Thursday, February 4, 2016
DNAinfo Highlights Senior Profiles Supported by New York Community Trust
Eighty-five-year-old Luis Cajigas doesn't need much to keep him happy.
Cajigas, known as "el gallo," or the rooster, of El Barrio, loves spending time with his friends and family — three children, nine grandchildren and 10 great-grandchildren — feasting on sopa de gandules and Kola Champagne soda and wheeling around on a motorized tricycle covered in roosters and adorned with a banner hailing his Puerto Rican hometown of Mayaguez. . .
Cajigas' life, and his insistence on living it despite a painful hernia and heart problems, is the subject of a year-long project called Exceeding Expectations, a project run by the Robert N. Butler Columbia Aging Center at Columbia University's Mailman School of Public Health and led by journalist Dorian Block and Ruth Finkelstein, an anthropologist and health policy expert.
The project, which profiles 20 seniors whose lives defy stereotyping, is funded by the New York Community Trust. . .