Nora De Hoyos Comstock: President & CEO Las Comadres Para las Americas.(The Advocates)

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One of the strongest emotions, love can also be a great motivator. For Nora Comstock, a love of her culture and the emptiness she felt when removed away from it inspired her to go national with an originally local effort. The president and CEO of Las Comadres Para las Americas, Comstock helps Latinas share the love from coast to coast. "I felt so lonely. I would come home and cry ... I missed the warmth of my culture so much," she shares about her painful ordeal.

Born in Raymondville, Texas, in an area known as the Rio Grande Valley near the Texas-Mexico border, Comstock was the oldest girl out of ten siblings, but she and her younger brother David were given away to her aunt and uncle, Sofia and Juan de Hoyos, to raise. "That was the tradition at the time, when family members couldn't' have children of their own," she acknowledges with a note of sadness. "Before I was born, my biological father told my adoptive parents, 'You can have the next one.'"

With cousins who were really her siblings, Cornstock was on the outside looking in from the get-go. Drawn to Anglo friends as a young girl, she abandoned Spanish for English. The family eventaully moved to San Antonio, where Comstock's acculturation continued. She married Doug Comstock and had twins, Ariel and Paul. Divorced five years later, she attended the University of Texas at Austin, where she earned a bachelor's degree in history and a Ph.D. in educational administration in 1982. Already attuned to the building digital tsunami of the time, she turned in her dissertation on green and white paper printed from her IBM 370. "I was the first in the program to use a word processor rather than a typewriter. My professors looked at it and asked me 'What's this,'" she grins.

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Attracted to rather than intimidated by technology, she eventually pursued a job at a computer company, CYB Systems, where she met her second and current husband of 25 years, Jack Bell. "I have to give credit to my husband, who's the real computer wizard in the family. I can come up with ideas, but he's the one that works out the details to make them happen," she asserts.

Born January 29, 1946, Comstock was blessed with Aquarian inquisitiveness and creativity. She converted this energy into businesses, the first, the Sana Group, that promotes healthy products and services for Latinos, and later, Comstock Connections, a consultant agency that brings together people with like needs in business.