August 13, 2020 • 10 mins
Mónica is joined by Colombian journalist and Univision news anchor Ilia Calderón for a conversation about the drivers of femicide around the world, and Ilia’s new book "My Time to Speak: Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race."
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:09):
Hi everyone. In this special episode, I'll be talking with
Emmy Award winning journalist Elia calroon. Ilia co anchors Univision's
nationally broadcast evening news show alongside Porcher Ramos. She's the
first Afro Latina to anchor a national news desk for
a major Hispanic network in the US. This month, Elia
(00:32):
published her memoir My Time to Speak, Reclaiming Ancestry and
Confronting Race. We'll talk about racism, intersectionality, and Elia's own
reporting on femicide. Did you find it to be somewhat
of a new experience, maybe even a struggle to open
yourself up personally, where as journalists were taught not to
(00:56):
do that. It was one of the most difficult things
to open my heart. Actually had to rewrite many chapters
many times. You grew up in a region called Choko,
Is that right, correct? Correct? A small town called Ismena.
And let's say, as the state is Choko, it's the
(01:19):
Pacific coast in the west. Yes, So tell us what
makes this region unique or special? We are more than
ninety percent African descendants who were were abandoned by the governments,
affected by the corruption of our own leaders. But yeah,
we were at the same time happy. When I was
(01:39):
growing up, in the first years of my life, we
didn't have power. We didn't have electricity, so my clothes
and my uniforms to go to school had to be
iron with a charcoal iron. I had to walk miles
and take a small boat across a river to go
to school. It was hard, but I think it gave
(01:59):
me the dry to fight for something, to want to
become someone, to do bigger things. And when I was
staying I told my mom I wanted to move to Menadine,
one of the biggest cities in Columbia, where her sister
and family lived. So I moved to live with my
Pia and her family and do my high school in Menadine.
(02:20):
And that is a city where I first racism for
the first time. Can you describe that? Yes, I was
in sixth grade and it hurt me so much. And
after I felt so bad because I didn't know what
to say, and I decided to forget about the episode.
(02:41):
And I didn't say anything about it, not even to
my mom. What am I going to say to her?
And I decided just to keep it to myself, to
keep it to myself. Those microaggressions, the way they look
at you, the way they tell you with the body
language that you don't belong here, or they want to
be away from you, they don't want to be related
to you. Was that just something that you quietly learned
(03:03):
how to live with. I just erased them as if
it never happens, and then I kept going and growing up.
When you go back to those memories, it is hard.
I didn't want my daughter to feel like the same
way I felt, and we started a long conversation that
never ends and I will never end. Like taking every
(03:25):
opportunity you have to talk to your kids about this
and those my corogression so called jokes that are offensive
went to refer to a dark skinned person are hard
and we need to eliminate them from our upbringing. So,
from what I understand, before you arrived here in the US,
(03:46):
you had this idealized vision of what the US would
be like. When did you realize that that vision you
had wasn't necessarily true? In my country, black people were
always the service of the house or enslaves or the
people working on the plantations, And for me, it was
(04:06):
like oh wow. But at the same time, I was
reading Tony Morrison and I knew about the experience of
the slaves in the United States, but when you come
and you see, you know, as you are in the news,
you see the news every day, you see the difference
and you can notice institutional racism. Basically, you've experienced backlash
(04:26):
against your identity as a woman of Afro Latina descent,
and that's essentially three different targets for me. It's like
being a minority within a minority, being black, being Hispanic,
and being a woman. The racism is very present in
Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico whatever. We had people
(04:49):
enslave that were brought from Africa against their will. In
those countries, we had history of racism. I am proud
to be a black woman with my ethnicity being Hispanic
or Latina, but my race is Black, my ethnicity culture
is Hispanic. I mean, your husband is Asian, you're after Latina,
(05:13):
and you have a daughter who embodies all these backgrounds,
and I'm so curious, like what it's like to live
in such a culturally rich household. It's just amazing. We
knew we had different upbringings, different cultures, but we decided
to embrace our differences and embraced where we are in common.
(05:35):
The moral values, the respect, the discipline, the family values
were all the same. So we tried to focus and
what we have in common, to start racing the family
that we have today. I wanted to ask if femicide
or gender based violence directed at women is something that
(05:56):
you've confronted in your professional life, actually dedicate. One of
the chapters of my book is called the High Price
of Silence, and we travel to Mexico and to El Salvador.
As hard in our countries is very even in Colombia,
(06:16):
not talking about only Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru. We
have so many cases of women that are killed because
they are women. As I say, we are not found dead.
