Maria Vargas

Maria Luisa Vargas was born on 19 May 1955 in Puerto Rico to Rosa and Raymond Vargas, the second oldest of four children and the eldest daughter. When she was six, her family moved to New York City, where they were one of the only Hispanic families in Black Harlem. The adversity of those streets sharpened her: she was never the largest or the toughest, but she was the fiercest, and her brothers' childhood slogan became, 'You better not mess with me or I'll get Maria on you.'

Raised in a Catholic family with a deep reverence for God, Maria adored Christ from a young age. While her friends idolised athletes and musicians, she would say her role model had always been Jesus. She completed high school and college in New York, and in her early twenties the Holy Spirit touched her life through the Unification movement, where she found a calling to build a better world on what the movement calls the front line.

She married Peter Shaw outside the church and bore one son, Artie, in 1983; the marriage ended in the late eighties, but Maria raised Artie within the Unification faith. Professionally, she worked as an executive assistant at the United Nations for more than twenty-five years, eventually in the Office of Humanitarian Affairs, serving the poorest of the poor. She had entered without the master's or doctorate the UN normally required, on what one colleague called nothing but 'God's approval.'

After retiring, Maria founded her own nonprofit, the Sun International Peace Foundation, raising her own funds and designing programs to enlighten and uplift young people. She served as Secretary General of Subregion 1 of the Universal Peace Federation, championed Hispanic Affairs, and was instrumental in launching the Peace Road events of 2020 and 2021. The last Peace Road program in the Bronx was held about six weeks before her death; almost no one there knew how sick she was.

She poured the same love into her bloodline in Puerto Rico, hosting reunions and prayer meetings, scraping and saving for airfare and gifts so that cousins separated by decades might know one another again. When Hurricane Maria struck the island, she organised relief from New York, flying her brother and her son out to install generators in the mountains and rebuild roofs for families who had lost everything.

In 2019 Maria was diagnosed with an aggressive uterine cancer. She pursued every avenue she could find, Western and Eastern medicine alongside crystals, teas, and chanting, but the disease outpaced the remedies. After a year of surgeries and chemotherapy, she passed peacefully overnight at Calvary Hospital in the Bronx on 7 October 2023, her loved ones at her side telling her it was okay to move on.

Her father had been Sergeant Raymond Vargas of the 65th Infantry Regiment, the Borinqueneers; Maria, raised by a combat soldier, became an ambassador for peace and showed her friends how to fight for it. She was, as one mourner put it, a woman of tears, a woman of courage, and a woman of cheerleading, who targeted the highest goals and refused to surrender.