The Women of Torres de Francia

7 dec 2022 · Sheroics

00:25:31

Meet the Women of Torres de Francia. After Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico in 2017, a small group of women from a local housing project in San Juan rushed into action by organizing community soup kitchens and feeding hundreds of families. They saved lives and their efforts became a model that was replicated across the country.

Transcript

It's been more than five years since Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September, 2017. But for those of us who lived through Maria and its aftermath, it still feels like yesterday. The category four storm devastated our island. It led to unimaginable hardship and misfortune, but in every taleof suffering there is another story, one of overcoming.

When I recently returned to Puerto Rico, my home, Maria was at the forefront of my mind, and so were a group of women who still inspire me.

I visited the women at their home, a public housing project called Torres de Francia, located in a very poor neighborhood in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico. The day Hurricane Maria struck and the days that followed still haunt the residents of that community.

It was raining very late at night. It was also windy, but when the water began to pour in through the windows, I went into a state of panic. My apartment was completely filling with water. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't get the water out. The more I tried to push the water out, the more the water came in.

Maria turned public housing projects like Torres de Francia into human prisons, potential death traps. But the women who lived there quickly turned panic into action, setting up a makeshift kitchen to feed hundreds in their community. When I saw these brave women again, I remembered why they have remained tattooed on my soul from the moment I met them five years ago.

Their passion towards the wellbeing of others, their relentless pursuit of what was right for their community, even when faced with disaster is still palpable.

When there is a crisis and people's lives are at stake, there are only two options. You either stand up and speak up and take on whatever, or whomever you must, or you stand down and be quiet and allow yourself to become complicit to a narrative that will only end up costing more lives. So standing up is not only something that has to be done, it is something we have to be committed to doing.

The women of Torres de Francia never thought they had an option, a plan B. They just did what had to be done. They knew after Maria hit their community faced starvation if they did not act quickly. Sometimes doing the most ordinary thing, like cooking, is the most heroic thing that can be done under extraordinary circumstances, and it begins with a simple act of will.

We're going to start from scratch, but we are starting.

Welcome to Sheroics, a new podcast from Ozy. I'm Yulín Cruz. I was the mayor of San Juan when Hurricane Maria tore across Puerto Rico. In my career as a public servant, I've been fortunate to witness what it takes to fight today's battles for social change. Sheroics, it's about women creating transformational change for the world, and they're doing it one community at a time.

Each episode, we will meet an activist, advocate or citizen working to make her corner of the planet a better place. These are the stories of women who lead from the heart. Stories we hope might inspire you to take action when your time comes.

I wanted to begin this series with a personal story that is very near and dear to my heart. I realized during Hurricane Maria that as long as a tragedy touches another human being, it's also touching me and that I had to use my platform and my voice to help others be heard. I've learned that leadership is not an issue of titles or positions.

Leadership can be found in the most unexpected places. You don't have to be on the six o'clock news to be a leader. Every day in every community, there's almost always a woman or a group of women who are the ones who push things forward and change their corner of the world. The story of the women of Torres de Francia still lives in my heart.

These women exercise the most powerful leadership ever: the power of love.

We had to deal with what we had, and we had to move on, and we got ahead.

The world begins counting with Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico on September 20th, 2017, but we can't forget the two weeks earlier, Puerto Rico was also hit by Hurricane Irma.

Hurricane Irma, plowing through the Caribbean with 185 mile per hour winds leaving a wake of destruction in her path. Puerto Rico slammed with the one two punch pounding rain and howling winds sent residents searching for cover.

Power was already out in most of Puerto Rico after Irma, but it was slowly, very slowly but surely coming. We had already set up the largest shelter in Puerto Rico, which was at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan. Then after everyone in the shelter had found a place to stay or gone back to their homes, that's when we hear another hurricane is coming.

Hurricane Maria, a powerful category four storm is now barreling towards Puerto Rico. We are very, very, very, uh, um, worried. Today in San Juan, a frantic scramble for supplies again just days after Irma. Maria has rapidly intensified. The government now declaring a state of emergency rationing basic provisions like water and baby formula.

The radar showed that Puerto Rico would disappear completely under Maria. We had about 16 hours of total silence as the storm swallowed the island.

Then, around seven o'clock that night, I went out with some members of the Emergency Management Office to explore the damage. There were still tropical storm winds. Because I don't weigh very much, they had to strap me to a car with a rope so that the wind would not blow me away.

I've never seen a war zone. I've only seen pictures. And in those pictures of wars, you see the desolation, the stillness, and that's what I saw. It was eerie. The silence, the total silence is only broken by the cry of someone who needed help. And that's when we knew we needed to go out every night to search for those who needed us.

Late that night, we started doing exactly that. We would find people that needed help and we brought them back to the shelter.

The first pictures now coming in from Puerto Rico after taking a direct hit. Hurricane Maria slamming into the island. And as you heard one official saying the island is destroyed. 150 mile an hour winds, ripping buildings apart, knocking out power everywhere.

All of the electricity is out tonight.

Things got worse by the hour. There was no running water, no communications, no working elevators. Buildings were becoming human cages, especially for people with mobility issues. It was tough to get help. It was even tough to get news. And on top of that, we were not getting much help from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, even though Puerto Rico had been a US territory, a colony of the United States since 1898. People had to become the first line of response.

Puerto Rico's in need of many things, massive amounts of food and water being delivered, but getting them distributed certainly is a challenge on that island.

Let me tell you what FEMA thought was food. I keep a photograph of that FEMA care package, and I still get mad just looking at it. The package had potato chips, beef jerky, chocolate pudding, apple sauce, and I will never forget this, a perfectly wrapped package with a plastic fork, knife, spoon, salt and pepper. What the heck were we going to need the salt and pepper for? FEMA would come and leave the food packages with the local leaders and then leave. It was soon evident that the US government was not going to do more.

I had had enough.

I am mad as hell. I beg you to take charge and save lives. We are dying here and I cannot fathom the thought that the greatest nation in the world cannot not figure out logistics for a small island.

Fortunately, relief started to pour in from other sources. Volunteers arrived from New York, supplies from the diaspora in Chicago Operation Blessing, food and water from Florida and from Goya, Chobani, Tres Monjitas, Suiza Dairy,

Core and other companies and non-governmental organizations. We formed a massive food collection and distribution center in the Coliseum with beans, rice, milk, Chocolate Cortes, and other vital supplies.

Thanks to this relief, we were able to give breakfast, lunch, and dinner to about 65 elderly homes across San Juan. I happened to visit one of these homes a couple of weeks after Maria hit. They had run out of water and out of diesel for their generators. While I was out in front of the home, a woman approached me on the street.

She said, "we're from Torres de Francia", and she pointed to the public housing building behind her. "We need your help". I thought so does everybody else. But there was something about the way she looked at me. Most people that we saw had given up. You could tell it in their eyes. They have that glazed stare that looks at nothing. But Luz Griselle Vasquez Rodriguez had this sharp look on her face. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. Well, she took the windows out and shot right through my soul, and I could tell that she wasn't gonna give up and she wasn't gonna take no for an answer. I could tell this was a woman with a mission and that nothing was going to distract her from that mission.

I saw some of myself in her. I saw some of my mother in her, some of my grandmother in her, so I told her I would be there soon. She told me, "I am going to hold you to it."

At first, the inhabitants of Torres de Francia, like everyone else in Puerto Rico had been knocked off their feet by Maria.

There were a lot of people crying, a lot of people who were sad, and it was tough to see. It was very hard what we went through.

Everyone in the community faced the same level of devastation.

No one can say I'm worse than you because we're all living in the same situation.

You have to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. If I feel like this, how would a person that doesn't have anything feel?

Luz Griselle took me around the building where the women of Torres de Francia had begun to build a community kitchen, just outside. They had scavenged anything they could find from the rubble.

They had taken wood from the debris to build fires to cook over making sure the wood was dry before using it. These are the little details, the thousands upon thousands of small acts of logistics that make a difference. Soon, the women had the ability to cook for over 400 families. Lunch and dinner, large plots, cooking over wooden fires.

They didn't wait for anyone to help them. They asked around for anything people could spare, that they could cook. Beans, sauce, rice, meat. They put together their own community kitchen.

Five years later talking to them, I can see the tears welling up in the women's eyes. And I tell you, I get teary myself thinking about what they accomplished. These women said, we're gonna do what comes natural to us. We're not only gonna feed our family, we're gonna feed everyone's family.

My mom taught me never to give up. My mom was not the easiest, but when she wanted something done, she would do it no matter what. She never gave up. She said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do it. I am going to do it. I'm going to do it!

And in a situation of life and death, it means a lot when you're taking the bread from your mouth and giving it to someone else that you recognize as more vulnerable. It is a lifeline. You put someone on the path to life and take them away from the path of death. These women did it without missing a beat. There was a rhythm to it. There was a let's get it done attitude all the time. Every single day. Every single day. And that type of perseverance is contagious.

