That day set the stage for Mrs. Polas’s role in leading the fight to fund bilingual education in city schools. She also became one of Boston’s most important activists — helping to elect Mayor Raymond L. Flynn, serving as one of his top aides, and making history as the first Latina candidate to seek a state Legislature seat.
Mrs. Pola, who in later years coordinated a senior legacy project and helped collect life stories in the Mission Hill neighborhood where she had lived for many years, died June 1. She was 86, most recently lived in Mattapan, and her health had been failing, her family said.
“She was one of the pioneers. She had a real impact on the community,” said Frieda Garcia, who was the founding director of La Alianza Hispana in the early 1970s, when Mrs. Pola first became a Boston activist.
Garcia, who also was executive director of the United South End Settlements for 20 years, said Mrs. Pola “was a leader, and leaders find a way to get in there and make change, and that’s what she did.”
“Carmen’s living legacy is a reminder to all of us — a reminder that every day we have an opportunity to lead, every day we have an opportunity to uplift voices and to open doors for others,” Casey Baines, senior director of communications for the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce, said in a video posted online in 2022.
Heading community organizations and rallying hundreds of parents to attend meetings, Mrs. Pola was a key driving force behind the evolving approach to bilingual education in the Boston Public Schools in the 1970s and early ’80s.
“We feel very strongly that any human being who has a knowledge of more than one language has a better understanding of people and can be of great service,” she told The Boston Globe in 1982.
Two years earlier, Mrs. Pola had launched a historic primary election campaign to try to unseat Kevin Fitzgerald, the incumbent state representative in the Suffolk 17th District.
Telling the Globe that she didn’t like being “put in the Spanish box,” she brought together a coalition of Latino, Black, Asian, and white campaign volunteers.
In a September 1980 editorial, the Globe endorsed her candidacy.
“A community activist who has worked especially hard on public housing and school issues, Pola has a solid grasp of the challenges confronting the Legislature and of the particular responsibilities she would bear as the first Hispanic representative from Boston,” the editorial said.
She lost by a close margin, but her campaign set the stage for Latino candidates who followed.
In the 1983 Boston mayoral election, she coordinated Flynn’s campaign in the Hispanic community and introduced him in Spanish at events.
Soon after Flynn was elected, he appointed Mrs. Pola to run the new mayor’s office of constituent services. Her office was just steps away from Flynn’s own in City Hall.
As the administration began in 1984, the Globe called her “the most influential” Latina official in Flynn’s administration.”
In Mrs. Pola’s constituent services office, signs in English and Spanish welcomed visitors to “la oficina del alcalde de servicios a los constituyentes.”
In January 1985, Flynn named Mrs. Pola as his senior adviser on human needs. She was responsible for dealing with many of the city’s major crises, such as fires, the homeless, and the hungry. She stayed in that job until leaving the administration in October 1986.
Mrs. Pola accomplished her rise from Mission Hill community activist to the heights of City Hall with a background unlike most of her colleagues.
“I have a high school diploma and a library card,” she said in a 2014 interview with Eloise Libre.
With a nod to Tremont Street, the thoroughfare that runs through multiple Boston neighborhoods, including Mission Hill, she added: “I have a Ph.D. from Tremont University – at life.”
Carmen Aurora Villanueva-Garcia was born on May 1, 1939, in Rio Piedras, Puerto Rico, the daughter of Miguelina Garcia, a hospital secretary, and Manuel Villanueva, an attorney.
Mrs. Pola, who graduated from high school at 14, moved to the United States with her mother after her parents’ marriage ended in divorce.
Living initially in the Bronx, N.Y., they moved to California, where as a teenager Carmen was a farmworker, picking cherries, grapes, and walnuts. “I’ll tell you something, I don’t eat any of them anymore,” she told the Globe in 1984.
“We were slaves,” she said of the workers’ conditions. “We lived in shacks, we cooked outside, and we had one shower for everyone in the field to share.”
Within a couple of years, she was in Oakland, studying at a college and becoming a community activist.
In 1961, she married Juan Pola, who was a truck driver before working in maintenance for Sylvania Electric Products after moving to Boston. He died in 2012.
Mrs. Pola told the Globe that her activism was possible because she and Juan were “equal partners. Whoever gets home first gets the household chores done.”
“She was always trying to make sure everybody was doing what they were supposed to be doing, and if there were any issues, she would resolve them,” said their daughter Rose of Baltimore, who added that subsequent generations turned to Mrs. Pola for guidance as well.
In addition to Rose, Mrs. Pola leaves a son, Juan Pola Jr. of Cambridge; two other daughters, Mary Pola and Jacqueline Williams, both of Pawtucket, R.I.; a stepdaughter, Lynette Pola of California; 15 grandchildren; and six great-grandchildren.
A celebration of Mrs. Pola’s life will be held at 11:30 a.m. Monday in the Boston Teachers Union in Dorchester.
Mrs. Pola’s honors included being the state recipient of AARP’s Andrus for Community Service Award, in 2012, and a community treasure award, presented in 2016 by then-city councilor Josh Zakim.
After leaving her City Hall job, she helped found community organizations and nonprofits, and she continued to advise elected officials on issues of importance to Latinos.
In all her advocacy, she stressed the need for people from different backgrounds, races, and neighborhoods to pursue their common goals.
“If we work together a little bit more, we will have a better world,” she said a dozen years ago in a TEDx Talk that is posted online.
“Nothing works when you do it by yourself,” she said, “so you have to create a coalition.”
Bryan Marquard can be reached at bryan.marquard@globe.com.
