Sylvia Rivera was born on July 2nd, 1951 in Bronx, New York to a Venezuelan woman and a Puerto Rican father. Days after she was born her father disappeared, leaving her just with her mom. At the age three her stepfather threatened to kill her, her half sister and mother, shortly afterwards her mother committed suicide. Leaving her and sister with their grandmother, but Rivera’s grandmother had little love for her effeminate grandson. After her half-sister was taken by her birth father Rivera’s Grandmother resented her even more, due to her mixed race-darker skin- and behavior. She would often received beating from her. Rivera’s experience in school was no better than at home. She was mocked for wearing make up by her peers and dropped out of school in sixth grade due to being called by a slur …show more content…
word.
At age eleven, between switching places to live, she left home. Rivera went to Forty-Second Street, an area to a community of drag queens, sex workers, and transgender, where she regularly hung out at and worked as a sex worker, by hustling with her uncle. At Forty-Second Street, she was taken in by a group of drag queens, adopting the name “Sylvia”. Her living with drag queens, at a young age, set the stage for her continued activism for transgender rights. Rivera refused to conform to the gender norms, those who refused were known as drag queens, and Rivera was best known as America's drag queen. She worked hard for justice and civil rights for the transgender community who weren’t a part of the Gay Rights discussion. Rivera helped lead the charge on the night of the Stonewall Riot in New York on June 28, 1969, where police officers raided a bar that was owned by the Mafia. The police officers mistreated several members of
the LGBT community and they revolted, by throwing bricks or bottles at them. After that experience Rivera wanted to get involved and the fight for justice. Her friend Marsha P. Johnson, a fellow drag queen, informed her of the meetings of the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) she jumped at the chance to get involved in the activities. Despite her enthusiasm to get involved in these activists groups, her identities as a sex worker, drag queen, poor and Latina troubled many white, middle-class activists groups. This class issued continued to plague Rivera as she worked hard within the activists groups. Despite their attempts to exclude transgender people from their work, Rivera worked hard to include them in. Within the GLF and (GAA), Gay Activist Alliance, Rivera was involved in the campaign to pass New York City’s first gay rights bill. She fought tirelessly for transgender to be included in the bill. When GAA attended a meeting of the Greenwich Independent Democrats, to informed them of the Petition they had circulated for the Gay Rights Bill, Rivera walked up to front and with petition in hand hit the councilwoman that was in charged, who refused to look at the petition. The Gay Rights Bill was passed in 1986, but the bill did not include any protection for transgenders. Even with the constant exclusion from the Gay Rights Movement, Rivera still fought for those who refused to be silenced. Rivera was active during the 70s with her organization, she and Marsha started, S.T.A.R (Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries). The organization focused on giving shelter to queer homeless youth. Rivera wanted to create something that would help others who faced the same problems she did. Although, S.T.A.R was active for most of the 70s it died in 1973. She left New York City and settled in Tarrytown, New York where she worked in food service. Her activism revolved around local drag shows and Pride Week activities. Rivera revived S.T.A.R on January 6, 2001 in order to bring awareness to the murder of transwoman, Amanda Milan.
Jenni Rivera, born Dolores Janney Rivera Saavedra, was born in Long Beach, CA. She grew up in poverty, and with four brothers she was a tom boy. She learned to defend herself at a young age. “I soon developed the reputation as the girl who beats up boys.” This taught her how to respect herself in the music industry. Despite her boyish ways she loved to sing. She would compete at bars with her dad. He early singing career made her realize she could make good money and provide for her family by singing.
Sonia Sanchez is an African-American writer regularly connected with the Black Arts Movement. She has composed over twelve books of poems, and in addition short stories, essays, plays, and kids' books. She was a beneficiary of 1993 Pew Fellowships in the Arts. In 2001, Sanchez was the recipient of the Robert Frost Medal for her poem and has been compelling to other African-American female artists, including Krista Franklin. Sanchez was born in Birmingham, Alabama, on September 9, 1934. Her mom died when Sanchez was just two years old, so she stayed with different family members for a while. One of those was her grandma, who passed when Sanchez was six. In 1943, she moved to Harlem to live with her dad, her sister, and her stepmother, who was
Maria Perez was born on May 18, 1944 in Zacatecas, Mexico. She grew up in a farm name Santa Rita. She is the last middle child of four kids, and her parents own a farm. It was a small farm, but she loves it. Since she was five years old, she helped her parents by working in the farm. Her job was to feed the horses, cows, chickens, and pigs. She loves all her animals, but her favorite animal was horses. When she was young, she loved to ride her horses. She felt off the horse and hurt head when she was young. She said, “I’m thankful to the lord that I survive that hit.” She wasn’t a normal child when she was growing up because she would just work with her parents and not plays like other kids. She wanted to have a normal childhood, but she had to work with her parents. She described
The Stonewall Riots were a series of riots that took place at a gay club, Stonewall Inn, in Greenwich Village, New York City, during a six-day span commencing on June 28, 1969. Generally speaking, the protesters were homosexual men and women fighting against discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation. At certain points during the riots, there were “between two hundred and three hundred police on the scene” and police officers chased down the protesters with nightsticks (Carter 193). Indeed, according to a news report cited by Carter, “young people, many of them queens, were lying on the sidewalk, bleeding from the head, face, mouth, and even th...