It breeds hope.

I always say the same thing. Better times will come. The world doesn't end here.

Very quickly, the women of Torres de Francia became an example of how to weather the storm literally, and how to move forward. Whatever you do, just look ahead. There's no time for tears, although they shed tears. There's no time for emotion, although what moved them with pure and raw emotion.

There's no time for weakness.

We must keep moving forward. We have to be resilient. We must reinvent ourselves. We have to keep on going because it's not like the kids know that they don't have food.

Not long after I met the women of Torres de Francia I took them to the Coliseum. When they saw the food that we had collected, I remember them holding each other and crying. They knew that they were going to be able to continue to do good in their community, to give a lifeline to people in need. I don't think there's anything more important to a woman than making sure her family eats and survives, and here these women are not just helping their immediate families, they're taking the word community and giving it a whole different spin, saying, not on my watch.

You're not going to go hungry on my watch. You're not going to die on my watch.

And that strength and resilience will help guard their community against future disasters and setbacks.

The need is there and we will have the need again, because Maria is not going to be the only storm that is going to pass through Puerto Rico.

And they were right. As of this taping Hurricane Fiona brought devastating losses and historic flooding to Puerto Rico. An island wide black out struck. Many people were cut off from services and had no access to clean water.

It was evident we had wasted five years in the reconstruction process. And that we were no further ahead than on that September of 2017.

The state of emergency in Puerto Rico. At this hour, hurricane Fiona is slamming the island with 85 mile per hour sustained winds. The governor of Puerto Rico is calling the damage catastrophic.

The women of Torres de Francia showed us that people are not waiting for the government to do everything people need.

If they have the raw material to do it themselves, they do it. Sometimes we think helping people means giving them what we think they need, but often helping is just about being a platform for them to achieve what they know they need. When other people and organizations came over to us and said, we need help in the community, I would respond, do you have a place where you can cook.

I would talk to the women of the community and say, all right, if you can cook, I can give you the food. Using the model set up in Torre de Francia, we put together 26 additional community kitchens around San Juan and a 27th for the students of the University of Puerto Rico. It was amazing. The organization was impeccable.

What happened as a result of those women at Torres de Francia was that communities began to understand that the strength was within them and that they didn't need to look outside of the community. Their heroes were living amongst them. They were already there.

I asked the women of Torres de Francia if they consider themselves to be heroes.

No, not at all. I understand that what I did, I will always do because I will help those in need.

But to do what they did, you need a good heart. And the most powerful tool these women had was their ability to love and lead with an open heart. When all there is around you is darkness, literal darkness, then acts of love are like sparks of lightning.

In a situation like that, when we're all having problems with our necessities, I believe it's not thinking about taking credit for being the hero, but how to help each other as a community.

For me, this isn't the story of women cooking to feed people. This is a story of women using food as a platform to redirect desperation and instill hope.

They used food to engage and they engaged because they love. And as a result, they did what FEMA couldn't do. And I often wonder to this day, how can the experts not get it done, when these women did get it done? That's what, to me, makes them sheroes. They took a very difficult situation and they brought life out of the clutches of death.

They took care of one another. They became the ultimate relief organization.

People often ask, so how are things in Puerto Rico? And of course they're hoping for the good answer. They're hoping for, oh, every home is fixed. The electrical grid is working fine. The problem is that this is the crisis that just keeps on going. The electrical grid remains unstable, we had a political unrest, two earthquakes, and then the pandemic, and of course, hurricane Fiona after that.

This morning across Puerto Rico, an urgent power struggle, frequent blackouts at times impacting hundreds of thousands of people.

We are having, practically weekly shutdowns. Four years ago, hurricanes Irma and Maria slammed into the island decimating Puerto Rico's already crumbling infrastructure. Now, officials say the island's power grid is in critical condition.

There are also more than 200 schools that could not open at the beginning of the school year because of the poor conditions they are experiencing. So this is a crisis that has not been fixed.

My grandmother used to say, did you start the fight? She expected the answer to be no. She would then ask, did you finish the fight? I learned that you may not start the fight, but you must always, always finish it no matter what. No matter what the odds are or the price you must pay, you must always finish the fight.

And these women of Torres de Francia, these sheroes, they keep on fighting. They fight every day for their children and their community, and they are determined to finish this fight.

We find heroes in every community, and I'm sure everyone listening knows one that they can talk about. Think about it. We want to hear from you. We want you to tell us about those sheroes that change your community every day. Maybe they're not on the six o'clock news, but they should be because they do extraordinary things.

So email us at [email protected] with your story. Who knows? Maybe their sheroics will be featured on an upcoming episode.

Sheroics is an Ozy production. I'm your host, Yulín Cruz. This episode was produced and engineered by Pamela Lorence. And written by Sean Braswell. Special thanks to Tim Rogers, Roberto Tito Terro in Puerto Rico and Bev Watson. Make sure to follow Sheroics on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.

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Mission to Save The Mission
4 jan 2023· Sheroics
When COVID hit, longtime activist Valerie Tulier-Laiwa knew her neighborhood would be greatly affected. With the help of several childhood friends, she jumped into action to meet the needs of the Latino community and beyond.

Transcript:

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What you see here are like I said, the manifestations of about three or four of our committees. The Latino Task Force has a range of services that we provide.

C. Yulin Cruz: T his is Valerie Tulier Laiwa, one of the leaders of the Latino Task Force. During the early days of Covid 19 pandemic, the group came together to provide their community with essential services like testing, vaccines and food.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Everything we see here is related to a hub, so that testing and vaccine hub, food hub, resource hub, which we'll see upstairs.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: That's chef Julio.

C. Yulin Cruz: Valerie took us through the group's headquarters on Alabama Street, in the Mission District of San Francisco.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Here they sort the food. So I wanna be very clear about this. We call this a Mission Food hub. We don't call it a food pantry. We don't call it a food bank, but bless the food pantry and bless the food bank. Nothing's wrong with that, but there's a stigma attached to those words.

C. Yulin Cruz: Valerie has been serving the Latino community in the Mission for decades.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Go ahead, pick that up. Up. Pick this up. See?

C. Yulin Cruz: She loves her people and she knows them inside and out.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So we give people culturally appropriate food. We give them arroz, we give them beans and they have a choice too.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: We give three types of beans. Cause not everybody's, not everybody who's Latino is Mexican and eat pinto beans, right? So we offer black beans, red beans, and pinto beans and rice.

C. Yulin Cruz: She also knows how to get the best out of each one of them.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So the women, it's really funny cuz you have volunteers, they have tables set up and they're, we buy these huge bags of beans and rice and they would bag them.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And if you try to help them, they'll tell you no, this is my area I'm bagging. And so we say okay. So they take it very serious and many of the people who volunteer at the food hub are actually people who were in our food line for so they became that. So let's come on over here and that's why I say again, is food up.

C. Yulin Cruz: I'm Yulin Cruz. In this episode of Sheroics we are talking with Valerie Tulier Laiwa about what it takes to preserve and protect a community besieged by sickness and hardship. Valerie and the Latino Task Force are showing how deep community roots, organized leadership and love can transform lives and create a platform for support that is more potent and more capable than any governmental agency.

News Clip: The breaking news, stay at home. That is the order tonight from four state governors as the Coronavirus Pandemic spreads. New York, California, Illinois, and Connecticut, all ordering non-essential employees to stay home. Those orders cover 75 million people across the United States,

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So I remember March 20. I remember that we had a very abrupt shelter in place order from the mayor of San Francisco. She said, beginning tomorrow, everything shut down. Completely shut down. And I remember where I work at, there was a huge event that was supposed to happen. I'm like, oh my God, can't we just shut down on Monday?

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Can't we just get through this Saturday event? But it was like no.

C. Yulin Cruz: It was soon clear to Valerie and other leaders in San Francisco's mission district that the citywide shutdown was just the beginning.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The Mission is very strong in terms of, of movements in terms of community organizing around different issues. So we all knew each other. We were all oh, okay, you're handling that, you're handling housing, you're doing this.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: But we all grew up so we all knew each other. What the pandemic did, the shelter in place it immediately, completely like a magnet. We all came together, all of us, and I was on the phone, the very first week of shelter in place with two or three people saying, what are we gonna do?

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What are we gonna do? We've gotta do something. And we knew instinctively. Intuitively that it was gonna hit Latinos very hard. We just knew it without any data.

News Clip: New numbers from the State Health Department show Covid 19 is taking a far greater toll on California's Latino population than on any other group.

C. Yulin Cruz: Across San Francisco, hospitals were filling up with people sick with the coronavirus. The overwhelming majority of them were Latino.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: There is a pattern that happens in poor communities. So you know when something bad happens, it really happens bad to poor communities. Like when 2008, when there was that housing crisis and everything was falling apart who was stuck with all those prime loans or those balloon payment loans?

