The Palacio Podcast
Lori Ann Guzmán from the Bronx: Tough, Smart, and a Role Model
Lori Ann Guzmán is Assistant City Manager for the City of Huntington Beach and a member of the Long Beach Board of Harbor Commissioners, the five-member governing body for the Port of Long Beach. With all those credentials and more, she told me a more interesting story about her early life in New York City. Lori Ann Guzmán was born in Brooklyn and raised in the Bronx. Her biological father was Puerto Rican and her mother was white. That’s not the interesting part. Her mother was seventeen and a minor in foster care. “…so, I ended up in foster care as well.” Guzmán’s mother went to a group home.
“…and I went to a family. And the family, that raised me from the time that I was two weeks, was Puerto Rican.”
Lori Ann Guzmán
For Lori Ann Guzmán, that life of being Puerto Rican is all she’s known. “I just had a great upbringing, a wonderful, happy life in the Bronx.” It wasn’t until she was fourteen that her growing size (Ms. Guzmán is tall) raised questions.
“I was taller than everybody. I’m a foot taller than my mom and my dad and I’m trying to figure out ‘How come I look different?’ and they think I’m a Viking, I’m growing out of my clothes and my feet are a size eleven and they don’t know what to do with me.”
Her parents then told her the story about coming into their home at two weeks of age and being adopted by them at five. She speaks reverentially about that time and how grateful she is for that stability and not having to suffer the fate of many foster children, being bounced from home to home.
Lori Ann Guzmán is the 65th commissioner to serve the Port since the Commission was formed in 1925 and is only the fifth woman to serve on the Board. According to the Commission, the Board has four women serving simultaneously, the most in the Port’s 105-year history.
PalacioMagazine.com recently interviewed Guzmán at the Port of Long Beach headquarters overlooking the Long Beach Airport. She spoke about the rich supportive life growing up in the Bronx, defying stereotypes and going for the gold in her college choices, and the rise in her professional career from the east to west coast.
The Supportive Women for Lori Ann Guzmán
Guzmán calls her mother, “a huge inspiration.” For her grandmother, Abuela Nicolasa, she has additional words, “She was very strong-willed. A seamstress in the garment district in Manhattan.”
“She was just amazing. She was a go-getter. She was real ballsy. She was just passionate as well…She just didn’t let anyone get in her way…she was independent.”
Then, there was the mentor in the English department at her high school. “She helped me to think about college.” No one in Guzmán’s family had gone to college. There weren’t many people in the neighborhood who had gone to college. For Guzmán, the decision to go to college was the pivotal moment in her life. Although a counselor was less encouraging, it was the chairman of the English Department that finally moved her to take the leap to Columbia University.
“She really pushed me to apply to Columbia and to apply to colleges. And so, I was blessed with a lot of people in my life that I could look to for role models.”
Guzmán would go on to earn a Bachelor’s Degree from Barnard College at Columbia University and a Master’s Degree in Public Administration from Columbia University’s School of International and Public Affairs with a full academic fellowship from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation.
What’s in a name for Lori Ann Guzmán
She’s been known as Lori Ann Farrell, Lori Ann Harrison, Lori Ann Guzmán. What’s with all the names? It really was a serious question that received a very serious answer.
“It’s very important to me because it represents different phases of my life and it represents my background which I’m really proud of and I feel very strongly about.”
Her maiden name is Guzmán. Her first marriage resulted in Farrell and her now marriage to Reginald Harrison (Director, Emergency Communications, and Operation Center, City of Long Beach) gave her Harrison. But, there’s nothing confusing about the role that the name Guzmán plays in her life, as a Puerto Rican woman and what that means to communities of Latino and Black people. When she first came to California, she realized that her New York Puerto Rican/mixed heritage and African roots were confusing to many people.
“So, Latinos wouldn’t necessarily recognize me as being Latina here if they weren’t familiar with the Caribbean look…and then African-American people wouldn’t recognize I would be Latina and I have people bad-mouthing Latinos to me on either side because they couldn’t figure out what my background is.”
It would make for awkward moments when Lori Ann Guzmán had to school people in the realities of her roots. The importance of her diversity became a teaching moment for Latinos and African-Americans but it also was a mentoring moment for young Latinos who had names like Garcia, Rodriguez, Martinez. They could look to Ms. Guzmán and see someone with a Latino name and believe that anything is possible; much as Lori Ann Guzmán had discovered long ago in the Bronx.
Lessons Learned by Lori Ann Guzmán
The lessons learned then and her experience and successes working for the State of New York led her to Long Beach government. She would become the first Latina City Controller and then, the city’s first woman to serve as its Chief Financial Officer. Guzmán has served as Treasurer for the Long Beach Transit Board and graduated from the Leadership Long Beach Class of 2000. Those lessons now serve her as Assistant City Manager in Huntington Beach and on the Board of Commissioners for the Port of Long Beach. She’s learned how to be herself as sometimes the only woman in a room of male executives who don’t know you and may say or do something inappropriate; as if to test her. They learn an important lesson.
“I’m from New York. Bring it…I’m Lori from the Bronx. So, I get a little twinkle in my eye like ‘It’s on. We’re going to have fun today’…and that’s not going to affect me very much. In fact, it’s going to turn me up a notch and I’m going to give it right back to you.”
That toughness, her intelligence, and a clear sense of purpose become very obvious to anyone interviewing Lori Ann Guzmán. She knows who she is and makes no apologies for her life and success. Guzmán wants to serve a public good and be a role model for the next generation of women. Not bad for “Lori from the Bronx.”
To find out more about the Port of Long Beach, visit HERE.
