Speaker 1: Hi everyone. In this special episode, I'll be talking with
Speaker 1: Emmy Award winning journalist Elia calroon. Ilia co anchors Univision's
Speaker 1: nationally broadcast evening news show alongside Porcher Ramos. She's the
Speaker 1: first Afro Latina to anchor a national news desk for
Speaker 1: a major Hispanic network in the US. This month, Elia
Speaker 1: published her memoir My Time to Speak, Reclaiming Ancestry and
Speaker 1: Confronting Race. We'll talk about racism, intersectionality, and Elia's own
Speaker 1: reporting on femicide. Did you find it to be somewhat
Speaker 1: of a new experience, maybe even a struggle to open
Speaker 1: yourself up personally, where as journalists were taught not to
Speaker 1: do that. It was one of the most difficult things
Speaker 1: to open my heart. Actually had to rewrite many chapters
Speaker 1: many times. You grew up in a region called Choko,
Speaker 1: Is that right, correct? Correct? A small town called Ismena.
Speaker 1: And let's say, as the state is Choko, it's the
Speaker 1: Pacific coast in the west. Yes, So tell us what
Speaker 1: makes this region unique or special? We are more than
Speaker 1: ninety percent African descendants who were were abandoned by the governments,
Speaker 1: affected by the corruption of our own leaders. But yeah,
Speaker 1: we were at the same time happy. When I was
Speaker 1: growing up, in the first years of my life, we
Speaker 1: didn't have power. We didn't have electricity, so my clothes
Speaker 1: and my uniforms to go to school had to be
Speaker 1: iron with a charcoal iron. I had to walk miles
Speaker 1: and take a small boat across a river to go
Speaker 1: to school. It was hard, but I think it gave
Speaker 1: me the dry to fight for something, to want to
Speaker 1: become someone, to do bigger things. And when I was
Speaker 1: staying I told my mom I wanted to move to Menadine,
Speaker 1: one of the biggest cities in Columbia, where her sister
Speaker 1: and family lived. So I moved to live with my
Speaker 1: Pia and her family and do my high school in Menadine.
Speaker 1: And that is a city where I first racism for
Speaker 1: the first time. Can you describe that? Yes, I was
Speaker 1: in sixth grade and it hurt me so much. And
Speaker 1: after I felt so bad because I didn't know what
Speaker 1: to say, and I decided to forget about the episode.
Speaker 1: And I didn't say anything about it, not even to
Speaker 1: my mom. What am I going to say to her?
Speaker 1: And I decided just to keep it to myself, to
Speaker 1: keep it to myself. Those microaggressions, the way they look
Speaker 1: at you, the way they tell you with the body
Speaker 1: language that you don't belong here, or they want to
Speaker 1: be away from you, they don't want to be related
Speaker 1: to you. Was that just something that you quietly learned
Speaker 1: how to live with. I just erased them as if
Speaker 1: it never happens, and then I kept going and growing up.
Speaker 1: When you go back to those memories, it is hard.
Speaker 1: I didn't want my daughter to feel like the same
Speaker 1: way I felt, and we started a long conversation that
Speaker 1: never ends and I will never end. Like taking every
Speaker 1: opportunity you have to talk to your kids about this
Speaker 1: and those my corogression so called jokes that are offensive
Speaker 1: went to refer to a dark skinned person are hard
Speaker 1: and we need to eliminate them from our upbringing. So,
Speaker 1: from what I understand, before you arrived here in the US,
Speaker 1: you had this idealized vision of what the US would
Speaker 1: be like. When did you realize that that vision you
Speaker 1: had wasn't necessarily true? In my country, black people were
Speaker 1: always the service of the house or enslaves or the
Speaker 1: people working on the plantations, And for me, it was
Speaker 1: like oh wow. But at the same time, I was
Speaker 1: reading Tony Morrison and I knew about the experience of
Speaker 1: the slaves in the United States, but when you come
Speaker 1: and you see, you know, as you are in the news,
Speaker 1: you see the news every day, you see the difference
Speaker 1: and you can notice institutional racism. Basically, you've experienced backlash
Speaker 1: against your identity as a woman of Afro Latina descent,
Speaker 1: and that's essentially three different targets for me. It's like
Speaker 1: being a minority within a minority, being black, being Hispanic,
Speaker 1: and being a woman. The racism is very present in
Speaker 1: Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico whatever. We had people
Speaker 1: enslave that were brought from Africa against their will. In
Speaker 1: those countries, we had history of racism. I am proud
Speaker 1: to be a black woman with my ethnicity being Hispanic
Speaker 1: or Latina, but my race is Black, my ethnicity culture
Speaker 1: is Hispanic. I mean, your husband is Asian, you're after Latina,
Speaker 1: and you have a daughter who embodies all these backgrounds,
Speaker 1: and I'm so curious, like what it's like to live
Speaker 1: in such a culturally rich household. It's just amazing. We
Speaker 1: knew we had different upbringings, different cultures, but we decided
Speaker 1: to embrace our differences and embraced where we are in common.