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: It was Latinos who lost their house. So we just know that.

C. Yulin Cruz: The city of San Francisco released Valerie from her job at the Public's Utilities Commission and assigned her to be a disaster service worker. She quickly went to work.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So with that permission, I was able to actually coordinate the Latino Task Force, meet with these folks, start these committees, start those committees.

C. Yulin Cruz: The Latino Task Force on Covid 19 was a massive undertaking and it required a special kind of leadership. Luckily the Mission District already had several leaders like Valerie, whose entire lives had prepared them to meet the challenges of that moment.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: My mom, she's Mexican and Apache. She was born in Tejas. But she was such a non-traditional Latina. She was in the Army. She went and she served two terms in the army and and that's where she met my father, Puerto Rican side cuz he was also in the army. So that's how they met and connected.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Otherwise how back in those days, how do you get a Mexican and Puerto Rican together? And I was born in Houston and there's maybe two Puerto Ricans while I was growing up. Maybe, or maybe just one, my dad. So I think that type of upbringing, like having a non-traditional Latina Mexican as a mother really just set me in a different pathway of life.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What bubbles up in me is really what our ancestors went through. And to be honest with you, I carry an anguish inside of me. But that anguish gets translated into doing good things for the community, advocating for the community, organizing the community. And so that's what moves me.

C. Yulin Cruz: I often say that I carry with me this incredible need to ease people's pain.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Yes. My mother was a drinker and because she was an alcoholic, it turned me into a caretaker, which is a positive thing it's, to me it's a beautiful thing.

C. Yulin Cruz: Tell me, When you encountered that need within you, when you realized, you know what I feel alive when I help others feel alive. When I help others to strive and not only survive. When was the first time you noticed that?

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: When I was young, in my twenties, I had a dream and I dreamt that I was going upwards. And in there it was like an arrow. And in that arrow there were people. I didn't know at that time, but that was my future that I would, anytime I would achieve to bring people along, to share, to be about community, to be about others, to understand. And having an alcoholic mother, being that caretaker, it just translated. So I've always been that way. I think even since I was young, I raised my little brother, so it, it's always been there in me.

C. Yulin Cruz: And that caretaker quality has earned Valerie a fitting nickname in the Mission: Mama Bear.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Before I started working for the city, I worked for nonprofits and I would run youth programs and I would growl I would growl at the staff. Really. And they loved it. They loved it because a lot of them were at risk and they loved the boundaries. And then in addition to that, I would also protect them with a viciousness. I'd advocate for them.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: They were like all my babies, and they felt that.

C. Yulin Cruz: It's also a mama bear growls to make sure that the cubs move along. It's also an inspiring growl, right? It can be a growl of pay attention. A growl of attention, things must be noticed. Don't do this. But it's also mostly a growl of love.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely.

C. Yulin Cruz: Valerie moved to San Francisco's Mission District from Texas when she was very young.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The Mission in San Francisco is a neighborhood. It is a barrio. And the reason why it received that mission is because the Spaniards built a huge church, Mission Dolores, right there on 16th and Dolores. And it was a time when they were colonizing The Ramaytush Ohlone, and I wanna pay respects to the spirits of that land.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And so it was naturally called the Mission. And also in that particular area, there are several Catholic churches, in that Mission. And the Mission, the barrio is relatively small in terms of geographical size, but it's huge in culture and people and richness. And with the Latino Task Force we have two hubs in the Mission, but we know that not all Latinos live in the Mission anymore. They're pretty much citywide in, in San Francisco. However, they know that the Mission is the home where they can buy their platanos, where they can buy their tortillas, their masa for tamales. They can go there to get services and they can go there to be amongst their culture.

C. Yulin Cruz: After Covid 19 hit, the Mission became the beating heart of an effort to save as many lives as possible.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The information that was coming from the city at the time was only in English. The information about shelter in place was only on websites, so we're already at a deficit. So one, we're not receiving the messages in Spanish, which the Latino Task Force took it upon themselves to have a communication and outreach committee, so we were trying to educate them.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Stay home, please. Social distance. But the problem with staying home is many of them live in crowded housing or they live in multi-generational housing. So it was a catch 22. We don't want you on the streets. We want you to isolate and stay home. But we also know that maybe home is not the safest place or the place where you can socially distance.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So we were trying to figure out how can we support the Latino community around this.

C. Yulin Cruz: The Task Force communications team quickly created a user-friendly trilingual website to make sure everyone in the community could get the information they needed.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: There was a one-stop shop where they didn't have to go to this site, that site gathered everything.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The icons were user-friendly, and it was trilingual. It was in Spanish, Maya, and English, and it wasn't necessarily written material for our Maya population. They're not necessarily literate in Maya, so we would do the videos. And then on top of that, over time when talk about vaccines, we were also combating the misinformation.

C. Yulin Cruz: And it didn't stop with better communication.

C. Yulin Cruz: The Latino Task Force came up with a strategy and an outreach plan that allowed for widespread covid testing and vaccine shots to be given within the community. According to the San Francisco Chronicle, the Task Force administered more than 230,000 tests and more than 90,000 vaccine doses. Another key focus of the Task Force's efforts was education.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So all of a sudden, all the schools were shut down. You can't go to school. Okay. In the majority of Latino households, one, they probably don't have wifi cuz they can't afford it. And number two, they most certainly don't have a laptop. And then number three, they most certainly don't have a space that they can call their own, like their own study room or their own bedroom.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So we knew that was gonna impact our kids tremendously.

C. Yulin Cruz: They also knew that food was going to become a huge problem for many.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So people were losing their jobs, they weren't gonna have access to food or money to buy food. So we started setting up food giveaway. So those were the first three that we saw the immediate need, and then we began to expand up to 13 different committees.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So that's how we did it.

C. Yulin Cruz: By late April in 2020, the Latino Task Force was handing out more than 7,000 boxes of food each week through efforts of more than 100 volunteers.

C. Yulin Cruz: You know what is amazing? At that same time, I was the mayor of San Juan, and you have described precisely what we did in the city of San Juan. Food was a major thing. The other thing is that for many communities and many families, when children go to public school, they have breakfast and lunch and potentially can take home an additional lunch, which then they will call dinner.

C. Yulin Cruz: Then it's also the issue of domestic violence. It's the young man that is coming out as gay and now has to live in a home with parents that do not love him for who he is. So abuse starts setting in. So it's interesting. I think the one great lesson from Covid is that policies cannot be put in place, divorced from the reality of the way people live, which is what you're describing right now, and it looks like that's exactly what you did.

C. Yulin Cruz: You took into consideration all of the factors that were going to infringe on people's as a ripple. I call them crisis ripple effects, right? There's the initial crisis, which is Covid, and then there's the ripple effects of the crisis, which are health and education and work and housing, and they keep on expanding until it's the perfect storm.

C. Yulin Cruz: You mentioned that you were working with the people that you had grown up with. They knew you. They respected you. You know them. You respect them. How much of that was integral in terms of creating community engagement as a powerful tool for combating the really difficult times that came with Covid.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: It was just, it was synergy and it was a natural fit because people who work in the community, we have shared values of love and so it was not difficult at all to find so many sheroes and heroes that exist and work in our community. It was so easy. It was really a beautiful thing to work with all these people that I grew up with.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: But also the beauty of it is this, because I grew up with them, because I worked in youth development, because I worked many years in nonprofit, they had a respect for me because I had earned that by the way I walked and moved through the community. And because I had that respect, they allowed me to basically boss them around, mama, bear them around.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Organize them, coordinate them, get them together, get them to meetings, get organized.

C. Yulin Cruz: How did all of that help you? Because community engagement is not easy. There's gotta be trust, there's gotta be common goals, and sometimes you have to make sure that the common goals are there to allow the trust to develop.

C. Yulin Cruz: But you mentioned the word that for us, that Sheroics is really important: love. This is really an act of love. Taking care of each other is an act of love.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What we did is not just love, it is love for our people. But what I call it is spiritual, not religious, but it's spiritual.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And I also like to share with people that how we behaved, is very indigenous. So Puerto Ricans who came together to respond to this Covid and to this shelter in place, as you mentioned, the food and all, that is indigenous to Puerto Rico. That is who Puerto Ricans truly are, and I think in your leadership, that is what you were trying to get at, is to honor how Puerto Ricans love each other and care for each other.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I remember my cousin was telling me that in Caguas that there was a, an extension cord that went out from only one house that had electricity and they had 10 other extension cords connected to that and how they would all cook together. Somebody would bring something here, somebody would bring something there.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: That's in our dna. And that's what happened here. And I wanna say it's indigenous because it's very circular, it's very communal, it's very spiritual. And the most of all is the key word that you said is love. And so I think that there is something that's in our DNA that wants us to behave the way we're supposed to behave before these other systems and bureaucracies are imposed upon our daily lives.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: The generic term or the play out term is colonization, but it is really systems and institutions that are not responsive. And so we had to respond because they're so slow to respond. They're so what I call burro-cratic.

