Ricardo worked as a volunteer at El Rancor, a drug rehabilitation center, and on a project on housing which led to the exposure of a plan called the Chicago 21 plan, to turn the Puerto Rican community into an enclave for the high income professional class. Upon graduation he attended Loyola University and was a member of the Latin American Student Organization, which developed the university's first Puerto Rican history class. He later attended Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago and was selected to represent the student body in a national conference on the need to force large U.S. corporations to open their doors to Latino engineers and other high tech professionals.
Read more about this topic: Ricardo Jimenez
Famous quotes containing the words early, years, personal and/or life:
“... goodness is of a modest nature, easily discouraged, and when much elbowed in early life by unabashed vices, is apt to retire into extreme privacy, so that it is more easily believed in by those who construct a selfish old gentleman theoretically, than by those who form the narrower judgments based on his personal acquaintance.”
—George Eliot [Mary Ann (or Marian)
“Unlike Boswell, whose Journals record a long and unrewarded search for a self, Johnson possessed a formidable one. His life in London—he arrived twenty-five years earlier than Boswell—turned out to be a long defense of the values of Augustan humanism against the pressures of other possibilities. In contrast to Boswell, Johnson possesses an identity not because he has gone in search of one, but because of his allegiance to a set of assumptions that he regards as objectively true.”
—Jeffrey Hart (b. 1930)
“Wilson adventured for the whole of the human race. Not as a servant, but as a champion. So pure was this motive, so unflecked with anything that his worst enemies could find, except the mildest and most excusable, a personal vanity, practically the minimum to be human, that in a sense his adventure is that of humanity itself. In Wilson, the whole of mankind breaks camp, sets out from home and wrestles with the universe and its gods.”
—William Bolitho (1890–1930)
“Thus our life is not altogether a forgetting, but also, alas! to a great extent, a remembering, of that which we should never have been conscious of, certainly not in our waking hours.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)