Celia Cruz
October 21, 1925–July 16, 2003
From the time she was a little girl, music was the most important thing in Celia’s life. She loved every type there was: the songs her mother sang while making fresh plátanos, the beats from her neighbor’s bembé next door, and the boleros she would hear while walking along the streets of Havana, Cuba. And she loved to sing. She knew every song on the radio by heart and was happy to sing for anyone who wanted to listen.
But one night, she discovered her very favorite kind of music. Tempted by the sounds of the carnaval wafting through her window, she snuck out with her tía to join in the fun. She couldn’t believe what she saw! Everyone was dressed up in sparkling costumes and dancing and singing to salsa music everywhere she went. It felt like magic. And when she got back home, she had the most wonderful dream she had ever had: she was wearing a flowing white dress and she was the queen of the carnaval!
Celia never forgot that dream, and when she grew up, she put on that beautiful white dress she had imagined and auditioned to sing for her favorite salsa band, La Sonora Matancera. They fell in love with her voice, and before long everyone in Cuba did, too. Her dream came true! Only, instead of becoming the queen of the carnaval, she became the salsa queen. “¡Azúcar!” she would shout out. Life was sweet.
Celia’s voice became the sound of salsa, and she won Grammy Award after Grammy. She traveled all over the world giving concerts, moved to the United States, recorded more than seventy albums, and even got her own star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame! To this day, if there is salsa dancing at a party and it feels like “la vida es un carnaval,” one of her songs is sure to be playing.
Dolores Huerta
April 10, 1930–present
As a little girl, Dolores lived in California between the orchards and vineyards where her mami owned a hotel. Dolores watched her mami scrimp and save to make ends meet. But whenever farmworkers came and needed a place to sleep, her mami let them stay for free. When people needed help, she’d always find a way.
Just like her mami, when soldiers’ families were left without their papis during World War II, Dolores got together with her Girl Scout troop to find a way to help. Fundraising on the streets, they helped the families buy clothes and food.
Dolores grew up to become a schoolteacher. But when her students would come to class hungry and without shoes on their feet, she knew the work she needed to do should start with their parents: the farmworkers. Dolores went to the fields and found them living in shacks with dirt floors. They didn’t even have clean water to drink! But they were too afraid to complain. Dolores insisted, “If we all stand up together, we can create change!” She teamed up with another organizer, César Chavez, and founded the very first farmworkers union in the United States!
Together, Dolores and César led protests and rallies. They talked to Congress. They even got a presidential candidate on their side. But when the growers didn’t listen, Dolores decided to go to New York and organize a boycott. She called on her feminist, Puerto Rican, and Black Panther allies, and together they got seventeen million people not to buy grapes. That sure got the growers’ attention! The farmworkers could finally negotiate decent working conditions and wages! Everyone said it couldn’t be done, but Dolores kept saying, “¡Sí se puede!”—and she was right! Even President Barack Obama used her famous slogan for his campaign, because there’s nothing people can’t do when they come together and take a stand. ¡Sí se puede! Yes we can!
Rita Rosita Moreno
December 11, 1931–present
At five years old, Rosita was happy playing under the warm sun of Juncos, Puerto Rico, cooking pretend feasts in her cacerolitas. But when her mami decided to start a new life in New York, everything changed. As soon as Rosita set foot on the freezing cold city streets filled with gangs at the ready with insults and pipes, she got the message loud and clear: “You don’t belong here!” “I want to go back to our casita!” Rosita would cry.
Then, one day, the sun came back and the flowers bloomed. Rosita felt happy for the first time and twirled all around the room. “You could be a dancer!” her mother exclaimed, and she signed Rosita up for classes with the famous Spanish dancer Paco Cansino. Rosita loved moving her feet to the rhythms of the classic Sevillanas and dressing up in the elaborate costumes her mami stitched by hand. By nine, she was already giving her first performance in Greenwich Village, and by nineteen she was off to Hollywood!
It seemed like a dream come true. But after being told to change her hair, her makeup, and her name to Rita, too, and still not getting the roles she deserved, she wondered, “Am I just not good enough?” Then, an exciting new musical, West Side Story, came out and she got to play a Puerto Rican for the first time in her life. She danced and sang and acted her heart out. And she won an Oscar for her role!
Finally, the world got to see how beautiful and talented she had been all along. Rita went on to win a Grammy, an Emmy, and a Tony, and she is still acting! Now, with her name among the stars, she is right where she belongs.
Maria Auxiliadora da Silva
May 24, 1935–August 20, 1974
From the time Maria was a little girl, she found art everywhere she looked. Even the coal from the kitchen stove got her mind whirling with ideas.
“Is dinner almost ready?” her mamãe would call out.
“¡Ai ai ai!” Maria would say with a start, running from her charcoal drawing on the wall to save the food she was supposed to be watching from being burned to a crisp.
When Maria’s mamãe saw the food, she just laughed. She understood. She was an artist, too. When Maria was nine, it was her mother who taught her all the different stitches for embroidery and how to work with colors. “Vem, sit with me,” her mother would say, and together they would tell stories with their threads.
