My Story
I’m telling you part of my trajectory so you can understand how my experiences took me to create the foundation. I was born in Puerto Rico in 1974. Because of my father’s job as a banker, I had to live in Brazil and Argentina when I was a child. I finished high school in Connecticut and went to the University of Michigan to get a cinema and video degree. I wanted to make independent movies. It was my passion.
My obvious alternative based in the place I wanted to live in after graduate, was the city of big lights, New York. I worked in some movie productions. Also in a movie filmed in Mexico, which was something I loved. After filming, I stayed several months in a beach house to write down a script. I thought that writing about my experience as Puerto Rican in a small internship school in Connecticut was a great story for a fascinating movie. I realized how wrong I was when I started telling the making
story to try to make the movie. So I ended in the area of video edition and working as editor assistant in some documentaries. Then, I found a job making commercials.
I worked for some time at a Hispanic advertising agency in New York City, editing commercials, originally filmed in English and then adapted to the Hispanic market.
I convinced myself that to pursuit a career in the creative field wasn’t my thing. It seemed that really creative people were born with a talent, to constantly think out of the box. I started to ask myself if I was born or not with that talent.
It is supposed that you do what you are good for. Not only you need to be passionate with what you do, but also it has to be easier for you than for the rest of people. You aren’t going to be a car driver if you don’t even know how to drive. Is a debatable point, but that was my strongest process.
I ended taking night time classes to get my MBA at Fordham University. I felt comfortable with my classmates, although I distinguished myself from the rest because I hadn’t experience in business area. I distinguished in the bad word sense.
After quitting my publicity work and with an MBA on my shoulders, I moved to Puerto Rico to work in a strategy to quit the weak shared-time real estate business, in which my family had a big interest. After a year, my father decided to be candidate in an elective charge and asked me to work with him as finance director in this campaign. I agreed and toured the island in this new adventure. Unfortunately, we loss elections, but I felt really proud about the campaign we worked.
Two months later, my whole life changed forever
My first memory happened two months after, in a hospital bed. How I reached there is something I don’t know. This is what others told me: I suffered a serious car accident in which, fortunately, I was alone. After crashing a ditch, the car spun numerous times and I went out through the front windshield.