Somebody killed a woman, somebody assistin a woman right, and
we need to keep bringing the topic to the table.
(06:39):
We need to keep raising our voices so more women
find a healthy environment where they can raise their voices
and where the stories can be heard and believed, and
we start to end the situation. One of the underlying
issues beneath all of this, it has to do with
(07:00):
the corruption that underlays the malfunction of the judicial system
in Latin America is drug trafficking. And that's certainly I mean,
that's what ties are two countries together, in Mexico and Colombia.
And we spent at least one episode in Forgotten explaining
how the US Mexico border became the gateway for Colombian
(07:22):
drugs in the eighties and nineties. Yes, we lived in
that era in the eighties and the nineties where the
war between the car tails and the drug against the
cartails was very hard. You felt in danger all the time,
all the time. Every time you were going out of
(07:43):
your house. You didn't know if you were coming back
a life because a bone board is going to explode
at a mall or a public place or just a street,
or they were going to kill someoney. And you, you know,
we're just passing by. You might as well be describing
what at certain periods we don't even have to go
to as a far away place to see these kinds
(08:05):
of crimes submitted against women. Here in the United States,
we see femicide occurring. We need to have a system
that supports women, like federal registration on a system of
gender based violence. Our countries need to distribute wars resources
to prosecute those crimes. The police forces need to be
(08:27):
well trained when they receive cases of domestic violence. Certainly,
some of the things we witness as journalists, even though
we don't experience them ourselves personally, they do have an impact,
I know, and how to deal with all those experiences
and the stories that you cover, the places you visit,
and the struggle of the people you interview. Sometimes it's like,
(08:51):
you know, it touches you at a personal level. Sometimes
you cry when you go back to a hotel after
listening to those kits for example in the caravan, or
a teenager that lost his mom that was, you know,
murdered by her husband or couple. Is hard, and this
(09:17):
book at the same time worked like an outlet of
those experiences that taught me and make me grow as
a woman and as a professional. Well, thank you so much,
Elia for being our guest on this special episode. To
read more about Elia Calderon and her story, check out
(09:37):
her book My Time to Speak, Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race.
To learn more about femicide in Mexico, listen to our
podcast series Forgotten The Women of Juarez. I'm Monica. Thanks
for listening,
Hi everyone. In this special episode, I'll be talking with
Emmy Award winning journalist Elia calroon. Ilia co anchors Univision's
nationally broadcast evening news show alongside Porcher Ramos. She's the
first Afro Latina to anchor a national news desk for
a major Hispanic network in the US. This month, Elia
(00:32):
published her memoir My Time to Speak, Reclaiming Ancestry and
Confronting Race. We'll talk about racism, intersectionality, and Elia's own
reporting on femicide. Did you find it to be somewhat
of a new experience, maybe even a struggle to open
yourself up personally, where as journalists were taught not to
(00:56):
do that. It was one of the most difficult things
to open my heart. Actually had to rewrite many chapters
many times. You grew up in a region called Choko,
Is that right, correct? Correct? A small town called Ismena.
And let's say, as the state is Choko, it's the
(01:19):
Pacific coast in the west. Yes, So tell us what
makes this region unique or special? We are more than
ninety percent African descendants who were were abandoned by the governments,
affected by the corruption of our own leaders. But yeah,
we were at the same time happy. When I was
(01:39):
growing up, in the first years of my life, we
didn't have power. We didn't have electricity, so my clothes
and my uniforms to go to school had to be
iron with a charcoal iron. I had to walk miles
and take a small boat across a river to go
to school. It was hard, but I think it gave
(01:59):
me the dry to fight for something, to want to
become someone, to do bigger things. And when I was
staying I told my mom I wanted to move to Menadine,
one of the biggest cities in Columbia, where her sister
and family lived. So I moved to live with my
Pia and her family and do my high school in Menadine.
(02:20):
And that is a city where I first racism for
the first time. Can you describe that? Yes, I was
in sixth grade and it hurt me so much. And
after I felt so bad because I didn't know what
to say, and I decided to forget about the episode.
(02:41):
And I didn't say anything about it, not even to
my mom. What am I going to say to her?
And I decided just to keep it to myself, to
keep it to myself. Those microaggressions, the way they look
at you, the way they tell you with the body
language that you don't belong here, or they want to
be away from you, they don't want to be related
to you. Was that just something that you quietly learned
(03:03):
how to live with. I just erased them as if
it never happens, and then I kept going and growing up.