When Maria grew up, she made her stories into paintings, mixing in the patterns and textures her mother taught her. Just as she had when she was a little girl, she could turn anything into art, even her own hair! She invented all her own techniques, building up parts of her paintings like a sculpture and playing with perspectives and colors like no one had done before. And by including little conversation bubbles where her figures made comments about education, feminism, racism, religion, and politics, she invited the public to talk. When art critics and academics tried to put labels on her or her work, she didn’t let them. “I am an artist,” she would say, and leave it at that.
Maria did everything on her own terms. By refusing to fit into offensive categories that made her feel like an outsider, she inspired a new generation of Brazilians who no longer measure themselves against European standards, but instead create their own. Maria was so full of fresh ideas that, even when she got very sick, she never stopped making art. When she died of cancer at age thirty-nine, she was working on a drawing that very day. Her family found it lying under her pillow.
Mercedes Sosa
July 9, 1935–October 4, 2009
High up in the trees of the park by her house in Tucumán, Argentina, Mercedes would sit and think. While everyone played down below, her empty stomach would grumble and she would ask herself: “How is it that Mami and Papi work so hard and can’t make enough money for us to eat? Why is it that people who look like me always seem to be the ones who are poor?”
Listening to Víctor Jara’s and Violeta Parra’s songs on the radio, Mercedes found she wasn’t the only one asking these questions. Their songs, traveling to her from Chile, felt like secret windows into her thoughts. She would sing their words to herself, filled with hope that one day things would change.
But the government didn’t want anything to change, and they had Víctor Jara killed. When Mercedes heard the news, her incredible sadness and anger gave her courage. Having been told by one of her high school teachers that she had a beautiful voice, she decided to use it. She was so nervous, she couldn’t look at her audience and had to close her eyes. But she sang out strong and loud. She
made sure the power of Víctor Jara’s words—and of all those who had dared to speak out—came through in her voice. Bigger and bigger crowds came to listen. By the time the government tried to stop Mercedes, her voice had already helped start a revolution.
Mercedes traveled all over Latin America and the world, singing out for women and children and human rights. Even when she received death threats, she never stopped singing. Her voice became the voice of the people. And, even today, when protestors come together, they play Mercedes’ recordings, letting her voice guide them as they march through the streets.
Isabel Allende
August 2, 1942–present
Isabel grew up in her abuelos’ house in Chile, which was filled with wild pets and the ghosts her abuela summoned during séances. At night, her abuelo loved to recite epic poems and fabulous folktales. For Isabel, it was the most magical place.
But when Isabel was ten, her mother remarried and the two of them had to follow her stepfather as he traveled the world for work. Isabel packed every object, smell, and memory of the rooms at her abuelos’ house into her heart. And during lonely, homesick nights, she would travel back there in her dreams.
Right when Isabel was going to finally return to her abuelos’ house, a brutal political coup in Chile forced her to stay abroad for her safety. Far away and missing her home more than ever, she received a phone call: “Your abuelo is very sick.” With her heart breaking, she wrote him a long letter filled with all the memories she had packed away from her childhood. She wrote page after page to her dear abuelo, traveling through her words to the times and places that made up his extraordinary life and weaving in her own fantastic imagination. By the time she finished, she had written over five hundred pages!
That very long letter became her first book, The House of the Spirits. It was as epic as her grandfather’s poems and as magical as the folktales he told. This book and the twenty- four she has written since have been translated into forty-two different languages! So even though her grandfather is no longer alive, people from all over the world get the chance to know him and all the other wonderful characters Isabel brings back to life.
Susana Torre
November 2, 1944–present
Running through the fields in Puán, Argentina, Susana and her cousin spotted a bird building its nest. “¡Probemos!” said Susana excitedly. They went to work gathering up bunches of twigs and mud. Together, they wove a whole collection of nests and then hid them in the trees of their village plaza. “Will the birds choose ours?” they wondered, and waited in the bushes hoping to find out. But the birds always seemed to know which nests were their own. “What makes something feel like home?” Susana asked herself.
When Susana got older, she continued to ask herself that question. In an art history class, she learned about the beautiful dome of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, Turkey. There, sitting under the spectacular wreath of windows that made the dome look like it was floating on beams of light, Christians, and later Muslims, would come together to pray. “I want to create spaces that bring people together like that!” Susana thought. “I want to be an architect!”
Susana started imagining the different kinds of places she could make. For her most famous project, Fire Station number 5 in Columbus, Indiana, she got rid of locker rooms and created shared spaces instead, with a big kitchen where everyone could meet. It was the first station in the United States to welcome women into the field, and it changed the way fire stations were built across the country!
Susana also put together the very first exhibit celebrating the brilliant work of women architects. It was so successful when it opened at the Brooklyn Museum that it traveled throughout the United States and made it all the way to the Netherlands! And to this day, for each space Susana creates, from an office building to a park, she makes sure it is a place where everyone can feel that they belong.
