I will be the first Ph.D. in my family; I am extremely fortunate and grateful for that. Neither my mother nor my father were provided the chance to go past the first grade in Puerto Rico, but I just finished the first year of a Ph.D. program in Medical Sociology and Race and Ethnicity. None of my six older brothers and sisters made it this far. I will graduate in may 2004.
        I came to the doctoral program in sociology at the University of New Mexico, after having earned two master's degrees. Before that I was a public administrator. My mother and father would have been very proud of me. My children are. However, writing these thoughts gives me pause. I think of the how unlikely a candidate for these merits I was as a youth. If someone had predicted my future based on my past, they would have prophesied a bleak one. I was a lost kid.
        I was born in Manati, Puerto Rico, but I grew up on the corner of 109^th Street and Fifth Avenue in Spanish Harlem, New York. Growing up in Harlem has been compared to growing up in Vietnam during the war years. I can attest to that: Most of my childhood friends and two brother are dead from combat in Harlem. I was nearly a casualty too. By the age of nine, I had done virtually everything an adult might do, and then some. I was an heroin addict by age of twelve. Not surprisingly, I finished high school in prison. As a consequence of a gang fight, I was sixteen and doing hard time.
        When I was sent to prison I was in the tenth grade, but I tested at a third grade educational level. Two years later my eyes were examined because of an eye injury in a fight. It was discovered that my vision was profoundly poor: I saw double. I suffered from severe nearsightedness in one eye and severe farsightedness in the other. I had not ever been examination before this. I did not realize it was not normal to see double as I had been that way all my life. Corrective lenses were prescribed and I quickly learned to read. The years of not reading seemed to induce in me an anemia for the written word that needed constant feeding. I would literally read anything - match book covers, toilet paper wrappers. I read five to six books a week. I read so much and so often that the guys in the joint nicknamed me "professor."
        Nine years of constantly reading could almost be classified as classical education. I read the works of most of the Greeks - Aristotle, Homer, Plato, Socrates. I read the Western European classics - Chaucer, Comte, Dante, Dostoyevsky, Engel, Kant, Goethe, Hegel, Locke, Marx, Maugham, Milton, Shakespeare. I read classics from the United States such as the biographies and ideas of Franklin, John Adams, Carver, Frederick Douglas, Dubois, and Jefferson. I read about the lives and theories of such people as Adler, Durkheim, Freud, Fromm, James, Jaspers, Jung, Leaky, Marcus, Maslow, Mead, Menninger, Masters and Johnson, Rogers, Skinner, Spencer, Sullivan, Weber, Wertheimer, and many more. I read much contemporary literature of the time such as Camu, Baldwin, Bellows, Hemingway, Hughs, Fitzgerald, Mailer, O'Hara, Salinger, Satre. I also took a page from Malcolm X, and for an hour each day I studied Webster's Collegiate dictionary. These great readings gave me an understanding of a world I had not know while I was trapped in my mind's prison in Harlem.
        Still in prison, I earned a certificate as a master tailor, and shortly thereafter, earned an high school equivalency diploma. Not satisfied with that, I went on to secure a New York State Regents high school diploma in math and science. Despite the reading and education, I was scared that when released I would fail. I had a choice to make: either go back to Harlem to the gang and heroin again, or leave everyone and everything I had known behind to start my life over elsewhere. I decided not to go back to Harlem and heroin.
        I was extremely fortunate. While still in, I was granted the opportunity to attend a study-release program at the State University of New York at Plattsburgh. I started classes in September 1972. I attended classes during the day and returned to prison in the evening until I was paroled in November of that same year. Freed from prison, I was still a captive of my past: I had no point of reference for what I encountered when released. Talk about anomie!
        I was unprepared for the emotional rigors of re-entry to an environment so different from prison and Harlem that I could have been on another world. Without exaggeration, the three years in college were more emotionally stressful than the nine years in prison. I had 15 years to prepare for prison by studying the role models my brothers and the street of Harlem presented for me. I had three months to prepare for the alien environment of collegiate life in a White, middle-class, small, rural town.
    Despite marginalization and acute alienation, I did not succumb to drugs. I managed to eke out about 60 credits towards the BA before I completely acquiesced to the pressure and ran. My SUNY transcript reflects the emotional upheaval that I dealt with for those three years. I did not become a statistic because of the support of some very loving people. With their encouragement and support, I went to California.