C. Yulin Cruz: I love that. Burro in Spanish means donkey.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Exactly. That's why I call 'em Burro-crats.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So please, yes. Steal that one. Yes. Take it. Yes, take it and use it.

C. Yulin Cruz: I'm gonna, I'm gonna, yeah, I'm gonna use it.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Please do. They just got in the way, they got in the way of delivering resources to us. And we were just demanding of them, look, just give us what we need.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: We will take care of ourselves. I think that what came out of the pandemic was tragedy. Absolute tragedy. But there was also absolute beauty. Absolute beauty from the community. The love for humanity comes out each in, each and every way. And we have young people, we have monolingual, older ladies, señoras, that work with us, we have everybody in between.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So I just wanna acknowledge the beauty that came out of it. The community wanted to come together. We, I can't tell you how many people wanna volunteer with us. Because the, it, it's pure love, like you said, it's pure love, and that's all they feel. They feel the respect, they feel the dignity, and they feel the humanity that we deliver when we give services.

C. Yulin Cruz: I, I'm just curious as to who is your shero?

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I think that the sheros are the folks that came from the community that willingly stepped up and there's too many to mention. But I will tell you this and I wanna acknowledge this. I wanna acknowledge really where my training came from. And I wanna acknowledge the black community. I wanna acknowledge the Black Panthers. They were a huge influence here on the West Coast. I wanna acknowledge Malcolm X. I wanna acknowledge black leadership because I think that's really important. That's where I get my organizing, that's my way of doing things.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And there are Latina heroes and sheroes and I'm not going to not acknowledge that. But for me, Valerie, personally, that's where it came from was the black movement.

C. Yulin Cruz: It means that we can all learn from each other because we share the same struggles. And it is those that do not want us to prosper in our struggles, that want to divide us.

C. Yulin Cruz: Yes. When we unite in an act of love, not only in sharing the struggles, but in sharing the way out of the struggles, love conquers all. And if you look at the black movements and the African American movements, they're also very spiritually based.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And we're very close with the black community in San Francisco.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So I say that I, I learned from black leadership and I put it into practice. And then because we were so organized in the Mission with the Latino Task Force, we shared our best practices with the black community, with the Pacific Islander community. We shared with other communities of color, said, look, here's our model.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Here's how we organize. Take what you want, leave what you don't need.

C. Yulin Cruz: Valerie and the Latino Task Force have overcome so much and they continue to face new challenges every single day.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: What I'm afraid of is that the city is gonna go back to business as usual. What I'm concerned about is that there is a surge going right now.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: And I think that there's gonna be variants coming in and I think that businesses, the economy, the people the economy, let me just say people who are running the economy are tired of covid. They're tired of the imposition on them being able to make money. So we're trying to really ramp up and get back into recovery.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I understand. Like for example, I understand tourism is absolutely crucial to San Francisco as it is to Puerto Rico. It is crucial and I understand that, but I don't want us to think that Covid is in the past. We still have to be in response and recovery and not just cut off the resources that were allocated to, to response and just redirect them only to recovery.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I think moving forward, it has to be a dual pathway and I don't see that happening, and I'm very concerned.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: All of

C. Yulin Cruz: the inequalities, inequities, discrimination disparities that somehow the system has been able to sweep under the rug or to smooth out. So all of those things have been brought out by Covid. You're seeing them in a very particular way in the Mission in San Francisco, all over the world, these phenomenon, people all of a sudden are seeing the poverty in their own neighborhoods, which they had not seen before. Poverty is not only people living without a home or being displaced, but people being poor within a structure within a home.

C. Yulin Cruz: So I agree totally with you. I think not only, not only is this not over, but it has given us a renewed opportunity to not turn a blind eye on what needs to structurally change.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I respect people who are nice. I respect people who wanna work within the system to change things, but that's not me.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: I want people who are gonna change the system, who are gonna challenge the system, who are gonna challenge the status quo at all cost. There are lots of sheroes who are doing the right thing, but they're trying to do it within the system and I think if you do it within the system, then what are you trying to really majorly transform?

C. Yulin Cruz: I'm sure you would say, what I often say, is we do it because it had to be done.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: Yes, absolutely. Absolutely. We're obligated. That's our responsibility, not only to our community, but to those who came before us. There are other people who have struggled, but there were times when it was a lot harder for them that they would be jailed, they would be imprisoned or they would be mistreated in a bad way.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: So we do it for those. The indigenous way, what you do today impacts seven generations ahead. So our move was for our children and our children's children, and our nieces and nephews. All of the children are nieces and nephews. And it's also to honor those who sacrificed before us, who came before us. And that's why we, like you, we can't close our eyes.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: We can't not do something. I wanna just say that we have a mantra with the Latino Task Force, and that is community led, community driven and community implemented. So that has been our mantra and we will continue to use that and fight the city. And believe me, we have some new fights coming up with the city.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: It has not always been easy. We fought with the Department of Health, we fought with our Covid Command Center. We fought with all the structures that be, and we demanded to be recognized and to do things our way, to give our community what they needed. Now they're trying to act like okay, you're done, COVID is done.

Valerie Tulier Laiwa: We 're gonna go back to normal. And so we have some more future fights. It is not over. It's not over.

C. Yulin Cruz: We find sheroes in every community. And I'm sure everyone listening knows one that they can talk about. We want to hear from you. We want you to tell us about those sheroes that change your community every day. Maybe they're not on the six o'clock news, but they should be because they do extraordinary things.

C. Yulin Cruz:: So email us at sheroes at Ozy dot com with your story. Who knows? Maybe their sheroics will be featured on an upcoming episode.

C. Yulin Cruz: Sheroics is an Ozy production. I'm your host, Yulin Cruz. This episode was produced and engineered by Pamela Lorence and written by Sean Braswell. Make sure to follow Sheroics on Apple podcasts and subscribe on Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Resources:

The Latino Task Force Website
- Luisteren Nogmaals beluisteren Doorgaan Wordt afgespeeld...
- Later beluisteren Later beluisteren
Nicaragua’s Voice for Freedom
21 dec 2022· Sheroics
What does it take to be the voice for freedom? Berta Valle, a former television news presenter, has become a tireless advocate for the freedom of her husband, Felix Maradiaga, and the other 200-plus political prisoners under the Ortega dictatorship. Her husband’s crime was announcing his intention to run for president in 2021, which got him arrested and sentenced for treason by a Sandinista kangaroo court. Valle is now raising her voice for freedom wherever she can — for her, her husband, and their young daughter.

Transcript:

[00:00:00] C. Yulin Cruz: Protests are the lifeblood of a democracy, and in 2018, thousands of people in Nicaragua took to the streets to fight for theirs.

[00:00:19] C. Yulin Cruz: The unrest was sparked mid-April by social security reforms. The protests swelling into a broader nationwide revolt against Daniel Ortega's 11 year rule.

[00:00:32] Berta Valle: And then, you know, people just started coming out to the streets and then the first kid was killed.

[00:00:42] C. Yulin Cruz: Berta Valle, a TV presenter and her husband, Felix Maradiaga, a college professor where among those watching the violence unfold in their home country.

[00:00:57] Berta Valle: And Felix, Felix told me this is going to be very, very bad. And that night was one of these first days that he received the calls from students telling him, Professor Maradiaga, they're killing us. We need help.

[00:01:17] C. Yulin Cruz: Berta and Felix had both been politically active for years. They had bonded over how to improve their country, but this time was different.

[00:01:34] Berta Valle: And I remember Felix, like it was around 10 in the evening, 10 at night. He, he told me I have to leave. And I said, where are you going? I'm going, I'm going to help the kids. And he left. And that was the day that I realized that all the conversation that we had before, you know about Nicaragua , about the fight that people have to, fight back to stop the dictatorship. It was really happening.

[00:02:06] C. Yulin Cruz: Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega has continued to consolidate his power over the small Central American country in the years since 2018.

[00:02:17] C. Yulin Cruz: Félix Maradiaga is now a political prisoner in a Nicaraguan jail. And Berta Valle finds herself in exile, fighting to save her husband and hundreds of others like him, while also trying to raise a daughter in a new home.

[00:02:35] C. Yulin Cruz: Welcome back to Sheroics. We're sharing stories about some amazing women creating transformational change for the world.

[00:02:44] C. Yulin Cruz: I'm Yulín Cruz. In this episode, we're talking with a shero that inspires me with her courage and resilience. Berta Valle's story is one of separation, hope and perseverance, but it's really a love story. It's about love for one's partner, for one's family, for one's country, and for democracy itself. It's about what it takes to hold onto them during the most challenging of times.

