Physician, founder and owner of Tirado Distilleries in the Bronx
(1973– )
Becoming a doctor has been my passion since the age of fourteen. Initially, since I loved animals, I wanted to be a vet. Then at a certain point I think it just was easier to learn about one animal than a lot of different animals, so it boiled down to learning about humans. That’s how I became an MD. And then it evolved further into serving the people, serving the community, serving the area in which we live. I wanted to create an environment that was very different from what my mother used to go to, which was more like a Medicaid mill. They were just pumping out patients and not really giving them the attention they deserved. I love what I do as a doctor. I would do it for free. It’s what I dreamt of since I was young so I’m blessed that I’m living my dream.
As a kid, we lived on Beech Terrace, with relatives living in the same building. I had a couple of aunts living floors above us and a couple of uncles living below us. My father was a chef who worked at the Mary Manning Walsh nursing home on Sixty-Eighth and York Avenue in Manhattan. My mom was a stay-at-home mom until we were a little bit older. Then she worked as a home health aide.
I had been in the gifted program at I.S. 149, the same program as Ruben Diaz Jr. Where I was in the South Bronx, buildings were burning, and there was the crack epidemic, HIV. That was all around me, but basically as a kid in the gifted program I escaped that. One of the things they did in that program was to separate the top ten percent of the students and make them compete with one another so that they pushed one another to their limits. You challenged each other as to who was going to be the best. With that as your background, you knew you could pretty much handle whatever situation was presented out there.
I would say that coming from a loving family that’s supportive, that’s constantly pushing you to achieve, was especially important. And the church was very important in my life too. You can’t do this job of doctoring without being spiritual. You can’t do this job without dedicating your work to God—dedicating your work to serving others. If you don’t have that foundation it’s hard. It’s really hard. You can get corrupted. You realize as you get older that money is nice to have but it’s not everything.
I went from the junior high school in the Bronx to being a scholarship boarding student at Suffield Academy in Connecticut. Although I was lonely there, I realized how blessed I was. A lot of students there were from privileged homes economically, but their families were really in disarray. I had my very strong family background with a lot of love within the family. And then I got to have that education opportunity at Suffield. It was awesome. Just thirteen students to one teacher. And in Spanish class, there were three students to a teacher. We also had advanced math courses. Suffield gave me the preparation and foundation for college.
In the sixties and seventies, there was a shift in the Hispanic population in New York. That’s when a lot of Dominicans came in. It was a new culture for us as Puerto Ricans. There was initially a clash between the two cultures, which I think stems back to the island and the exploitation of each other in Puerto Rico and then continuing in the United States. The Dominican view, which is interesting, is you gotta work. We’re gonna work and we’re gonna do whatever it takes to make it here. The first generation wants to go back, but by the second and third generations they’ve already created enough networking to stay here.
I married a Dominican. The cultures are similar in the food that they eat and the music that they hear. The difference is in their identities. For example, Dominicans are very proud of who they are, because they have their own country. Puerto Rico is in between. We really don’t know what we are. As an unincorporated territory, we’re really part of the United States. That limbo creates a different uncertainty. But the United States is a beautiful country. I love it here. It’s the only country that a son of a cook could actually become a doctor. I would die for the United States at any given moment.
I went to visit Puerto Rico with my wife and her father, my Dominican father-in-law. It was his first visit to Puerto Rico. On that trip we ended up going from San Juan to the West Coast. The Mayaguez area, where my parents are from. When we were in San Juan we went to the Bacardi rum factory. I was amazed to see what they did there that transformed the rum industry. It was so simple. They charred the oak barrels. When you do this, you get a charcoal formation along the barrel. The charcoal acts as a filtering agent and it also acts as a coloring agent. Just in doing that, they made the rum a little bit smoother and cleaner. Charcoal is what you get in a Brita water filter. It acts as a filtering agent, so it smoothes it and takes out the impurities. That’s when I got the idea for opening up my own distillery.
My background was in organic chemistry at Fordham University and I did a lot of research there. In that research, we used a distillation apparatus. Basically, it’s heating up the chemicals, allowing water to cool down the vapors, and collecting the materials at specific boiling points and temperatures. And that’s what alcohol distillation is.
Once I saw what Bacardi was doing, I knew that I could do it too. I knew that I could manipulate some of the properties to create my unique flavor and that if everything went well I could probably leave a mark behind in the world that I actually existed. For me, to standardize the process, the process has to start and finish the same time every time. At some point, there are different people that taste it, but I don’t. I’m the type of person who does things excessively when I like something, so I prefer to not even place myself in the kind of situation where I may lose control. Therefore I’ve never touched alcohol. My father likes drinking, so he’s one of the tasters and part of the process.
I love what I do as a doctor. I’m serving others. I’m blessed that I’m living my dream, but the distillery is different. Which one do I value more? Definitely saving someone’s life. There’s nothing better in life than doing that.