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.
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