August 13, 2020 • 13 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
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
When was the last time your pet was excited about
meal time? Sure, they're always happy to eat, but I
mean tailwagon jumping up and down excited. Fresh Pet brings
that joy daily to thousands of pet parents. It's simple.
Fresh Pet uses only whole ingredients, gently steamed, cooked without preservatives,
and refrigerated like meat should be. Look for Fresh Pet
(00:21):
in the fridge on the pet aisle or at fresh
pet dot Com for home delivery options. Make meals exciting again.
Fresh Pet, We're picky eater or approved during the month
of April. Shop the buy one, get one fifty percent
off personal care sale happening now in the health and
beauty aisles. It's Safeway. Shop select products like Dove Deep
Moisture Gel handwash, Trusom a rich moisture shampoo with Vitamin E,
(00:44):
Simple Kind of Skin, facial cleanting wipes, or in Nexus
Color and Shore Conditioner Salon haircare and get them Buy one,
get one fifty percent off at Safeway. Visit Safeway dot
com or head into your local Safeway store for more
great deals in the health and beauty aisles. We joined
the UNS community when our twins were just four years old.
We became part of the uns community for our daughter,
(01:07):
and she's not due for six months. Join over six
hundred thousand parents and children that are registered with UNST
by downloading the app today. UNST put smart investing tools
right in the palm of your hand, with flexible accounts
that can be used for college tuition, a first car,
and more. Download the UNST app from the App Store
or Google Play Store. See terms and conditions at UNEST
(01:28):
dot CEO. Hi everyone. In this special episode, I'll be
talking with Emmy Award winning journalist Elia Calron. Ilia co
anchors Univision's nationally broadcast evening news show alongside Orger Ramos.
(01:54):
She's the first Afro Latina to anchor a national news
desk for a major Hispanic network in the US. This month,
Elia 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
(02:18):
somewhat of a new experience, maybe even a struggle to
open yourself up personally, where as journalists were taught not
to 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,
(02:40):
is that right, correct? Correct? A small town called Ismena.
And let's say, as the state is Choko, it's a
Pacific coast in the west. Yes, So tell us what
makes this region unique or special. We are more than
ninety percent African descendants, poor, were abandoned by the governments,
(03:02):
affected by the corruption of our own leaders. But yeah,
we were at the same time happy. When I was
growing up, 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
(03:23):
take a small boat to cross a river to go
to school. It was hard, but I think it gave
me the drive to fight for something, to want to
become someone, to do bigger things. And when I was saying,
I told my mom I wanted to move to Meladine,
one of the biggest cities in Columbia, where her sister
and family lived. So I moved to live with my
(03:46):
Pia and her family and do my high school in Meladine.
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.
(04:11):
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
(04:33):
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's 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 opportunity
(04:56):
you have to talk to your kids about this and
those corrogression, 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, you
had this idealized vision of what the US would be like.
(05:20):
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 like, oh wow.
But at the same time, I was reading Tony Morrison
(05:40):
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 against your
identity as a woman of for Latina descent, and that's
(06:02):
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 enslave that
were brought from Africa against their will. In those countries
(06:23):
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, and
you have a daughter who embodies all these backgrounds, and
(06:47):
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
raised our differences and embraced where we are in common.
The moral values, the respect, the discipline, the family values
(07:11):
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
you've confronted in your professional life. I actually dedicate one
(07:31):
of the chapters of my book it is called the
High Price of Silence. And we traveled to Mexico and
to El Salvador. As hard in our countries is very
even in Colombia, not talking about only Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru.
We have so many cases of women that are killed
(07:56):
because they are women. As I say, we are not
found that somebody killed a woman somebody assisting a woman, right,
And we need to keep bringing the topic to the table.
We need to keep raising our voices so more women
find a healthy environment where they can raise their voices
(08:20):
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
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 our two countries together, in Mexico and Colombia.