In “The Lesson” Toni Cade Bambara presents us with a group of angsty preadolescents who live in New York in the 1920s; this time period was a trying time for African Americans who constantly battled with the socio-economic tensions that resulted from their rival social class of privileged white people. Children like Sylvia grew up in broken family situations where it was more than common for parents to spend their days wasted away in the world of drugs and prostitution. Fortunately, Sylvia and her friends are taken under the wing of Miss Moore; they have little tolerance for her because they relate her presence with school due to the life lessons she attempts to teach the group. On the particular day that Miss Moore accompanies Sylvia and her friends to the FAO Schwarz toy store for another one of her lessons, Sylvia has a revelation about the growing tensions between African Americans and white people that causes her to deeply analyze some of the growing racial issues in her own community, state, and country as a whole.
Sylvia’s being poor influences the way in which she sees other people and feels about them. Sylvia lives in the slums of New York; it is the only life she knows and can realistically relate to. She does not see herself as poor or underprivileged. Rather, she is content with her life, and therefore resistant to change. Sylvia always considered herself and her cousin as "the only ones just right" in the neighborhood, and when an educated woman, Miss Moore, moves into the neighborhood, Sylvia feels threatened. Ms. Moore is threatening to her because she wants Sylvia to look at her low social status as being a bad thing, and Sylvia "doesn’t feature that." This resistance to change leads Sylvia to be very defensive and in turn judgmental. Sylvia is quick to find fl...
Selena Quintanilla Pérez was a famous Tex Mex woman who was a songwriter, fashion designer, a spokesperson, an actress, and a singer. Her life was filled with joy, music, performing, and she was loved by many. Unfortunately, things started to go downhill.
Maya Angelou went from living in a place where the religious and pious were the ones who garnered respect, to an environment in which gamblers, hustlers, prostitutes, and gangsters were the ones who held the power. I too had a similar experience when I moved from my quiet hometown to the big city when I was eight years old. I learned quickly, as Maya did, that the more diverse aspects of life I was able to experience, the more well rounded a person I could become. I could also relate, in many aspects, to the part of the story in which Maya and her brother attend a non-segregated high school in California, until at 16 years old Bailey, gets his own apartment. Subsequently, Maya is forced to spend the summer with her father and his malicious girlfriend, Dolores, in a trailer park. After an argument with Delores comes to blows, Maya runs away from home and vows to make it on her own. I too had a brother that moved away from home at an early age, and I have experienced problems with stepfamilies for most of my life. Though my experiences have never reached the tragic depths that Maya’s did, I can unremittingly sympathize with her plight and empathize with her pain.
Jessie Lopez De La Cruz was born in Anaheim, California in 1919. She was abandoned by her father when she was 9 and lost her mother a few years later. She moved to live with her grandparents, she was raised by her grandmother after her grandfather died. She grew up traveling around to farm. Moving from places to places, spent most of her life working, she was in and out of school and only got to a sixth grade education. Later in her life, in 1938, she married her husband at the age of 19. From 1939-1947 she had six children, she lost a baby daughter to malnutrition, lack of adequate sanitation, and inferior health care. In her early forties, she found her life dramatically
Shirley Chisholm, named Shirley Anita St. Hill at birth, was born to Charles Christopher St. Hill and Ruby Seale on November 30, 1924, in Brooklyn, New York. Both her parents were immigrants. Her father was a factory worker from Guyana and her mother was a seamstress and a domestic worker. At the age of three, Shirley relocated to Barbados to live with her grandmother. She received much of her primary education in the Barbadian school system, which stressed the traditional British teachings of reading, writing, and history. Chisholm credits much of her educational successes to this well-rounded early education. When Chisholm was ten years old, she returned to New York.
Wendy Martinez was raised in Cumming, Georgia after being brought by her parents to the U.S. from Mexico to provide her a better future than their own. Her mother worked tirelessly as cleaning personnel at a company and her father
To begin with, the reader gets a sense of Sylvia's personality in the beginning of the story as she talks about Miss Moore. Miss Moore is not the typical black woman in the neighborhood. She is well educated and speaks well. She has climbed up against the odds in a time where it was almost unheard of for a black woman to go to college. She is a role model for the children who encourages them to get more out of life. Sylvia's opinion of her is not one of fondness. She says that she hates Miss Moore as much as the "winos who pissed on our handball walls and stand up on our hallways and stairs so you couldn't halfway play hide and seek without a god damn mask”(357). By comparing the hatred with something she enjoys, we get to see what a child does in the slums for amusement. Sylvia feels t...
I dream about time travelling back into the Progressive Era, where I would witness first hand the hard work, patience, and dedication civil right advocates had as they fought against the injustice committed against them and participated in peaceful protests for what is right.
On June 28, 1969, an event occurred that was to be the start of one of the most powerful movements in US history. On that Friday in June, the New York police force raided a popular bar in Greenwich Village called the Stonewall Inn because it was suspected of operating without a liquor license. Raids usually went on undisturbed by people involved, but during this raid the area around the inn exploded into fierce protest. The repercussions and multiple disputes that resulted from the initial raid would come to be known as the Stonewall Riots.
Puerto Rican actress Rita Moreno, born Rosita Dolores Alverio is one of Latin Americas most iconic figure in show business. Through her successful career, which is still on going at the age of 85 years, Rita has been awarded every prestigious award in Hollywood. Through her success, Rita has given inspiration to Latinos who previously thought a career in Hollywood, for them, would be impossible. One such Latina, Jennifer Lopez, has told countless interviewers of how she was hugely affected by Rita’s acting in the film ‘West Side Story’."Watching this beautiful, strong Puerto Rican woman command a screen with her talent in a time when Latina women did not have every door in this industry open to them made me feel as a little girl, watching in