[00:03:18] C. Yulin Cruz: What better way to begin a love story than with a celebration of poetry? As a teenager, Berta lived with her family in Ciudad Darío named after Rubén Darío, Nicaragua’s most celebrated poet.

[00:03:33] Berta Valle: The way we celebrate Rubén Darío's birthday, it was by having this event where they elected the Musa Dariana. So it was like the muse that inspired Rubén Darío's Poetry.

[00:03:47] Berta Valle: So the girls of the city, they participate and the contest is about, saying the poems of Rubén Darío and also we have several questions about his life. And in 2000, I was participating and it happens that they invited Felix to be one of the judge.

[00:04:11] Berta Valle: He was maybe 21, 22 years old. He already finished the university.

[00:04:19] C. Yulin Cruz: Look at the, look at the way your smile changes.

[00:04:23] C. Yulin Cruz: Yeah.

[00:04:23] C. Yulin Cruz: as you think about that, as you can see , so was it love at first sight?

[00:04:29] Berta Valle: Well, actually, actually what happened is that I won the contest that year. Actually he, there were four judges, so Felix was the one that gave me the lower score.

[00:04:44] Berta Valle: But he gave me the highest score from comparing to the others.

[00:04:52] C. Yulin Cruz: Berta won the contest in a unanimous decision and was crowned Dario's muse. The celebrations in the city continued over the next few days.

[00:05:01] Berta Valle: The city had a party. Like a party for all the city in the plaza and you know, the muse was there, of course, saying hi to everyone.

[00:05:16] C. Yulin Cruz: Someone else inspiring was also there.

[00:05:19] Berta Valle: And then I was in the center of the plaza saying hi to everyone. So he came to me, you know, he say hi, and he introduced himself saying that he was part of the judge. And we start talking and we spoke like for an hour. And we exchanged phone numbers and then he left and we started talking by the phone.

[00:05:41] Berta Valle: And these calls were like, I don't know, two, three hours. So what happened? What happened? Talking about love at first sight? What happened is that I forgot about his face and I was talking with this guy. I didn't remember his face, but I really, really liked his way of, you know, thinking. And he was very smart and I love the fact that everything I asked, he knew it.

[00:06:13] Berta Valle: And one day I told him, look, there's gonna be a party in my school. It's part of the event of my graduation. Why don't you come? Then that was the first time I saw him like consciously. And I realized that I liked him.

[00:06:30] C. Yulin Cruz: Oh,

[00:06:32] Berta Valle: So yeah, that was the way we connected. And then of course we share a lot about our stories. We had a lot of things in common, and particularly we talked about Nacaragua.

[00:06:48] C. Yulin Cruz: Both Berta and Felix had emerged from a country in turmoil.

[00:06:53] Berta Valle: So we had the Samosa dictatorship for 42 years. Then 1979 came with the revolution. They call it the Sandinista Revolution, but it was actually the Nicaraguan revolution because everybody participated.

[00:07:13] C. Yulin Cruz: But a civil war between the Marxist Sandinistas and the US backed Contras engulfed the country during the 1980s.

[00:07:22] Berta Valle: More than 50,000 Nicaragua were killed during the war.

[00:07:26] C. Yulin Cruz: And many thousands more fled the country.

[00:07:29] Berta Valle: My parents decided to leave the country and come to the US as immigrants, you know, they crossed the border illegally.

[00:07:38] Berta Valle: I was 10 months. So basically my mother carried me in her arms and she crossed the desert. And the first seven years of my life, I live here in the United States in California.

[00:07:53] C. Yulin Cruz: Felix also came to the United States as a child.

[00:07:56] Berta Valle: Felix's father died when he was eight years old. So Felix's mother took the hard decision to send him alone to the U.S. because of the war in Nicaragua. He was able to get to Florida where he stayed with a family friend.

[00:08:18] C. Yulin Cruz: And, and that, that shapes a person, right?

[00:08:20] Berta Valle: Of course. Imagine.

[00:08:22] C. Yulin Cruz: Having walked what I have heard is a very terrible, difficult and, and life-threatening travel all throughout the United States, that, that shapes the way the person sees life.

[00:08:38] C. Yulin Cruz: Cuz you did it in your mother's arm. Yes. Which is different. Yes. Um, but it's interesting that you both had the same experience.

[00:08:45] Berta Valle: Exactly. No, that, and that was one of the, our first conversations.

[00:08:49] C. Yulin Cruz: It was a formative experience for Felix.

[00:08:52] Berta Valle: That is what I believe created in Felix, this commitment to Nicaragua, you know, when he got back and he say, I'm going to fight for my, for my country, and I won't let this happen again.

[00:09:10] C. Yulin Cruz: I, I don't want anyone else to go through what I did and have to leave.

[00:09:14] Berta Valle: Exactly. Basically, yes.

[00:09:16] C. Yulin Cruz: Both Berta and Felix returned to Nicaragua where peace and democracy were starting to take hold. They fell in love.

[00:09:30] Berta Valle: This is something interesting. Before we got married, Felix warned me that there was going to be always someone, which he was going to be unfaithful to me, and this was Nicaragua. Of course I didn't understand it. You know, how deep was this commitment? But but yeah, since the beginning we had this conversation.

[00:09:56] C. Yulin Cruz: Berta Valle and Félix Maradiaga were married in 2006.

[00:10:05] Berta Valle: So we got married. He keeps working in in the Ministry of Defense and I start working on TV. And I became a TV anchor. So while we were living our lives, what happened is that, Daniel Ortega went back into power and the way he went back into power was by corruption.

[00:10:34] C. Yulin Cruz: Ortega, who had ruled Nicaragua from 1979 to 1990, ran for president again in 2007.

[00:10:43] Berta Valle: So he won the election with 38% of the Nicaraguans voting for him, because the opposition who was really the minority was divided. And once he went back into power, the Sandinistas took control of the institutions.

[00:11:07] C. Yulin Cruz: Ortega took further steps to tighten his grip on power. He took control of the armed forces, the judiciary and the police. He even changed the country's constitution to allow him to run again for president.

[00:11:23] Berta Valle: Felix was already a critical voice. He came out with an article in 2009 where he called the Ortega government a dictatorčship.

[00:11:43] C. Yulin Cruz: Felix continued his criticism of the regime at the Civil Society Leadership Institute.

[00:11:50] Berta Valle: So he founded this institute where he trained a lot of young people about values of democracy and peace and governance and nonviolence, because he already knew that that was something that they were, were, were going to take away.

[00:12:12] C. Yulin Cruz: And at and at that time, Berta, were you seeing the signs that something like what eventually happened, could happen?

[00:12:22] Berta Valle: You know, this is the sad part because we were seeing things: how they were controlling all the institutions, how they were taking power through the police and the armies, the military. And sometimes it was very frustrating and I remember people saying to Felix that he was a little bit of like an extremist, and Felix was very frustrating saying, you, you are not seeing what I, why I already saw. This is the same guy from the eighties that wants to establish this ideology in the country, and this is going forward to that.

[00:13:11] Berta Valle: This is not a democracy

[00:13:15] C. Yulin Cruz: Berta had also experienced firsthand the challenging political environment in Nicaragua.

[00:13:22] Berta Valle: I was witnessing how the information was already controlled by the regime. So they own a lot of TV stations and radio. And for example, I remember once some journalists came to me and said, Hey boss, look, we found this story about this case of corruption and we can be the first to put it on air, and now we'll receive a phone call saying we have to wait because that news cannot come out.

[00:13:58] Berta Valle: And I would have to go to the journalists and tell them, look guys, congratulations. I appreciate your hard work, but we are not going to publish this yet. We are going to wait for others to publish this first. That is out of censorship.

[00:14:14] C. Yulin Cruz: Before the 2016 election, Berta was approached with a proposal: to run for office.

[00:14:22] Berta Valle: I was young, I was a woman. I was well known because I was a TV anchor, so I realized that I can give something to the coalition to really win the elections and get rid of Daniel Ortega and his wife.

[00:14:41] C. Yulin Cruz: She accepted the offer.

[00:14:46] Berta Valle: But some weeks later, the regime took away the political party that was going to be the, the one that brings the coalition to the election and we couldn't run.

[00:15:02] C. Yulin Cruz: Berta paid the price for even contemplating a run for office. It became almost impossible for her to find work.

[00:15:11] Berta Valle: You know what they told me?

[00:15:12] Berta Valle: They told me, Hey Berta, you know, we admire you. We have seen you grow as a professional, I think you're very smart, but we cannot hire you. So, and I'm like, but what is it? Why? Why accepting a nomination for a public spot in government should be considered as something bad. So I told them, look, well, it's fine.

[00:15:44] Berta Valle: I understand your position, but it is my right to elect or be elected. And then I realized that yeah, people was very comfortable. You know, they were doing business and they didn't wanna lose that.

[00:16:00] C. Yulin Cruz: Do you think, Berta, people remain silent out of fear or out of this shock doctrine that it doesn't matter what I do, it's not going to be enough.

