© Latinas in History 2008
A
native of San Juan, Puerto Rico, the religious activist, Belén Figueroa
de Pagán, became surrogate mother to her two younger sisters at the age
of twelve. Well instructed in homemaking, Figueroa married Antonio Pagán
in the 1940s and they joined the large wave of migrants leaving the island for
the U.S. By the 1950s she was a student in the Arca Evangélica Bible Institute
in Spanish Harlem and engaged in pastoral missionary work in the Latino community.
The family moved to Niagara Falls where they began the first storefront church
for Hispanics. At a time when a handful of Latino families lived in western New
York, the Pagán-Figueroa family founded a second storefront mission, Los
Vencedores en Cristo. By 1957 the family moved to Buffalo, New York and established
another mission in the basement of their first owned wooden house. Named by her
congregation, the “facilitator of dreams,” Figueroa died in 1960. The
Belén Figueroa Foundation was incorporated to honor her accomplishments
in Puerto Rico in 1986.
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