When you go back to those memories, it is hard.
I didn't want my daughter to feel like the same
way I felt, and we started a long conversation that
never ends and I will never end. Like taking every
(03:25):
opportunity you have to talk to your kids about this
and those my corogression so called jokes that are offensive
went to refer to a dark skinned person are hard
and we need to eliminate them from our upbringing. So,
from what I understand, before you arrived here in the US,
(03:46):
you had this idealized vision of what the US would
be like. When did you realize that that vision you
had wasn't necessarily true? In my country, black people were
always the service of the house or enslaves or the
people working on the plantations, And for me, it was
(04:06):
like oh wow. But at the same time, I was
reading Tony Morrison and I knew about the experience of
the slaves in the United States, but when you come
and you see, you know, as you are in the news,
you see the news every day, you see the difference
and you can notice institutional racism. Basically, you've experienced backlash
(04:26):
against your identity as a woman of Afro Latina descent,
and that's essentially three different targets for me. It's like
being a minority within a minority, being black, being Hispanic,
and being a woman. The racism is very present in
Latin America, from Argentina to Mexico whatever. We had people
(04:49):
enslave that were brought from Africa against their will. In
those countries, we had history of racism. I am proud
to be a black woman with my ethnicity being Hispanic
or Latina, but my race is Black, my ethnicity culture
is Hispanic. I mean, your husband is Asian, you're after Latina,
(05:13):
and you have a daughter who embodies all these backgrounds,
and I'm so curious, like what it's like to live
in such a culturally rich household. It's just amazing. We
knew we had different upbringings, different cultures, but we decided
to embrace our differences and embraced where we are in common.
(05:35):
The moral values, the respect, the discipline, the family values
were all the same. So we tried to focus and
what we have in common, to start racing the family
that we have today. I wanted to ask if femicide
or gender based violence directed at women is something that
(05:56):
you've confronted in your professional life, actually dedicate. One of
the chapters of my book is called the High Price
of Silence, and we travel to Mexico and to El Salvador.
As hard in our countries is very even in Colombia,
(06:16):
not talking about only Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru. We
have so many cases of women that are killed because
they are women. As I say, we are not found dead.
Somebody killed a woman, somebody assistin a woman right, and
we need to keep bringing the topic to the table.
(06:39):
We need to keep raising our voices so more women
find a healthy environment where they can raise their voices
and where the stories can be heard and believed, and
we start to end the situation. One of the underlying
issues beneath all of this, it has to do with
(07:00):
the corruption that underlays the malfunction of the judicial system
in Latin America is drug trafficking. And that's certainly I mean,
that's what ties are two countries together, in Mexico and Colombia.
And we spent at least one episode in Forgotten explaining
how the US Mexico border became the gateway for Colombian
(07:22):
drugs in the eighties and nineties. Yes, we lived in
that era in the eighties and the nineties where the
war between the car tails and the drug against the
cartails was very hard. You felt in danger all the time,
all the time. Every time you were going out of
(07:43):
your house. You didn't know if you were coming back
a life because a bone board is going to explode
at a mall or a public place or just a street,
or they were going to kill someoney. And you, you know,
we're just passing by. You might as well be describing
what at certain periods we don't even have to go
to as a far away place to see these kinds
(08:05):
of crimes submitted against women. Here in the United States,
we see femicide occurring. We need to have a system
that supports women, like federal registration on a system of
gender based violence. Our countries need to distribute wars resources
to prosecute those crimes. The police forces need to be
(08:27):
well trained when they receive cases of domestic violence. Certainly,
some of the things we witness as journalists, even though
we don't experience them ourselves personally, they do have an impact,
I know, and how to deal with all those experiences
and the stories that you cover, the places you visit,
and the struggle of the people you interview. Sometimes it's like,
(08:51):
you know, it touches you at a personal level. Sometimes
you cry when you go back to a hotel after
listening to those kits for example in the caravan, or
a teenager that lost his mom that was, you know,
murdered by her husband or couple. Is hard, and this
(09:17):
book at the same time worked like an outlet of
those experiences that taught me and make me grow as
a woman and as a professional. Well, thank you so much,
Elia for being our guest on this special episode. To
read more about Elia Calderon and her story, check out
(09:37):
her book My Time to Speak, Reclaiming Ancestry and Confronting Race.
To learn more about femicide in Mexico, listen to our
podcast series Forgotten The Women of Juarez. I'm Monica. Thanks
for listening,
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