(08:44):
And we spend at least one episode in Forgotten explaining
how the US Mexico border became the gateway for Colombian
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,
(09:09):
all the time. Every time you were going out of
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 someone when you you know,
we're just passing by, you might as well be describing
(09:29):
what is at certain periods. We don't even have to
go to as a far away place to see these
kinds 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
(09:53):
to prosecute those crimes. The police forces need to be
well trained when they received cases of domestic violence. Certainly,
some of the things we witnesses as journalists, even though
we don't experience him 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,
(10:16):
and the struggle of the people you interview. Sometimes it's like,
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
(10:46):
book at the same time worked like an outlet of
those experiences that touch me and make me grow as
a woman and as a professional. Well, thank you so
much for being our guest on this special episode. To
read more about Elia Calron and her story, check out
(11:07):
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 Juadis. I'm Monica, Thanks
for listening. Hello beautiful. I named you, Arit, founder of
(11:38):
Madison Read, a hair color company I named after my daughter.
I started Madison Reid to give you the most gorgeous
hair color made with ingredients you could feel good about.
Are you tired of drug store hair color? You deserve better?
Spring is here and the forecast calls for your best
hair color ever. Upgrade to salon quality hair color that
(11:59):
nourishes and improves the condition of your hair without any
harsh odors. It's easily done at home and we deliver
it to your door. Plus, our hair color matching technology
makes picking the right color easy, fast and accurate. For
limited time, new clients get fifteen percent off plus free
shipping on your first online order. Visit Madison Dashread dot com.
(12:22):
Forward Slash promo take our online colored quiz to find
your perfect shape. That's Madison dashread dot com, Forward, slash
up promo, Try it, love it. That's the beauty of
Madison read he Is there anything better than a great
night sleep? Lisa's award winning mattresses are here to make
that a reality. Rated the New York Times Top Pick
(12:45):
four years running. Lisa offers free shipping and a risk
free one hundred night trial, and right now you can
save up to seven hundred dollars on select mattresses plus
two free pillows. It's time to get the sleep you
deserve with Lisa Exclusion Supply. Visit Lisa dot com for
more details. That's l e Say dot com. Imagine what
(13:06):
your dog would tell you if they could talk. More treats.
With Canine Health Check, your dog's jeans can speak to you.
Canine Health Check screens for over two hundred and fifty
genetic diseases and more. Just swab, send the sample, and
wait two weeks or less for results. We offer genetic
screening for dogs that has been developed by expertly trained
veterinarians and PhD geneticists, so you can trust that your
(13:28):
results are of the highest quality and accuracy. Visit canine
health check dot com and get thirty percent off with
code iHeart
When was the last time your pet was excited about
meal time? Sure, they're always happy to eat, but I
mean tailwagon jumping up and down excited. Fresh Pet brings
that joy daily to thousands of pet parents. It's simple.
Fresh Pet uses only whole ingredients, gently steamed, cooked without preservatives,
and refrigerated like meat should be. Look for Fresh Pet
(00:21):
in the fridge on the pet aisle or at fresh
pet dot Com for home delivery options. Make meals exciting again.
Fresh Pet, We're picky eater or approved during the month
of April. Shop the buy one, get one fifty percent
off personal care sale happening now in the health and
beauty aisles. It's Safeway. Shop select products like Dove Deep
Moisture Gel handwash, Trusom a rich moisture shampoo with Vitamin E,
(00:44):
Simple Kind of Skin, facial cleanting wipes, or in Nexus
Color and Shore Conditioner Salon haircare and get them Buy one,
get one fifty percent off at Safeway. Visit Safeway dot
com or head into your local Safeway store for more
great deals in the health and beauty aisles. We joined
the UNS community when our twins were just four years old.
We became part of the uns community for our daughter,
(01:07):
and she's not due for six months. Join over six
hundred thousand parents and children that are registered with UNST
by downloading the app today. UNST put smart investing tools
right in the palm of your hand, with flexible accounts
that can be used for college tuition, a first car,
and more. Download the UNST app from the App Store
or Google Play Store. See terms and conditions at UNEST
(01:28):
dot CEO. Hi everyone. In this special episode, I'll be
talking with Emmy Award winning journalist Elia Calron. Ilia co
anchors Univision's nationally broadcast evening news show alongside Orger Ramos.
(01:54):
She's the first Afro Latina to anchor a national news
desk for a major Hispanic network in the US. This month,
Elia 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
(02:18):
somewhat of a new experience, maybe even a struggle to
open yourself up personally, where as journalists were taught not
to 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,
(02:40):
is that right, correct? Correct? A small town called Ismena.
