They awoke to the deep growl and bright lights of military trucks flooding their hilltop home late one April night in 1981. The police led away Sylvia Rosales' husband, Mauricio Aquino, an IBM executive still clad in his robe and pajamas. The officers said he was under investigation. The next day, they claimed to never have seen him.
Rosales' face softens as she remembers that far away time. Born into privilege in Madrid and raised in a sheltered compound in San Salvador, Rosales' social conscience stirred at a young age; she taught literacy to the poor in one-room shacks and even brought home children to bathe in her family's swimming pool.
Her parents -- a lawyer and a businesswoman who prided themselves on giving their children the best of everything -- didn't understand their daughter's tenderness for the disadvantaged. At the university where she studied sociology, she fell in love with Aquino, who also came from a well-to-do family.
They married when she was 21 with conventional dreams of money and happiness. But violent crackdowns from the repressive military regime deepened their resolve to fight for social justice and their political sympathies for the ragged insurgency.
Then her husband disappeared.
"That is how the nightmare began," she says. "You know the film, 'Missing?' That was my life." For two years, Rosales searched for her husband before finally fleeing El Salvador with her two young girls after receiving death threats.
"If this was happening to us," she says, "what happens to the working-class people who have no protection? Who speaks for them?"
She would. Rosales dedicated her life and her husband's memory to speaking for those who had no voice from Washington, D.C., where she took vocal stands on political asylum and human rights issues, to the Bay Area, where she helped raise $8 million to start the Community Bank of the Bay.
Six years ago, Rosales used the business acumen she says she inherited from her mother to develop a formula to lift immigrants from poverty by teaching them to start viable businesses, manage money and build assets and by instilling in them a responsibility to give back to their communities. Her business incubator, Anew America Community Corp., has helped a few hundred "new Americans" from 40 countries find new lives and hope.
On her office wall hangs a photograph taken by one of the program's graduates, Ana Vilanova, with the inscription: "Deep in our hearts/We find the new America/Hidden in the calm of the jungle/Providing dreams and hopes to our souls/See the beauty we bring to this land!"
Rosales, who calls herself a "new American," has found new life as well -- what she calls a second chapter. She is remarried to David Fike, provost of Marygrove College in Detroit (the two have a "commuting" marriage and see each other every other week). Fike adopted her two girls and together they have a 17-year-old son.
Her eldest daughter, Alexandra, is getting a joint degree in law and public policy and dreams that someday she and her mother will return to El Salvador for long-overdue answers to painful questions.
"That chapter is not closed," Rosales-Fike says. "It is not finished."
• NAME: Sylvia Rosales-Fike
• AGE: 49
• TITLE: President and CEO
• ORGANIZATION: Anew America Community Corp.
• LOCATION: Berkeley