Estela López for Constable, New Canaan 2009
Estela López graduated from New Canaan High School in 2003 and has been a New Canaan resident for eighteen years. She volunteered at the Outback Teen Center and used to be a receptionist at Waveny Care Center. She majored in Women's Studies at the University of Connecticut in Storrs. She became interested in activism because her father, Hector López, taught her about the struggle for the independence of Puerto Rico since she was a child.
In college, she was part of the Violence Against Women Prevention Program helping to educate students about rape culture and sexism on campus. She is a member of Stop Porn Culture! because she thinks the pornographic, image-based pop culture we currently live in is dangerous and unhealthy for women, men, and children.
She currently works as a case manager at a local children's mental health clinic and will attend graduate school to study how women can become independent by becoming intimately familiar with nature. She is training herself to become more aware of the land she lives on by working on becoming a certified Kamana naturalist. She is currently organizing a wilderness survival and skill share camping event with some New York City environmentalists.
Estela thinks global human rights are impossible to achieve until we protect the biological diversity of the natural world, respect indigenous humans, and allow women to have bodily integrity. Estela is half Filipina and half Puerto Rican, and the biological diversity of both nations is being harmed by global warming.
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