And let's say, as the state is Choko, it's a
Pacific coast in the west. Yes, So tell us what
makes this region unique or special. We are more than
ninety percent African descendants, poor, were abandoned by the governments,
(03:02):
affected by the corruption of our own leaders. But yeah,
we were at the same time happy. When I was
growing up, 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
(03:23):
take a small boat to cross a river to go
to school. It was hard, but I think it gave
me the drive to fight for something, to want to
become someone, to do bigger things. And when I was saying,
I told my mom I wanted to move to Meladine,
one of the biggest cities in Columbia, where her sister
and family lived. So I moved to live with my
(03:46):
Pia and her family and do my high school in Meladine.
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.
(04:11):
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
(04:33):
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's 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 opportunity
(04:56):
you have to talk to your kids about this and
those corrogression, 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, you
had this idealized vision of what the US would be like.
(05:20):
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 like, oh wow.
But at the same time, I was reading Tony Morrison
(05:40):
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 against your
identity as a woman of for Latina descent, and that's
(06:02):
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 enslave that
were brought from Africa against their will. In those countries
(06:23):
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, and
you have a daughter who embodies all these backgrounds, and
(06:47):
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
raised our differences and embraced where we are in common.
The moral values, the respect, the discipline, the family values
(07:11):
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
you've confronted in your professional life. I actually dedicate one
(07:31):
of the chapters of my book it is called the
High Price of Silence. And we traveled to Mexico and
to El Salvador. As hard in our countries is very
even in Colombia, not talking about only Mexico, El Salvador, Colombia, Peru.
We have so many cases of women that are killed
(07:56):
because they are women. As I say, we are not
found that somebody killed a woman somebody assisting a woman, right,
And we need to keep bringing the topic to the table.
We need to keep raising our voices so more women
find a healthy environment where they can raise their voices
(08:20):
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
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 our two countries together, in Mexico and Colombia.
(08:44):
And we spend at least one episode in Forgotten explaining
how the US Mexico border became the gateway for Colombian
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,
(09:09):
all the time. Every time you were going out of
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 someone when you you know,
we're just passing by, you might as well be describing
(09:29):
what is at certain periods. We don't even have to
go to as a far away place to see these
kinds 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
(09:53):
to prosecute those crimes. The police forces need to be
well trained when they received cases of domestic violence. Certainly,
some of the things we witnesses as journalists, even though
we don't experience him 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,
(10:16):
and the struggle of the people you interview. Sometimes it's like,
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
(10:46):
book at the same time worked like an outlet of
those experiences that touch me and make me grow as
a woman and as a professional. Well, thank you so
much for being our guest on this special episode. To
read more about Elia Calron and her story, check out
(11:07):
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 Juadis. I'm Monica, Thanks
for listening. Hello beautiful. I named you, Arit, founder of
(11:38):
Madison Read, a hair color company I named after my daughter.
I started Madison Reid to give you the most gorgeous
hair color made with ingredients you could feel good about.
Are you tired of drug store hair color? You deserve better?
Spring is here and the forecast calls for your best
hair color ever. Upgrade to salon quality hair color that
(11:59):
nourishes and improves the condition of your hair without any
harsh odors. It's easily done at home and we deliver
it to your door. Plus, our hair color matching technology
makes picking the right color easy, fast and accurate. For
limited time, new clients get fifteen percent off plus free
shipping on your first online order. Visit Madison Dashread dot com.
(12:22):
Forward Slash promo take our online colored quiz to find
your perfect shape. That's Madison dashread dot com, Forward, slash
up promo, Try it, love it. That's the beauty of
Madison read he Is there anything better than a great
night sleep? Lisa's award winning mattresses are here to make
that a reality. Rated the New York Times Top Pick
(12:45):
four years running. Lisa offers free shipping and a risk
free one hundred night trial, and right now you can
save up to seven hundred dollars on select mattresses plus
two free pillows. It's time to get the sleep you
deserve with Lisa Exclusion Supply. Visit Lisa dot com for
more details. That's l e Say dot com. Imagine what
(13:06):
your dog would tell you if they could talk. More treats.
With Canine Health Check, your dog's jeans can speak to you.
Canine Health Check screens for over two hundred and fifty
genetic diseases and more. Just swab, send the sample, and
wait two weeks or less for results. We offer genetic
screening for dogs that has been developed by expertly trained
veterinarians and PhD geneticists, so you can trust that your
(13:28):
results are of the highest quality and accuracy. Visit canine
health check dot com and get thirty percent off with
code iHeart
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