        In San Diego, I made a conscious decision to secure a job that helped others. I believed the adage: "in helping others we help ourselves." That philosophy has never failed me. Three years in college and nine in prison, secured a job for me helping ex-offenders find work. In that position I learned a great deal about working adroitly with people as difficult as I had been. I also learned to work closely with the political structures in order to secure funding for the branch office to which I had been promoted at Project JOVE. As a consequence, from there I went to work for a San Diego County Supervisor as Confidential Investigator and Administrative Assistant in charge of Social Services. I felt that in this capacity I might be able to help even more people. I believe I did. I helped establish a number of social service programs for poor people, and a free clinic.
        As a direct effect of these first two jobs after prison, for the next 20 years I worked in either social or public service positions. I was an executive director and executive vice-president, as well as public administrator in county and city governments. I directly administered budgets in the millions of dollars and managed as many as 450 employees, including law enforcement personnel. Ironic.
        Throughout my career I tried, with some success, to make restitution for the criminal life I led as a child. But there was also a disquietude in me. Despite my career and life experience, I found that very few people wanted to hear what I had to say concerning drug and social problems, much less fund programs I proposed in these areas. I also found myself longing to use the experiences I gained in prison and throughout life, to help others through teaching. It was time to answer Langston Hughes: what happens to a dream deferred.
        I had made an half-hearted stab at school now and then during my administrative career, but in 1995 I decided that time, place, and circumstances were propitious to go back to college. I did. I finished the bachelor's degree, and continued into a master's program. I completed two masters degree programs in three years. The first master's degree is in Sociology with concentrations in Gender and Race and Ethnicity. The second master's degree is in Geography with an emphasis on government planning. I graduated both degrees with honors: I was inducted into Phi Kappa Phi, the national honor society, and into Gamma Theta Upsilon, the national geography honor society.
        I developed an interest in medical sociology early in 1996 and set as a goal to secure a Ph.D. in that field. In medical sociology I could see a blending of a number of issues that were important to me: drug addiction, gender, health promotion, and race and ethnicity. I decided that I wanted to study under two people whose work I admired in the field of Medical Sociology. They were both at the University of New Mexico.
        I had begun teaching sociology and computer technology at the collegiate level during the time I was completing the second masters. I saved enough money to relocate to New Mexico where I intended to reside for a year before applying for admittance in to the doctoral program I had chosen. While I waited for resident status, the masters in geography and my experience in government offered me the opportunity to teach at New Mexico State University's Political Science Department.
        The master's degrees and occupational experience also opened other doors. My thesis in sociology dealt with poor Latinas. As a consequence, I had the good fortune to be allowed to create a program to help women trying to get off welfare. Based on my thesis in geography, I was also called in by the City Manager of the City of Las Cruses, New Mexico, to design and implement a customer service program for his line staff.
        The women's program was funded by the US Department of Housing and Urban Development. I was able to create a program, through grounded research to (ostensibly) train welfare mothers to transition off welfare. However, what I designed with their help was what the women knew would work for them regardless of welfare. It was a multifaceted program that encompassed every aspect of life skills - self-esteem, behavioral and physical health screening, world-of-work training, personal finance management, first aid and CPR training, dressing for success courses - and occupational training leading to an actual job placement. We had an 85 percent success rate.
        I followed the same action oriented, grounded research format in the program I designed for the City of Las Cruces. I designed it from the line staff's perspective, as oppose to the usual focus which is on the customer's needs. The focus was on the importance of the line staff's jobs to the functioning of the city. The program proved successful, morale improved and changes suggested by the employees themselves to improve services were implemented.
        I was successful in getting accepted by the doctoral program I had come to New Mexico to pursue. At the University of New Mexico I study what I had wished to, and I am learning the ins and outs of scientific research in mental health. I am currently being mentored by the faculty under who I had wished to study, Drs. Philip May and Howard Waitzkin. They have introduced me to several others faculty who have provided me with invaluable help in my research projects.
        One of these people, Cathleen Willging, Ph.D., has provided me with the opportunity to do ethnographic field research that I will use for my dissertation. I am fulfilling the goals I set for myself in 1996. I will be done in May 2004. I will be the first one in my family to earn a Ph.D.
        I have come a long way from being stoned on the streets of Harlem and fighting and reading my way through prison. My parents would have been very proud. My children are.

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