Her father always supported her, but never let her win at basketball
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She’s MDC
How Madeline Pumariega, who grew up in Hialeah, went from a student at Miami Dade College’s Kendall Campus to lead one of the country’s largest colleges as its fifth president and first female one.
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On a recent evening, as she prepares to head out from her Wolfson Campus office after a long workday to attend a nearby cocktail event, Madeline Pumariega phones her father.
“¿Ya tú estás saliendo del banco?” she asks him, looking at the time — about 6 p.m. — on her watch. “Are you leaving the bank yet?”
Her 84-year-old dad still drives from his home in West Kendall to work as the executive vice president of business banking at Iberia Bank. “Pronto, ¿por qué?” he responds, “Soon, why?”
She drops an impromptu invitation to the opening of an exhibition at HistoryMiami Museum, an event that will honor her first year as president of Miami Dade College, leading up to her investiture ceremony scheduled for Friday at the Arsht Center. “There’s this event,” she says, “do you want to come? I’ll send you the address.”
A talk with her father, Miguel Pumariega, is built into Pumariega’s jam-packed day. Around sunset, either he calls her or she calls him to figure out when they will get together, often over dinner. Their busy schedules allow them to do so at least one to two times a week.
Miguel favors Primo’s, an Italian restaurant inside a hotel in downtown Miami, near his daughter’s office, but he’s not picky. He usually hands over his car keys to his daughter: “You drive,” he says.
“She knows all of the new places,” Miguel says, shrugging. She smiles back.
Their close-knit relationship has shaped Pumariega, 54, who now leads the largest college in Florida and one of the largest in the country. Her mother, a former teacher, passed away late last year, so she cherishes the time she has left with her dad, while thinking her mom is “watching from another seat in the house.”
Pumariega’s parents instilled family and faith as foundational and leading principles in her life, even after they separated when she was a little girl.
‘God is why’
Her mom was one of eight children, so Pumariega, besides her siblings, grew up around cousins close in age and sees them — and their children — regularly.
“If I’m not at the college, I’m with family,” she says. “That’s really important to me.”
She spends most of her free time during the weekends with her daughter, 17-year-old Alyssa, a high school senior at Florida State High School in Tallahassee. Pumariega and Alyssa’s father separated; he now lives in Argentina. (Prior to Pumariega taking the MDC post, she was provost of Tallahassee Community College and former chancellor of the Florida College System in Tallahassee.)
“That is the most important role I will ever play in my life: Alyssa’s mom,” she says. “And the greatest contribution I will ever make to the world is Alyssa, because she is amazing.”
The family-centered environment, as well as her Catholic upbringing, showed Pumariega the value of lifting others up. When she was younger, she didn’t dream of pursuing a specific career, although at one point she considered law enforcement because she could save people, and at another point, she wondered if she should follow her mom’s footsteps and teach.
“It was more like always wanting to make a difference, like whatever I did, I wanted to help people,” she says.
She didn’t end up working inside a classroom exactly, but in her more than 30-year career in education, she’s come close to many classrooms.
“People ask me, ‘How did you become the president of Miami Dade College?’ And I say, because of God’s grace,” she says. “God is why.”
She probably learned the spontaneity that shined through her last-minute invitation to her dad for the HistoryMiami event as a child and teenager in Hialeah, where her relatives used to drop in to visit her mom — or vice versa.
“My mom just whipped out pound cake and coffee and play dominoes,” Pumariega said. “We would get in the car and go visit my aunt unannounced,” she remembers.
‘I back you up’
Born in Pedro Betancourt in the Matanzas Province of Cuba, Miguel Pumariega left the island on Dec. 29, 1961, thanks to his dad, who had left earlier. He and Aleyda, his wife and Pumariega’s mom, moved to New York together for a few years and then landed in an East Hialeah home.
His eldest son’s childbirth took nearly 24 hours. So when Pumariega, their second child, came along, Miguel sat in the waiting room of South Miami Hospital and prepared himself for the delay. To his surprise, about an hour later when he walked around to check in with the doctor, he realized his daughter had already been born.
“Where have you been?” Miguel recalls the doctor asking, chuckling.
Her quick arrival to the world foreshadowed her decisiveness later in life. Miguel says his daughter, fiercely ambitious, has always set and achieved goals for herself.
“I am very proud of Madeline, not only because of her accomplishments, but also because of the type of person she is,” Miguel says. “She likes helping people. She has a huge heart.”
Pumariega gravitated toward sports early on, probably because of her competitive nature, he says. In school, she played softball and basketball and swam. At home, she played basketball against her 6-foot-tall father.
“I never gave her a chance to win,” he says. “I used to tell her, ‘You’ll beat me when you can beat me.’ But then she got bigger, and the tables turned. She started beating me.”
At about 16, Madeline approached her father and announced she wanted to work at the bank with him. He got her in.
“I back you up,” he told her.
A few years later, she told him she wanted to quit because she wanted to focus full time on her education.
“I back you up,” he told her again.
Last fall, when she notified her dad that she would apply for the presidential post at the college, after working there for more than two decades, Miguel recited the words again: “I back you up.”
This story was originally published December 8, 2021 at 6:00 AM.
