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Father, in spite of all this spending of money in learning Latin, I will be a painter.

At 20, I realized that I could not possibly adjust to a feminine role as conceived by my father and asked him permission to engage in a professional career. In eight months I filled my gaps in Latin, Greek and mathematics, graduated from high school, and entered medical school in Turin.

I had a Latin master who, for no rational reason whatsoever - I was a very quiet kid at school - just hated me.

I studied Latin in high school, and I was reading stuff from Cicero. And that signal took a few thousand years to get to me. But I was still interested in what he had to say.

Somebody told me once I wasn't Latin enough, and that made me laugh.

I received my high school baccalaureate diploma in Latin and Science in 1928, then my two baccalaureate diplomas in Mathematics and Philosophy in 1929.

I'm the kid that tried to take Latin in school because I felt if I could understand the root of everything, then I could understand why it worked. That was what took me into engineering. And the reason I stayed is, engineering teaches you to solve problems. It teaches you to think.

I sang in English my whole life; I just happened to decide that I had a passion for Latin music, and I wanted to jump into Latin music first.

My father is Cuban. Spanish was my first language, but I don't speak it that much anymore because I had dyslexia, and in school they work with you only in English. But I'm proud to be Latina, and most people don't know I am.