Mariana Abrantes de Sousa is an economist who studied at UC Berkeley and Princeton University and a former investment bank officer in New York and Portugal. She has been involved as a volunteer in the movement to recognize Aristides de Sousa Mendes and to create a museum in his family home Casa do Passal, both in the US and Portugal since 1986, when she met his son John Paul Abranches in California. She was raised in Beijós, the village where the Sousa Mendes family lived and where Angelina and Aristides were married, but under the Salazar regime no one ever said anything about the "hero from next door." A dual Portuguese-US citizen, she is retired and living in Portugal.