Madeline Pumariega’s parents walked through the doors of the Freedom Tower when they first arrived in Miami, fleeing communism from Cuba. They came with uncertainty, with nothing left behind them, and with a hope they could not yet name. Decades later, their daughter stewards that same building as an institution — and leads the college it represents.

Her mother’s dream in Cuba had been to be a teacher. She had trained for it, was proud of it. When she arrived in Miami, she worked in a factory — putting on buttons, doing piecework with her sister. But the dream did not die. Years later, already a mother, she went back to school on Saturdays at Biscayne College to earn her teaching certificate. She spent 35 years in Miami-Dade County public schools. Young Madeline grew up checking papers and putting stickers on her mother’s lesson plans. She saw what education could do because she watched it transform her mother’s life.

“Making it” in her household looked like opening your home. It was the ping pong that came out when aunts and uncles arrived fleeing Cuba. It was the first house her parents bought. It was frijoles and picadillo around the table with people who had come with nothing.

Madeline herself became a Miami Dade College student athlete, playing basketball at the South Campus. She returned years later, worked her way up through the institution, and eventually rose to become the first woman to lead MDC in its more than 65-year history. Before that, she made history at the state level — becoming the first woman and first Hispanic Chancellor of the Florida College System, overseeing 28 colleges serving hundreds of thousands of students across Florida. Forbes has recognized her for advancing innovation and leadership among women.

The Freedom Tower’s centennial restoration and its Libertad exhibit — which she stewarded — preserves the stories of more than 400,000 Cubans who came through those doors. For her, the exhibit is not history. It is her family. It is the obligation to make sure her daughter Alyssa, and every generation that follows, can walk in and hear that story firsthand.

Her message to every student who walks through MDC’s doors is the same one her family’s story taught her: freedom must be preserved. Education is how you protect it. And the college that opened its doors in the 1960s— around the same year her parents came through the Freedom Tower — is still doing exactly that.