[00:16:13] Berta Valle: I think it's, it's a collage of a lot of things. So one is fear of course. The other thing is because of your interest, and the other one is because, yeah, maybe they feel that they couldn't do anything and it's better to be like this and not touch anything because they knew that something worse could happen.

[00:16:40] C. Yulin Cruz: And then in 2018, something worse did happen.

[00:16:47] Berta Valle: The regime announced a reform of the social security lowering the percentage of the benefit of the elders. And you know what? People just didn't handle it anymore. So a protest started very, very small. You can see the pictures. They came out to support the elders with the flags, saying we don't want the reform.

[00:17:16] C. Yulin Cruz: Things escalated quickly and the government cracked down on the protestors.

[00:17:22] Berta Valle: And they beat the elders. But this time everything was being transmitted through social networks, social media, and we saw that live. So people got very angry and more people joined the protest.

[00:17:40] Berta Valle: People started saying, we want change. We don't want the regime anymore. This is enough. We want change.

[00:17:49] C. Yulin Cruz: Weeks of protests ensued. Young Nicaraguans, including many of Felix's students, bravely took to the streets.

[00:18:01] Berta Valle: So during the first semester, there were more than 355 people killed by the regime. We had in May, we think the biggest, the largest march ever in Nicaragua.

[00:18:18] Berta Valle: And people were walking with a flag of Nicaragua. That was it. And they get to a point where, where there was a national stadium and they killed, that day, around 16 kids with franco tiradores, with snappers,

[00:18:34] C. Yulin Cruz: Sharp. Sharp snipers.

[00:18:36] Berta Valle: Yes, snipers.

[00:18:43] Berta Valle: We could see the cruelty of this regime. And of course, as they mentioned already, they are unwilling to leave power, you know, and they just became a dictatorship. They were already a dictatorship, but now it's, they, they're the mask, It's gone.

[00:19:08] C. Yulin Cruz: In 2013, Berta and Feliz had a daughter, Alejandra, and just like their parents during the 1980s, they were faced with a tough decision.

[00:19:20] C. Yulin Cruz: They headed for the US hoping it was just a temporary visit.

[00:19:26] Berta Valle: So we decided as family that it was better for me to get to in exile with Felix's mother and Alejandra, our daughter who was five years old and left Felix in Nicaragua to work by himself. So in June, Felix was here in the US denouncing in the UN in a meeting or something, the situation in Nicaragua, and all the violation of human rights. And we met with Felix and then people told him to not go back. And while we were here,

[00:20:08] C. Yulin Cruz: Did you tell him, did you tell him not to go back?

[00:20:12] Berta Valle: Yes. Yes. And the mother too. Like, we were like very concerned.

[00:20:17] C. Yulin Cruz: Was that a difficult decision to make?

[00:20:19] Berta Valle: Of course it was. Imagine that I came here with a carry on, you know, like we were supposed to come for three days and then I find myself not able to go back to my country. I left everything behind. So it was really hard. And not only that, understanding that my husband was going to go back to Nicaragua and that there was a real possibility of him getting hurt.

[00:20:49] Berta Valle: But again, so you, you just embraced what you have to do.

[00:20:54] C. Yulin Cruz: Where did you get the strength to let him go? Because it must have been hard to go to the airport and see him go off and knowing or, or at least feeling that you may not see him.

[00:21:14] Berta Valle: I, I rely on my faith, you know, I'm Christian, so I really believe that there is a purpose, you know, a divine purpose in our lives. I really believe that Felix took this decision because he really believed that democracy and you know, this way of governance, is the best for the country. And I just understood that this was his call. So at the end I told him, look, I can, I can have you here with me safe.

[00:21:53] Berta Valle: But I just knew that he was not going to be happy. You know, he wanted to go back and be with the people. So for me, that gave me peace. And I, and I just said, Lord, I give you this man. Protect him. I trust in you and do whatever you have to do. I thought about Alejandra, that was like the hardest part. You know, because it was not fair for her, you know, she didn't ask for this.

[00:22:23] C. Yulin Cruz: The family stayed in California with Felix visiting for long periods when he could.

[00:22:30] Berta Valle: And the last time we saw him in person was in March, 2020, because, you know, then he went back to Nicaragua, the pandemic came, he couldn't travel, but also because his passport was taken away and the regime never gave him a new passport. So he couldn't travel.

[00:22:55] C. Yulin Cruz: Despite the setback, Felix continued to work for the opposition, and in 2021 he decided to run for president against Ortega.

[00:23:08] Berta Valle: He told me, Berta, I don't care about the presidency. You know, this is just a way of mobilizing people. But if I die, I will die in peace. Because what I wanted for many years, it's happening right now. Which was the awakening of the people.

[00:23:32] C. Yulin Cruz: Felix's candidacy for president was short lived.

[00:23:36] Berta Valle: So what they did is that they imprisoned all the presidential candidates.

[00:23:42] Berta Valle: With presidential elections just five months off, opponents of Nicaragua's President Daniel Ortega and his wife Rosario Murrilo, the vice president, are dropping like flies.

[00:23:54] C. Yulin Cruz: Several leading opposition figures, including Felix were arrested in June, 2021.

[00:24:02] C. Yulin Cruz: The Nicaragua government has not responded to news organization's request for comment on the arrests in a statement. The government said that Mataga was being investigated for getting involved in illicit activities and for being a threat to the Nicaragua Society and the people's rights.

[00:24:24] C. Yulin Cruz: Now he, he gets put into jail and you have no communication with him?

[00:24:29] Berta Valle: Yes. No phone calls, of course, no visits.

[00:24:33] C. Yulin Cruz: Is there anyone of his family that has been able to see him in jail?

[00:24:37] Berta Valle: Yes. So he was detained on June 8th, 2020. He would be disappeared for 84 days and then he got the first visit from his sister because his sister is still in Nicaragua. She and her husband, they are the only two family members that have been able to visit him.

[00:25:01] C. Yulin Cruz: Conditions in the prison are awful.

[00:25:05] Berta Valle: Felix told his sister that he is in this cell in complete darkness. They are not allowed to receive sunlight only once every 10 day for 15 minutes. They don't have any type of reading or writing material, not even a bible that we have been asking for. They are subjected to daily interrogation, whatever they want. They sleep in concrete bed, only like with a really thin mattress. The food is really bad. Felix has lost around 60 pounds.

[00:25:57] C. Yulin Cruz: How do you make of something so difficult? And, and of course when people listen to us, they won't be able to see you as I'm looking at you right now, and from the wide smile and sparkly eyes of when you met him, now you're serious and your eyes are filled with tears as as they should be. Tell me first of all, as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, how does this make you feel?

[00:26:40] Berta Valle: At the beginning when he was arrested, when he was detained, I mean, Felix was clear that this could happen. You know, people ask me why didn't he leave the country. Well, first of all, because he was already under, he was already under house arrest in some way, so it was hard.

[00:27:01] Berta Valle: But because he was committed, you know, he stayed there to fight the fight. So, at the beginning, when everything happened, I was very mad. I was upset, you know, because I felt abandoned. My husband decided to stay in Nicaragua instead of coming and taking care of his family. But then I start doing this advocacy.

[00:27:28] Berta Valle: I mean that right after he was captured, I came out with this press conference saying, you know, denouncing what happened and saying that we were going to do this advocacy, and you know, you don't have any option. That the life of this person is on risk, so you have to save them.

[00:27:51] Berta Valle: It's an honor for me to appear before you today to bring awareness on the ongoing crisis of democracy and human rights in Nicaragua.

[00:28:02] C. Yulin Cruz: For the past year, Berta has tirelessly campaigned for the release of her husband and the other political prisoners in Nicaragua. She has spoken to world leaders at the Geneva Summit, the Oslo Freedom Forum, and everywhere else she could be heard. Making her case and sharing her story.

[00:28:24] Berta Valle: In 2019, my husband, Felix Maradiaga, stood here on this same stage and said that he saw the seed of hope being planted in Nicaragua. Today he's imprisoned together with more than 180 political prisoners. I am here to continue his fight against the cruelest human rights abuses my country has ever seen in peace time.

[00:28:54] C. Yulin Cruz: Berta has become a powerful voice for democracy in her own right, and in doing so, has discovered more about herself, her country, and her husband.

[00:29:09] Berta Valle: But then during the process of learning how to do advocacy and learning everything that he was doing, you know, working with the grassroots, working with the victims, talking to the mothers of those that were killed by the regime, you know, understanding how the opposition was trying to organize and mobilize.

[00:29:30] Berta Valle: So when I entered that world that I, I barely knew, I started understanding how important was what Felix was doing, and then I understood that it was not that he left his family, it was that he knew that his family was going to support him. And he knew that he could, could count on me.

