The son and grandson of parents and grand parents would move from Puerto Rico in search of new opportunities.

It's our privilege to take this moment and to do the most American thing imaginable, to forge opportunity out of crisis, to draw on our resolve, our ingenuity and our tireless optimism as a people and build something better than we've ever had before.

That's the choice Americans make every day.

It's a choice that defines us as Americans.

It's the choice my grandparent's made Avelino Maria de la Paz Cardona and Herrmann um Eunice Rosa when they made their way from Aguada, Puerto Rico, for new opportunities in Connecticut.

I'm proud to say I was born at the Yale Lakers housing projects.

That's where my parents Hector and Sarah Cardona instilled early on the importance of hard work service to community and education.

I was blessed to attend the public schools in my hometown of Merit in Connecticut, where I was able to expand my horizons and become the first of my family to graduate college and become a teacher, a principal and assistant superintendent in the same community that gave me so much that that is the power of America and I being bilingual and bicultural and as American as apple pie and rice and beans.