Julia Alvarez
March 27, 1950–present
Sitting on her grandfather’s knee telling him what she wanted to be, Julia imagined endless possibilities: “A bullfighter! A cowboy! A famous actress in Hollywood movies! I want to ride in a submarine and be a pilot and fly to Nueva York to buy toys!” she would say. And her abuelo would smile, but the side-eye he gave to her tíos and tías said it all: she would be a mamá, a tía, an abuela. Those were the dreams she was supposed to dream.
It wasn’t until Julia and her family escaped President Rafael Trujillo’s dictatorship in the Dominican Republic and moved to New York that Julia found a different way to be all the things she wanted to be. Hiding from the bullies who made fun of her accent and threw stones at her on the playground, Julia spent recess escaping into books. Reading book after book, she not only came to master the language of her new home but also found that she could step into the shoes of anyone she wanted to know or be!
As Julia grew up, she went from reading her way into the lives of characters to writing her way in. She wrote about the famous Mirabal sisters risking everything to overthrow President Trujillo, about doctors on a mission to save the world with vaccines, and about a Mexican family struggling to keep their undocumented status a secret in the United States.
Even though her family worried about the bold political stories she wanted to tell, Julia kept writing. Now she passes on what she learned by teaching future writers to push beyond the edges of their imaginations—and always to take a look through other people’s eyes.
Sandra Cisneros
December 20, 1954–present
With six rambunctious brothers running around her family’s small Chicago house, Sandra was constantly on the lookout for a quiet place. The first time she stepped into the public library, where you had to be quiet and where there were nooks and crannies to curl up in—perfect for escaping into the worlds of books—she knew she had finally found it.
Sandra filled her mind with stories of people who lived in places she could only imagine and who spoke with voices unlike anyone she had ever met. She dreamed of writing books like the ones on all those shelves.
When she grew up, Sandra went off to a famous writing school in Iowa. But the more she tried to sound like the voices in the books she had read, the more she found she couldn’t write. “Who are these people who have attics and summer houses by the sea?” she asked herself. And suddenly, it hit her! “What if I write about people who never find their way into these books? What if I write about people like me?”
Night after night, Sandra worked on a story that would later become known as The House on Mango Street. She filled it with her own voice and the voices of people she knew and loved. When it was published, it felt so true to so many people that it became an instant classic.
Now, while she writes her next book, she is working to support other writers, too. Through the Macondo Writers Workshop, which she founded, Sandra is helping writers from many different backgrounds bring their own stories to life.
Sonia Sotomayor
June 25, 1954–present
It was in her abuelita’s apartment in the Bronx, with all her cousins and tíos crowded into two rooms, that Sonia learned how to get people’s attention. When Abuelita stood up to recite beloved Puerto Rican poems at those family parties, even the most heated argument over dominoes would go quiet. As Abuelita’s strong, deep voice made its way to everyone’s hearts, Sonia’s tías and tíos were moved to tears. Sonia saw how her abuelita brought words to life—not only painting pictures in people’s minds, but waking up their feelings, too.
Sonia’s dream was to become a lawyer like her favorite TV character, Perry Mason. She joined the debate team in high school, but at first, even with solid arguments, she lost. Then one day, she decided to channel Abuelita. Little by little, sculpting her words into pictures with her hands, Sonia built the tension. She felt the room fall silent, and soon she had the entire audience on the edge of their seats. By getting the audience to imagine themselves in someone else’s place, she brought together her final argument, reaching the hearts of
everybody there. As she went to step down from the stage, the whole audience broke into applause! Just like Abuelita, Sonia got everyone to not only hear her words, but feel their power. She won the debate!
Sonia became a lawyer, then a judge. She impressed everyone so much that President Barack Obama nominated her to the Supreme Court! Now, helping to decide the most important cases in the country and standing up for equal rights, Sonia never forgets that making a good argument is just as much about connecting with people as it is about choosing the right words.
Rigoberta Menchú Tum
January 9, 1959–present
With her piglet and sheep, lying in watch over the growing maíz, little Rigoberta loved to dream. Under the same Guatemalan night sky where her ancestors had mapped the stars, Rigoberta dreamed of the day her pueblo of Laj Chimel would finally be able to live off of their land. Instead of taking those crowded old buses down to the fincas to pick cotton and coffee for only a few cents a day, they could stay up on the mountains of Quiché in peace.
Year after year, after long seasons breaking their backs on the finqueros’ fields, the whole pueblo worked together to tend their own crops. And right around Rigoberta’s fourteenth birthday, they finally grew enough to feed everyone! Rigoberta’s neighbors gave thanks, playing their chirimías and drums!
But before long, the finca owners found out, and, taking advantage of the internal war that had been targeting Indigenous communities like Rigoberta’s for years, they brought in the army to steal the land. Rigoberta’s father, don Vicente Menchú Perez, started working with community leaders to stand up for their rights, but he got sent to jail. Rigoberta knew she had to take on la lucha. She went to work organizing meetings to come up with a plan. “¡Ke’qach’ija’ na! ¡Resistimos!” she told her pueblo. And when the army came back with guns, the neighbors were ready with tricks and traps to outsmart them.
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