'Sesame Street's Maria, Sonia Manzano Leaves PBS Show After 44 Years

After 44 years of being a regular resident on PBS's Sesame Street, Sonia Manzano, 65, who has played the character of Maria on the famed children's television show, is leaving. She made the announcement at the 2015 American Library Association Annual Conference earlier this month.

Manzano first came on the show back in 1971 as a teenager and progressed over the years as a regular "human" character on Sesame Street as well as the Sesame Street Presents movies like Follow That Bird (1985), Elmo's Adventures in Grouchland (1999), as well as TV movies and holiday specials for the show. The original intent of Sesame Street was to reach inner city children and help them with basic cognitive skills, so that they could feel more comfortable when they started kindergarten with their middle-class peers. In order to do this, the station selected their main cast members to be racially diverse. Refinery 29 reports what Manzano said of being cast, "I'm Puerto Rican, born in New York, watched a lot of television in the fifties...never saw anybody who looked like me on television, and thereby began to feel invisible. If you're not reflected in society, you begin to feel invisible, and I wondered how I was going to contribute to a society that didn't see me. Sesame Street sort of does that for kids. Everyone's reflected on the show."

In addition to not only merely working in front of the camera and writing for the show, Manzano's character Maria reflected much of what Manzano herself was going through at the time. When she got married to her real-life husband Richard Reagan in 1986, Maria and her boyfriend Luis got married on the show as well. When Manzano told PBS executives that she wanted to have a child, Maria and Luis welcomed their daughter Gabriella onto the show. As Manzano changed and grew as a person, so did her persona, Maria.

Not only was Manzano a part of a show that helped children learn and feel included in contemporary American society, but she has also won 15 Emmy Awards for her writing on Sesame Street and recently wrote a memoir about her life before the show called Becoming Maria: Love and Chaos in the South Bronx and should be released sometime in August of this year.

Check out an interview Manzano did with CBS News for Sesame Street's 45th Anniversary!