[00:30:02] C. Yulin Cruz: Are, are you doing this advocacy for him,

[00:30:06] C. Yulin Cruz: for you, for Nicaragua, for Alejandra, or for everybody?

[00:30:16] Berta Valle: Definitely, this had become a broader thing, you know? So of course I start doing it for Felix, right, because my husband was in prison. But then again, I, I started talking with the mother, for example, the mothers of those that were killed, and you hear them. It's impossible not to feel empathy for them and to understand that justice has to be delivered to them.

[00:30:52] C. Yulin Cruz: I had a friend that once told me, you cannot lead a normal life, so that my daughters can lead a normal life. . So in a way, you and your daughter and Felix's mother and Felix, what you are really doing is you're using your, your bodies and your mind, and your spirit as a platform for change. When Felix comes out, do you expect that you would both say, you know, our job is done, or will you say, a chapter of our lives is done. Now we need to continue the fight.

[00:31:36] Berta Valle: Something that I have learned is that you cannot really plan for the future. RIght now, I am in this mood of living for the today. No. But what I really would like to do is to be a mother for Alejandra. That's what I wanna do.

[00:32:05] Berta Valle: She didn't enjoy, she didn't enjoy the mother that I wanted to be because I, you know, I have to take this role. So I would definitely support whatever decision Felix takes. I mean, if he get out of the prison and he wants to go back to Nicaragua and fight for Nicaragua, well, that's his decision, but I definitely will like to focus on her.

[00:32:36] C. Yulin Cruz: I want to thank you for taking this time to be with us. I want to thank you for being vulnerable because, as women we are sometimes taught that when you're vulnerable, you cannot be powerful. And, and what you have talked about is something that is very dear to us at Sheroics, the power of love.

[00:33:01] C. Yulin Cruz: Love makes you do things that you thought you couldn't do. Love makes you do things that you thought you would never do. And love gives you the strength to push on. Alejandra will look back in her life and know that her mother did what she had to do. Not only for her father, but for her, and for also you. You have proven that it is only with love that we can really lead.

[00:33:35] Berta Valle: And, and you know what something interesting also that happened is that during all this process, which is of course, it's painful, I have learned that I'm really capable of doing a lot of things that I never thought. You know, and I, and I, and, and that's been like, um, also like a healing process for me.

[00:34:01] Berta Valle: You know, I was very scared of not having the correct words or not knowing information that is relevant. But at the end I understood that it, it was not about that. It was about, what you mentioned it was about love. It's about just connecting why as humans, what is happening in Nicaragua is important.

[00:34:27] C. Yulin Cruz: It's also about taking the time to appreciate the little things in life and watching her daughter grow up to be a powerful woman herself.

[00:34:40] Berta Valle: So at the end you have this girl that is just growing and, and she has her character and the, the way she speaks. She says, mom, I'm your mini me

[00:34:56] Berta Valle: So, we went to the Oslo Freedom Forum. I took her to New York because it was close and, and, and I want her to see what I'm doing when I'm not with her. And so we were getting ready for the trip, and she saw a suit. A girl suit in the store. And she said, mom, you have to buy me that suit because if I'm going to the Oslo Freedom Forum, I have to look like you.

[00:35:26] Berta Valle: So I'm like, oh my God. And, and it bought her that suit and she looks amazing.

[00:35:35] C. Yulin Cruz: We find Sheros in every community, and I'm sure everyone listening knows one that they can talk about. Well, we want to hear from you. We want you to tell us about those Sheroes that change your community every single day. Maybe they're not on the six o'clock news, but they should be because they do extraordinary things.

[00:35:55] C. Yulin Cruz: So email us at [email protected] with your story. Who knows? Maybe their sheroics will be featured on an upcoming episode.

[00:36:08] C. Yulin Cruz: Sheroics is an Ozy studios production. I'm your host, Yulin Cruz. This episode was produced and engineered by Pamela Lorence and written by Sean Braswell. Make sure to follow Sheroics on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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The Mothers of Uvalde
14 dec 2022· Sheroics
Uvalde, Texas sits at a literal crossroads. U. S. highways 83, from Canada to Mexico, and 90 from Florida to California cross right through the middle of town. But the city is at a different crossroads, too; an emotional one. It's at the intersection of fear, cultural division and grief - all of which were amplified by the horror that took place on May 24th, 2022. A gunman opened fire at Robb Elementary School, killing 19 children and two teachers. Police stood for over an hour in a hallway outside the classroom while the shooting was in progress. Over the last year, much has been revealed about the inaction that day. We recently learned the Uvalde County Sheriff’s office didn't have an active shooter policy in place, and a senior law enforcement official on the scene didn't complete an active shooter training course. But, we also learned about the brave citizens who stepped up that day and who have continued to work for systemic changes that will improve the lives of Uvalde citizens and, hopefully, prevent another tragedy. Angela Villescaz, founder of the Fierce Madres, tells her story to Yulin Cruz.

Transcript:

On May 24th, 2022, there was yet another mass shooting in the United States.

We are following the breaking news out of Texas and it is heartbreaking news.

This one at an elementary school in Texas, in a town called Uvalde, just west of San Antonio.

Tonight inside the unspeakable horror. Officers running to the scene with the 18 year old gunman already inside Rob Elementary where second, third, and fourth graders were in the middle of their day. Authorities say he got in through a back door, slipping into a classroom and opening fire on fourth graders and their two teachers.

The gunman killed 19 children and two teachers, while police stood for over an hour in a hallway outside the classroom they were in. In the wake of the tragedy, devastated parents and residents sought answers from the local school board.

And I can't help but wonder if they just didn't find our children worthy of being saved.

The town's collective grief soon turned into collective action.

More calls for action in Uvalde today. The families of the children who were killed and local teachers lined the city plaza calling for change. Organizations, We Are Your voice, Esse, and Fierce Madres are pledging to rally every weekend.

The group Fierce Madres has been especially vocal since the shooting in Uvalde. Its members are proud, passionate women; mothers, and grandmothers who are determined to hold those in power accountable, and make their schools and communities a safer place.

I've always been fearless. The founder of Fierce Madres is Angela Villescaz.

She attended Robb Elementary as a child and lived in Uvalde most of her life. She is known to many in the community just as Tia Angie.

I believe that something good can come out of all of this.

I'm Yulin Cruz. In this episode of Sheroics we are going to talk with Angela Villescaz and hear more about Fierce Madres and what it takes to turn an unspeakable tragedy into a force for change in the world.

The day after the shooting in Uvlade, Texas Governor Abbott held a press conference. It had been just four years since another school shooting in Santa Fe, Texas had killed eight students and two teachers.

As horrible as what happened, it could have been worse. The reason it was not worse is because law enforcement officials did what they do.

So it all started at the press conference where I'm the woman in the black hat standing behind Beto O'Rourke.

Beto O'Rourke, a democrat, was running against Abbott in the Texas Governor's race, and he was not happy with the official response to Uvalde.

Governor Abbott. I have to say something. The time, the time for you to have stopped this was was after Santa Fe.

Sit Down!

After that press conference, I went to the Uvalede Memorial Hospital to see if there was any families there that, that I could help or meet with.

But no one there survived.

Angela returned to her car in the hospital parking lot.

And I was sitting in my vehicle with the window rolled down and gentleman came up to me and said he felt bad that he was with the press, but that they didn't make it in time to the press conference.

He said, would it be okay, we're from Austin, Texas and can we do an interview? And so I said, sure. And the lady came out from behind the vehicle and she seemed a little hesitant to do it in public. She wanted to go to the side of the hospital wall to get a little privacy. And I agreed. And so during the interview, I said something like, Hispanic moms, you may not know much about our culture, but one thing about us, even though we're quiet and we've been ignored and neglected, but one thing about us is you do not mess with our kids.

And so I said, we're gonna do something about this, I promise you. And the reporter just started bawling. She was just crying. So she made a TikTok the following day on her personal account. And so she contacted me the day after that and she said, I'm so sorry, I should have probably asked your permission, but I made a TikTok and it went viral and I used the clip that you spoke about Hispanic moms, and now there's thousands of women asking who you are.

And she's like, do you mind if I tell them? And I said, sure. And so, these women, they were hashtagging Hispanic Moms United. And so they were saying things like, who's this woman? You know, I wanna be a part of anything she creates. And, we just, I wanna be a part of her movement. And so I really felt like I had to now live up to that because I had said we were gonna do something about it.

Now I had to keep that promise. And that's how I came up with the name Fierce Madres.

So did, did you come up with the idea of fierce madres because, you know, now I am committed. Right? As often happens, I, I speak up, I stand up because, you know, it's the internal act of saying I have to do something and then I verbalize that by speaking up and now I really have to do something.

Now the time for action, I think you call it, action without fear, actions without fear.

Yeah. Taking action, but fearlessly. I've always, my whole life been a Mexican-American activist wanting equality, wanting, I've been recruiting candidates across Texas for a while, so I already knew the conditions we were in in Uvalde with that type of demographic.

