Bio

Elena Aguilar was born in London, England in 1969.  She is the daughter of a Jewish-American woman and a Costa Rican man who could not live in their own countries together because of the Cold War politics of the 1960s.  She was raised in a working-class suburb amongst immigrants from the West Indies, Pakistan, India and Bangladesh.  After the military coups in South America in the mid-1970s, Elena’s mother became involved in the solidarity movement and her community expanded to include Chileans, Argentineans, and Bolivians.  The exiles that Elena met in her childhood had a profound impact on her life. 

In 1979, Elena moved to California with her mother and younger brother.  She attended the University of California, Santa Cruz, where she majored in History and Latin American Studies.  After graduating, she moved to Havana where she worked for Radio Havana, Cuba, from January 1993 to March 1994.  A Hard Rain: A Memoir of Cuba in Crisis is about this critical year in her life. 

Since 1995, Elena has taught in the Oakland Public Schools.  From 1998 to 2000 she also attended the University of California, Berkeley, and received a masters of arts degree in Cultural Anthropology.  Elena lives in Oakland with her son and husband.