“The only way we’re going to get out of the hole is if we empower kids, because the system won’t change in our lifetime,’’ she told the Globe in 1990. “I tell the kids, ‘You are the best, the cream of the cream, and don’t let anyone tell you anything else.’ I say, ‘You speak two languages, so how can you be dumb?’ I also tell them: ‘You’re the future leaders of our community. We’re all waiting for you.’ ’’
Mrs. Mayerson-David, whose work was celebrated in a White House ceremony in 2010 when Michelle Obama honored her and Alerta with a plaque and grant, died of pancreatic cancer Friday in Brigham and Women’s Hospital. She was 64 and lived in Newton.
“Lucia was a boss, a mentor, a teacher, a role model,’’ said Ilyitch N. Tábora, associate director of the Talented and Gifted Latino Program.
“One of her greatest gifts was being able to inspire people and listen,’’ said Tábora, who was a student in the program when she met Mrs. Mayerson-David 19 years ago. “She had an amazing ability to listen to kids and make them realize they were talented and gifted.
“Even as Latinos at the top schools in Boston, you felt inferior to other students,’’ she said. “The expectation was that you were going to leave and transfer out. Listening to her, you knew you were talented and gifted. You knew you were going to make it.’’
With a background more diverse than nearly anyone she met, she was Lucia to some, Lucha to others, or Lucy or Luchita.
The daughter of Holocaust survivors, she was born in Oruro, Bolivia, a mining city to which her parents immigrated from Poland after World War II.
The second of three children, and the only daughter, she spent her youth in Oruro and La Paz before her family left Bolivia for Santiago, Chile, when she was a teenager.