Speaker 1: The moral values, the respect, the discipline, the family values
Speaker 1: were all the same. So we tried to focus and
Speaker 1: what we have in common, to start racing the family
Speaker 1: that we have today. I wanted to ask if femicide
Speaker 1: or gender based violence directed at women is something that
Speaker 1: you've confronted in your professional life, actually dedicate. One of
Speaker 1: the chapters of my book is called the High Price
Speaker 1: of Silence, and we travel to Mexico and to El Salvador.
Speaker 1: As hard in our countries is very even in Colombia,
Speaker 1: not talking about only Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru. We
Speaker 1: have so many cases of women that are killed because
Speaker 1: they are women. As I say, we are not found dead.
Speaker 1: Somebody killed a woman, somebody assistin a woman right, and
Speaker 1: we need to keep bringing the topic to the table.
Speaker 1: We need to keep raising our voices so more women
Speaker 1: find a healthy environment where they can raise their voices
Speaker 1: and where the stories can be heard and believed, and
Speaker 1: we start to end the situation. One of the underlying
Speaker 1: issues beneath all of this, it has to do with
Speaker 1: the corruption that underlays the malfunction of the judicial system
Speaker 1: in Latin America is drug trafficking. And that's certainly I mean,
Speaker 1: that's what ties are two countries together, in Mexico and Colombia.
Speaker 1: And we spent at least one episode in Forgotten explaining
Speaker 1: how the US Mexico border became the gateway for Colombian
Speaker 1: drugs in the eighties and nineties. Yes, we lived in
Speaker 1: that era in the eighties and the nineties where the
Speaker 1: war between the car tails and the drug against the
Speaker 1: cartails was very hard. You felt in danger all the time,
Speaker 1: all the time. Every time you were going out of
Speaker 1: your house. You didn't know if you were coming back
Speaker 1: a life because a bone board is going to explode
Speaker 1: at a mall or a public place or just a street,
Speaker 1: or they were going to kill someoney. And you, you know,
Speaker 1: we're just passing by. You might as well be describing
Speaker 1: what at certain periods we don't even have to go
Speaker 1: to as a far away place to see these kinds
Speaker 1: of crimes submitted against women. Here in the United States,
Speaker 1: we see femicide occurring. We need to have a system
Speaker 1: that supports women, like federal registration on a system of
Speaker 1: gender based violence. Our countries need to distribute wars resources
Speaker 1: to prosecute those crimes. The police forces need to be
Speaker 1: well trained when they receive cases of domestic violence. Certainly,
Speaker 1: some of the things we witness as journalists, even though
Speaker 1: we don't experience them ourselves personally, they do have an impact,
Speaker 1: I know, and how to deal with all those experiences
Speaker 1: and the stories that you cover, the places you visit,
Speaker 1: and the struggle of the people you interview. Sometimes it's like,
Speaker 1: you know, it touches you at a personal level. Sometimes
Speaker 1: you cry when you go back to a hotel after
Speaker 1: listening to those kits for example in the caravan, or
Speaker 1: a teenager that lost his mom that was, you know,
Speaker 1: murdered by her husband or couple. Is hard, and this
Speaker 1: book at the same time worked like an outlet of
Speaker 1: those experiences that taught me and make me grow as
Speaker 1: a woman and as a professional. Well, thank you so much,
Speaker 1: Elia for being our guest on this special episode. To
Speaker 1: read more about Elia Calderon and her story, check out
Speaker 1: her book My Time to Speak, Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race.
Speaker 1: To learn more about femicide in Mexico, listen to our
Speaker 1: podcast series Forgotten The Women of Juarez. I'm Monica. Thanks
Speaker 1: for listening,