Isabel

About the Book

Isabel, a Cuban American immigrant, has contemplated writing about her family’s ordeal while living in Communist Cuba under the Castro regime. It is only after she suffers a sudden heart attack at the age of fifty-five that she realizes she needs to share her story with others who have had similar experiences. As a young girl growing up during turbulent times in her native Cuba, Isabel takes the reader through key events that changed her life and the anguish of persecution in her own country. Later, as an immigrant in the United States in the late sixties, Isabel experiences what it is to leave her beloved country while learning to acclimate to a new culture and learning a second language. In doing so, she experiences bullying, racism, conflict, and hopelessness. Fifty years after her arrival to the United States, the author looks back at her life that’s filled with challenges as well as accomplishments. She reflects about her roles as mother, wife, daughter, and her thirty-two-year career as an educator.

About the Author

Isabel Mesa-Collins, Ed.D. is a Cuban-American educator. She has dedicated her career to teaching bilingual students in Chicago’s most marginalized communities. Having taught for twelve years in the Humboldt Park neighborhood, Dr. Mesa-Collins became an Assistant Principal of an elementary school in the Hermosa Park community. She then was elected principal of an elementary school in the Bucktown neighborhood from 1995-2007. She was then selected to lead as a Chief of Schools, overseeing 30-40 elementary schools in the Southeast and Northwestside until 2012 when she retired.