• Submitted by: manso
• Society
• 03 / 20 / 2011

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By Sara Gonzalez.MiamiHerald.com. Quintana was born in Puerto Rico and raised in Cuba. For more than 50 years, she called Wynwood home and fought for the rights of the needy in her community.

Long-time Wynwood community activist Dorothy Quintana, who advocated for her community up to her last days, died last week of natural causes. She was 101 years old.

Quintana had dedicated more than half of her life to fighting crime and drugs in Wynwood — a historically Puerto Rican community between downtown Miami and Little Haiti.

Born in Puerto Rico and raised in Cuba, she called Wynwood home for more than 50 years.

For decades, her old, modest home housed the hungry and the sick. She fed Haitian immigrants when they first started arriving in Miami in the late 70s. And in the 80s, she replaced her dining room table and chairs with beds for the new Mariel boatlift Cuban refugees.

Some in the area knew her as Dottie. Others called her the “Mayoress of Wynwood.”

Married twice, she had no children of her own, often saying the needy in her community were like her children.

“Always, always she was working for the people,” according to Said Martinez, program director at De Hostos Senior Center where Quintana was a board member. “She took your problem as her problem’’ Martinez said.

In recent years Martinez would help Quintana get ready for local and state award ceremonies in her honor.

“She was so sweet, she would get so happy, she was like a child,” Martinez said.

But Quintana knew how to take care of herself in the depressed neighborhood she loved. “She had a gun,” she said laughing. “That’s so funny because do you imagine — 101 years, with a gun.”

Quintana also had a full surveillance system protecting her home. Martinez said Quintana set up the cameras in part because she lived alone and in part because she worked to expose criminals.

Martinez said Quintana would drive around Wynwood at night and “when she observed something wrong, she’d call the police, in order to protect her community. It’s incredible, incredible.”

Pablo Canton with the Neighborhood Enhancement Team is one of the many people who drove Quintana around Wynwood. He said she would point out the drug dealers and abandoned properties that attracted crime.

“Dorothy was one of those that [would] give me the priorities. She would say, ‘hey, you know this one’s really bad, I’m getting a lot of complaints,’ And we would place a priority on the ones she would call.”

Canton said Quintana’s drive in life was to help people and improve the Wynwood community.

“She was full of energy. At that age, you would figure, ‘Well, I’m going to stay home and watch TV and read the paper. But not Dorothy,” Canton said. “And even though she never drove a car, she always found somebody to drive her around. And she would go everywhere. I would see her in all the commission meetings.”

Wilfredo Gort, chairman of the city of Miami commission, said Quintana always spoke her mind at the public meetings.

“Sometimes she would get pretty upset at people so she would bang the table with her cane,’’ Gort said.

Gort had know Quintana for nearly 35 years and last saw her three weeks ago — at a commission meeting.

Quintana was trying to get funding for an agency that provides transportation to senior citizens in Wynwood.

Even then, in her final weeks, Gort said, she was the same, passionate Quintana.

“She had someone assisting her because she was blind at the time. But she was able to be there and speak very loudly. She got up there and she gave them hell.”

The Commission decided to fund the program.

Quintana died on March 13 — two days before she could see it happen.

Source: //www.miamiherald.com/2011/03/20/2125131/