Felisa Rincón de Gautier
In 1946, Felisa Rincón de Gautier broke barriers when she ran for and was elected mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, becoming the first woman to be elected as the mayor of a capital city in the Americas. She was an active participant in Puerto Rico’s women’s suffrage movement and pushed for child care programs that became the inspiration for the United States’ Head Start program. Dõna Felisa, as she was called, received 113 keys to different cities across Puerto Rico, the U.S., and Latin America and was awarded 11 honorary degrees.
Sylvia Rivera
During the late 1960s and early 1970s, a time when Stonewall riots were making the gay-rights movement mainstream, bisexual trans Latina activist Syliva Rivera advocated for the queer and transgender people the movement had left out. She did this through S.T.A.R., Street Transvestite Action Revolutionaries, an organization she co-founded in 1970 that aimed to achieve rights for the trans community and provide them with social services. But as mujer of Puerto Rican and Venezuelan descent, Rivera’s activism also focused on intersecting issues of women’s rights, poverty, and race, driving her to organize with feminists, the Young Lords, and the Black Panther Party.
Cosmopolitan.com by Raquel Reichard