Isolina Ferré Aguayo was a Puerto Rican Roman Catholic nun. Known as the "Mother Teresa of Puerto Rico", she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom in recognition of her humanitarian work.
Background
Isolina Ferré was bom on September 5, 1914 in Ponce, the youngest child of Antonio Ferré and Mary Aguayo Casals. Although she lost her mother when she was still young, Ferré was profoundly influenced by her mother s lifetime of charity' work; for example, her mother insisted that Ferré donate one of her best Christmas gifts to needy children who were without toys. After her mother died, she was raised by her father, her elder brothers and a sister, and the household staff. In her memoirs she tells the story of how the family driver, Pellín, used to take her to Ponce's poorest neighborhoods, where she had first-hand contact with the social malaise and ailments that affected the poor.
Education
Ferré received the call to the Catholic apostolate when she was still an adolescent. The family was adamantly opposed to her becoming a nun. She recalled that her brother Luis tried to persuade her to become a social worker and help the poorer employees of the Puerto Rico Iron Works. Convinced that her call was genuine, she rejected her family's advice and remained determined to join a religious order. At the age of 21 she entered the order of the Missionary Servants of the Holy Trinity in Philadelphia, where she went through the novitiate and was ordained as a nun in 1937.
Ten years later, and somewhat burned out by the complexity of her work, she was once again transferred to New York, where she had the opportunity to attend Saint Joseph College and eventually finished a master's degree in sociology at Fordham University'.
Career
During her first years as a nun she worked with a wide array of needy groups in the United States. She helped coal miners in West Virginia, conducted a census of Catholic families in Brooklyn, and assisted Portuguese immigrants in Cape Cod. Starting in 1946, her order relocated her to the town of Cabo Rojo, Puerto Rico, a coastal city in the southwest west corner of the island, where she was asked to help the poor.
Her college education, in addition to the solid experience that she had acquired working with the poor, placed Ferré in a key position to work with the growing problems facing Latinos in New York during the 1960s. She served as a director of the Dr. White Stellman Center, an institution that aided Puerto Rican and Latino immigrants as well as other disenfranchised minorities, and became a member of the War on Poverty Committee, which dealt with the many issues and struggles raised during the civil rights movement. She also worked with gangs in New York.
Using the knowledge she had acquired during her studies and her years of experience performing missionary work, Ferré launched what was to become her most challenging assignment. She implemented a community development project where she trained residents of this community in a wide array of trades. With the assistance of her brother Luis and several area businesses she built a series of technical and vocational shops that offered the residents skills that they lacked. In a few years, her facility, known as Centros Sor Isolina Ferré, became the most successful economic development project on the island and one of the most emulated models of community development in the Caribbean and Latin America. The center not only provided the residents with vocational education and career opportunities, but also offered them basic social assistance and health care. The project was replicated successfully in another poor metropolitan community in the Caimitos sector of Río Piedras. Ferré's work was recognized with multiple awards. Like her brother Luis, she received the Presidential Medal of Freedom on August 11, 1999. There is no doubt that she felt her biggest honor was to serve poor and needy people.
When Ferré died, on August 3, 2000, thousands of Puerto Ricans of all creeds mourned the departure of the woman that they called "El Angel de la Playa" (The Angel of the Beach). Her work touched the lives of thousands of Puerto Ricans and she served as a role model for generations of people to come.
Personality
She later said that she always believed her order assumed that she was going to be in semi-retirement. After arriving in the area of La Playa de Ponce, a poor neighborhood along the coastline of the Ponce beach, Ferré was shocked at the social and economic conditions faced by the neighborhood's inhabitants. The area was an over-populated slum full of people who lacked basic skills to work in the area's many flourishing industries.