Interview: Nuyorican Dreamer

Robert Torres is a Puerto Rican immigrant raised in New York—a "Nuyorican" in street speak—who excelled at school and got out of the ghetto. His brothers and sisters are Nuyoricans who did not.

Over the years, the thirtysomething Torres' successes—he's a Brown University graduate who's been a teacher, a Teach for America executive, and a co-director of the Learning Project charter school in Manhattan—alienated him from his younger siblings—Tati, Beatriz, Danny, and Milly—and his mother, Marta. Wanting to offer them a big-picture view of their situation—and wanting to give a national audience some true-to-life images of Puerto Ricans in America—he and a filmmaker friend, Laurie Collyer, decided to make a documentary about the family.

The resulting film, Nuyorican Dream, competed at this year's Sundance Film Festival and will make its television debut on HBO in October. It follows the family from 1994 to 1999, during which time Tati and Beatriz, both mothers in their late 20s, struggle with heroin addiction as 23-year-old Danny drifts in and out of jail. We see Torres working the equation from both ends, trying to instill a sense of possibility and responsibility among family members who've fallen through the cracks as well as to kids just approaching the edge, including his preteen sister, Milly, and students at his charter school.