![]() I gave 110 percent of myself, and even though I didn’t win I felt like a winner with everything I had done-the pageant, the rebuilding, everything.Īnd if I had won, I wouldn’t have been able to do this story! It wasn’t even two weeks after I got back to Los Angeles that Playboy contacted me. (Luckily, they ended up giving me a second chance.) When I came back here, I had nothing I had given up everything to go back home. Around the time of the pageant, my modeling agency in Los Angeles dropped me because I wasn’t there. Winning Miss Puerto Rico would have been a dream, but it wasn’t in the cards for me. They do wonderful work, and I was blessed that they helped me use that experience in the pageant. They sponsored a project I did for the pageant: One of the schools in my hometown didn’t have any water, so we installed a cooler and did a presentation where we ran dirty water through the filter so it was totally clean. While I was there, I worked with Waves for Water, a nonprofit that was installing handmade water filters all over the island. Nobody in the industry knew me, and I’d never done a pageant in my life. I moved back to Puerto Rico the following April. Why do you want to come back to the island?” I told her, “I want to use that platform to say something and for people to hear me.” BIRTHPLACE I told my mom, “I’m moving back, and I’m going to compete for Miss Puerto Rico in the Miss Universe pageant.” My mom said, “You’re crazy-you’re already established in Los Angeles. I wanted to go home immediately and help my family and my people put the pieces back together, and I had an idea how I could make the biggest impact. I was living and working as a model in Los Angeles at the time. When Hurricane Maria hit back in 2017, it was devastating to my hometown of Toa Baja, which is on the outskirts of San Juan and right near the beach.
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