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Alexandra O'Rourke

Biography

Alexandra’s life story consists of overcoming one obstacle after another and setting ever-higher goals to pursue her dream of using the law and public policy to improve the lives of her fellow immigrants. Fleeing Mexico with her mother to avoid threatened retaliation for her mother’s anti-corruption activities, she joined her mother in becoming a legal resident with the help of an attorney. Alexandra fought to get herself out of a class taught primarily in Spanish, learned English with the help of a volunteer tutor and self-teaching books, and did so well in school that she won a competitive scholarship to the University of Texas at Austin.

It was during her experience with other immigrant families, many poor and with little or no health care, that Ms. Chirinos realized the extent of domestic violence and child abuse that often went unreported and uncorrected. “It was because of that experience that I began to feel that it was my duty one day to defend the rights my fellow immigrants could not,” she writes. Working as an intern at the state legislature, she helped shape a bill to improve treatment for a diabetes problem that affected many children of low-income immigrants. Alexandra also founded a Hispanic Scholarship Fund Chapter to counter a dropout trend among Hispanic students at the university.

In another initiative, she started the Bilingual Mentoring Program to help immigrant youngsters learn English with the help of university students who were learning Spanish, benefiting both groups. She also wrote a thesis on domestic abuse in immigrant communities that was used by a non-profit group to improve its outreach and find better ways to deal with this problem. Overcoming another obstacle, Alexandra got her Congressman’s help to become an American citizen and qualify for a Harry S. Truman Award for Public Service.

Ms. Chirinos also won a George J. Mitchell scholarship to do research on human rights law in Ireland and the United Kingdom before starting law school at Harvard, where she plans to specialize in immigration law. “I realize that very few people that share my background will ever have the opportunity to pursue a legal career,” she writes. “My ultimate goal is to serve as an effective legal representative of this nation’s growing community of immigrants.”
 

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