Luiz G. Pérez was born in Aibonito, Puerto Rico where he lived until the age of ten. His family arrived in Worcester 1959 in search of jobs and future opportunities. At first, they blended in with the other immigrant families in their neighborhood; but once significant numbers of Puerto Ricans began to arrive, there was a lot of racial and ethnic tension, culminating in violence that affected him personally. This is when he decided to turn to education as a means of understanding the world and his role in it. This determination has led him to be at the center of every major Latino social movement in Worcester to date.

During his time in college, while he was volunteering at a local school, he saw that “[Latino] kids were being taught next to a boiler.” This and similar unequal learning conditions motivated him to work with a the Hispanic Parent´s Advisory Coalition of Worcester to sue the public school system for not providing equitable resources for bilingual education.

Pérez also co-founded the Asociación Latina Para Acción Progresiva (ALPA) in 1971 as a response to the need in the Worcester community for a state-funded, secular organization over which local Latinos had full agency, as opposed to organizations under the auspices of the Roman Catholic Apostolate. It was a fight to establish community autonomy. While infighting, encouraged by local power brokers, according to Pérez, led to the closing of ALPA in 1979, a parallel organization, Centro las Américas (recently renamed CENTRO), took up the cause and is today the "largest minority led, community based, multiservice, multicultural, multilingual nonprofit organization in Central Massachusetts." More recently, Pérez co-founded the Worcester Working Coalition for Latino Students, which created the Latino Education Institute (LEI) in 2001 in collaboration with Worcester State College. LEI provides a wealth of innovative programming and research dedicated to improving educational outcomes for Latinos. Pérez attended Assumption College and later Suffolk University Law School. He was the first Puerto Rican attorney to practice law in Worcester and, in 1987, became the first Puerto Rican Associate Justice in the Worcester Juvenile Court. (Narrative profile by Ari Herrera, Holy Cross ´23)

"That created tension until we fought it out one night where a friend of mine killed a kid over stupid stuff. So I was part of that group. And that really took me back a little bit, and I says why are we this way? Why do we hate them? Why do they hate us?"

"We demanded that the school department change their attitude towards us, that they respect us as human beings, and that they give us the full rights that the Constitution of United States was guaranteeing us as citizens of the United States."

"I was going through Assumption College, we began to organize ourselves into self-determination groups, because Model Cities´ intent was to get these grassroots people in these neighborhoods towards self-determination, to build up their own community, from bottom up and from the top down. "