Kica Matos is known nationally for her immigration and racial justice work, but at her home in New Haven, Conn., she begins each day in a relatable way for many Latinos — with a cafecito and what she calls the good kind of chisme, or gossip.
“The only bochinche I like to engage in is what I call light bochinche, which is when people update you about ‘So-and-so got married’ and ‘so-and-so is off to college,’” Matos said, ‘like stories that are not gossipy but really are interesting things about a person.”
Ask Matos for bochinche, and she’ll first tell you proudly about her son studying at her alma mater, Cornell University. You may have heard light bochinche about Matos herself when she was named to TIME Magazine’s The 100 Most Influential People of 2026.
It’s the latest accomplishment in a storied career fighting racial injustice, which all began in her early years as a Black Boricua kid.
Matos was born in Cerro Gordo, Puerto Rico, as the youngest of four during a time when she said so-called colorblind racism was the norm. Though Puerto Rican society essentially declared everyone on the island was equal parts white European, African and native Taino, she said the lived experience varied.
“Growing up in Puerto Rico, as a child, I remember being singled out and called ‘la negrita’ in endearing ways from loved ones,” Matos said. “But then you hear people talk about negros in really terrible ways.”
Matos started to notice how the culture favored whiteness, from the casting of telenovelas to the voting of people into power.
“At some point in time, even in your childhood, you start to absorb and understand societal biases, and so I realized that Black people in Puerto Rico were disparaged,” she said.
Then, at 9 years old, Matos and her family were forced to move abroad due to her father’s environmental activism. She grew up in Trinidad and Tobago then Fiji.
But it was during her college years in New Zealand that Matos first really got involved in social justice. She noted it was a fraught time for the predominantly white country, with headlines about the national rugby team playing in peak apartheid South Africa and the bombing of Greenpeace ship Rainbow Warrior in Auckland.
She returned to the U.S., and lived stateside for the first time, for grad school and her law studies.
“I remember, 21, getting to New York, and it had been snowing,” she said, shivering a bit. “I couldn't believe how cold it was. So cold.”
It was when Matos began working at Amnesty International in the U.S. that she says she saw the ultimate racial injustice — the death penalty.
“They were working on the case of this young man who was 17 at the time that he committed the alleged crime,” Matos recalled. “He had severe intellectual challenges and was African American and was tried by an all-white jury.”
Matos was sure she had found her calling.
“I said, ‘Okay, I'm going to dedicate the rest of my life to fighting for the abolition of the death penalty,’ and that really is what I thought I was going to do,” Matos said. “Life has a way of challenging you, because even the best laid plans don't turn out. So, here I am, 30-something years later, doing something completely different and unexpected.”
While working as a federal defender for those on death row in Pennsylvania, Matos met and married fellow death penalty abolitionist Henry Fernandez III and moved to his state, Connecticut. Here, Matos continued working in racial justice, as an immigrant rights advocate leading New Haven’s oldest Latino nonprofit, Junta for Progressive Action.
Eventually, Matos was named a deputy mayor of the city. In that role, she helped create the nation’s first municipal ID cards.
And now, as the president of the National Immigration Law Center, Matos was named to the TIME list alongside the likes of Chicana Civil Rights leader Dolores Huerta and the first American head of the Catholic Church, Pope Leo XIV.
“When I read it, that's when I burst out crying because it was so overwhelming for me, and it was just lovely, Matos said. “It just felt like a moment of sunshine during over a year of just storms.”
The surge in ICE activity kept Matos busy nationally and right here in her backyard, as cases of Connecticut immigrants detained by ICE ramped up. Matos took action in the aftermath of one of the state’s first high-profile detentions since the start of the second Trump Administration. A New Haven mother Nancy Martinez was detained by Immigration and Customs Enforcement while her 13-year-old daughter Monse and her little brother sat in their driveway, ready to head to school.
Matos stood beside the children in front of the facility where their mother was being held before her deportation. There, Monse addressed rallygoers through her tears.
“You focus your leadership on people who sometimes become leaders as a consequence of something that has happened in their life, like Monse,” Matos said. “She quickly stepped up and showed remarkable poise and courage and leadership because of what happened to her mother.”
Matos does not claim her work is easy, but she said she loves what she does and encourages other Latinas to block out anyone else’s thoughts on their calling but their own.
“People are formulaic about what they want to do with their lives based on what their parents told them or what society regards as a respectable job,” Matos said. “One of the things that I'm very mindful of is: You only have one life — there's no do-over — and that you should do what makes your heart beat.”
Do it, she said, even if your heart squeezes in sadness sometimes for the same reason.
This story is part of the series Poderosas: Portraits of Purpose, highlighting Latina leaders in our Connecticut communities.
