Pop Star: Lourdes Sanchez Ridge

“All you hear are the bad stories,” she shakes her head. “Latinos are poor, uneducated, and worse. You never about the engineers – like Raul Valdes-Perez, a Carnegie Mellon Ph.D. who started Vivisimo, a sophisticated search engine. Or physicians -- like my brother Juan Sanchez, a Connecticut cardio-thoracic surgeon. Or attorneys --” like Lourdes Sanchez Ridge herself.

In Pittsburgh since 1990, a senior counsel with Thorp Reed & Armstrong, Downtown, Sanchez Ridge was born in Havana, moved to Miami at age six. Having gone to school in Miami, and law school in Gainesville, she returned home to serve as an assistant state attorney, then a DC-based assistant US attorney, conducting some four dozen trials and more than 100 grand jury investigations. Now in Pittsburgh, where she moved with her husband, fellow attorney Bob Ridge.

She is also a tireless promoter of all things Latino, including serving as president of the Pittsburgh Metropolitan Area Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, a non-profit organization headquartered in Beechview, promoting Latino businesses, and serving as a link between the corporate and Hispanic communities.

Such as the local Latino community is. While the US average for foreign-born nationals is a healthy 12 percent, Pittsburgh lags behind with an anorexic three percent – despite some 4,000 foreign-born college graduates in Pittsburgh. How many of them are Spanish speakers? Some 24,000, according to the 2000 census, a number that may be low, given the undocumented Latinos living here.

Currently, Sanchez Ridge’s best guess is some 40,000, including as many as 25 percent undocumented (and therefore invisible). “It’s a matter of opportunity,” she says. “People go where the opportunities are, and Pittsburgh has a lot to offer. Cost of living. Housing. Livability. Size. Access to government.”

Keeping Latinos, and attracting others, is Sanchez Ridge’s crusade. “I want to represent them,” she says, “the success stories, the professionals. The stereotype is that all Latinos are poor and uneducated, but that’s not true.”

Working to teach new immigrants what she calls “the ways of the United States,” the Upper St. Clair mother of three helped start monthly workshops in Americana – checking accounts, Social Security, insurance, savings plans, and so on. In addition, she lobbies for greater Latino culture in Western Pennsylvania – having such Latino foods in the Giant Eagle as sofrito, malta, Cuban crackers, plantain chips; getting the popular Spanish cable program Telemundo on the box (she uses a satellite dish to tune in); translating court documents into Spanish. “We’re trying to make Pittsburgh a friendlier place for Spanish speakers,” she says.

Overall, Sanchez Ridge wants more open doors. “Give them the chance to be real competitors,” she enjoins. “If Latinos move here, their children will go to school here. They will go to college here. And stay here. And Pittsburgh will grow.

“Advertise,” she enjoins, “in New York, Florida, California, Chicago. Be pro-active. Go out and grab them. If you market Pittsburgh the right way, and seek them, you will bring them.”

---

Abby Mendelson’s latest book, Ghost Dancer, a collection of short stories, is available at amazon and bn.com.

---

Captions:

Lourdes Sanchez Ridge

Law offices of Thorp Reed & Armstrong

Sanchez Ridge

All photographs copyright Brian Cohen