So that's not new for me. That's new for these parents, but not, not for me. I dunno how to best explain, I've always been fearless.

Angela is not only fearless, as a political organizer and someone who works with survivors of abuse and trauma, she was made for this moment.

My background is I've spent over 20 years working with survivors of domestic violence, sexual assault, and human trafficking, so it's just real natural for me to always want to be there for women who are survivors.

In the days after the shooting, Angela met another fierce madre, a local farm worker named Angeli Gomez.

I got a call from a friend of hers. I was leaving outta town from Uvalde. It was 10 at night and she calls and says she was, she been friends with Angeli for 10 years, would I like to come by. So I turn my car around and went back and went to her house and met with her.

Angeli Gomez was the Uvalde mother who jumped the fence at Robb Elementary School in order to save the lives of her two kids.

So we are hearing this morning from a mother who ran inside the school in Uvalde Texas to protect her kids. She says that police held her back and handcuffed her, as the shooting unfolded.

Some of the police officers on the local force had known her and were friends with her. They had put her in handcuffs outside of Robb Elementary originally. One of her friends from the police force said, Hey, can you take those off of her? You know, she doesn't need to have that on her. She's going through a custody issue with her boys and stuff. So can you take that off? And he did.

And as soon as he took them off, she says she like kind ducked under his arm and took off.

As soon as they uncuffed me, I jumped that first gate fence and once I jumped it, I went to my son's class.

Gomez showed the same tenacity when it came to helping Angela organize the Fierce Madres group.

She's got a lot of leadership qualities and she's real inclusive.

She's just a, a very outgoing leader. So early on, we formed a bond. You know, and the Washington Post picked up on that. They would kind of watch us make protest signs and they would come over to her house and sit in the living room with us. So that's how we started out.

Slowly, the Fierce Madres and the other Uvalde parents found their voices.

Mainly in the early stages, it was about, I would say, three pretty vocal parents and those individuals, I would admire them. Early on they were just so demanding answers. Demanding answers, and loud.

You have no idea how frustrating this is. No idea. And we're sitting here just listening to empty, empty words. That's all it is. Empty words.

A movement had started and thousands wanted to join in. And sometimes things got a bit crazy, with so many voices wanting to contribute and be heard.

We were just getting loud too. At the school board meetings, towards the end some people joined, uh, got t-shirts that I didn't give 'em, and they were like super loud from San Antonio.

They'd come from outta town. And it kind of scared the locals here and I'm like, wait a minute, I didn't vet you. You're not really in leadership of Fierce Madres. So a lot of co-opting was taking place as well. Lot of weird situations were popping up.

Well, you know, when passion takes over. When people are passionate about things, they may do things that they think are helping, but they're really not helping.

There are people that are not in agreement with the cause and that are there to be instigators of division.

And sabotage the good work you're trying to do.

The first main objective for the Fierce Madres was to hold local officials accountable. They demanded that Uvalde School Police Chief Pete Arredondo be fired.

So I started a Fierce Madres Political Action Committee. So, the first three months we focused on Pete Arredondo right? Accomplished.

But we are gonna begin with breaking news out of Uvalde, Texas.

The city's Police Chief for Schools, Pete Arredondo has been fired for his actions or inactions during the Robb Elementary School massacre back in May. The decision to fire Arredondo came during an emotional school board meeting that included comments from parents of some of those children.

The Fierce Madres didn't stop there. They started advocating for gun reforms, like raising the minimum age to buy an assault style rifle in Texas from 18 to 21. And when the National Rifle Association dared to plan a fundraiser in nearby Hondo, they took action there too.

The Hondo City Council votes to revoke an agreement which would've allowed the Friends of the NRA to hold a fundraiser at a city owned facility.

The actions of the Fierce Madres met with some early success, but they also met with some fierce blowback. From her very first TV interview, Angeli Gomez came under fire.

There's wives and mothers of police officers here that felt she, that her testimony embarrassed them, like we didn't even know how bad it really was.

That was early on. And just the fact that she gave that interview, it, it brought a lot of attention and harassment. I witnessed the harassment and it hasn't ended, it hasn't stopped.

The resistance to change in Uvalde arises from a broader culture of fear that dominates in a community often divided.

The officer who first saw the shooter outside the school could've taken the shot.

But didn't because he felt, he felt that he had to call his supervisor for permission. And that's the kinda fear that the individuals here live under. The community is over 80%, uh, Hispanic, like 84%, but the four men that run it are Anglo. So our county judge is white. Our, our mayor's white, our superintendent is white and our state representative. And so

they call all the shots. And so the culture here is, is this fear of if I shoot this guy I could get fired or worse, you know? And so even yesterday Beto O'Rourke was in town and this lady was standing next to me and wanting a picture with him and she was terrified. And I said, just go stand next to him. Hand me your phone, I'll take a picture for you.

She goes, no, those big cameras that are the media, I won't do it unless they turn their angle away because, and she told Beto, she said, I wanna picture so bad cause my 70 something year old sister prays for you every day. And, and um, it was such an emotional moment, she said, but if that camera captures me, my boss will fire me.

And I've worked there for 38 years and I can't lose my job at 38 years. So she was terrified to do a photo, just to do a photo. And so that's the way it is here. Everyone, the teachers are scared to tell you how they really feel. The cops are scared. There's not many job opportunities here. So if you have a job in one of those fields, either the school, the hospital, or law enforcement, you know, you don't wanna lose your job.

It takes a lot of courage to speak up in Uvalde, especially to ask the tough questions that many don't want asked.

I think anytime we hear there's a school shooting or, or a mass shooting, I think the first question on everyone's mind is, what color was he?

You know, was he black? Was he white? Was he Hispanic? What they thought when they, when they found out that the guy's last name is Ramos, it was like, oh, it couldn't have been racial. He went to a Hispanic school and he did the shooting and he's Hispanic, so it wasn't a white kid or a black kid, but they don't, they don't understand behind that scene how much racism played a part.

The systemic racism in Uvalde, you know, through neglective resources.

That lack of resources can have devastating consequences and may have played a direct role in the shooting.

The 18 year old shooter, no one really wants to talk about it in the families. I try to be respectful. They don't want his name said, they don't want to have any fame after what he did, the shooter.

But I really do believe we need to take a hard look at how he fell through the cracks. How he missed a hundred days of school and they kick him outta school. I, I don't think that's the way you're supposed to handle it. According to federal law, state law, and the resources that were supposed to be spent on, on things like, you know, the depression, that covid led to because of isolation and stuff. Many people dropped the ball. And so you have the town divided.

You have people saying, why are y'all doing this? The only person to blame is the shooter. Ok. Well, let's take a look at how we treated the shooter. You know, there's so much and, and you, you don't offend other side by looking like you're overly compassionate about somebody who's got that mental state.

So it's really tough.

Nobody ever wants to talk about the shooter, and I can understand why. But the point is that these tragedies will continue if we don't in tandem have sensible gun control laws, but also have the ability in our schools to be able to sift through those that need additional help.

Angela Villescaz was active in the Democratic party for a long time, but politics as usual no longer seems enough.

So I had a background in politics, but when May 24th happened, I completely got a whole different lens in life and the rest of my years on the earth I wanna spend protecting children. So I have no interest.

You know, I said I'm done. I called up my state party and said I wanna dissolve any of the chapter that I have built and created, and I want nothing to, I'm not going to the state convention. I want nothing. I'm all for Uvalde. That's it.

Many of the other Fierce Madres are all for Uvalde, too.

What makes a person go through a difficult situation like they have been through, turn that into a positive force for change? What made you say, I'm leaving everything behind, and I'm putting all my effort in changing Uvalde?

Yeah. I think on the first question that may include even like parents who have gotten turned into activists or running for office, I think that it could possibly be part of it being therapeutic for them in, in, in handling their grief and, and in the healing process. Feeling like I gotta do something for my child. So they didn't die in vain. So I need to stay busy, busy, busy, active, active, active in order for my child's life to mean something. And for me, the hardest thing I've ever experienced. And I thought, what does it matter if the people in Uvalde, I just don't like, I don't like politics.

I don't like politicians on either side of the aisle because in this experience I learned that the Santa Fe shooting in Texas, those survivors contacted me. They did the same thing. They worked so hard and they finally got SB 11, a bill passed. And then guess what? It had no teeth. So they warned me. They're like, Angie, if you're gonna go down this road and you're gonna put everything into it, just know that even if you get the bills passed that you want, the school boards have sovereign immunity.

And so like the things that they're supposed to do, like making sure substitute teachers have keys issued to them so they can lock the doors and, and keep the kids safe, those kinda things. They're not doing it. So that's tough. But to me it's more like I, I truly believe I'm a woman of faith, I believe that something good can come outta all of this. I don't, I don't believe that we should just move on and not accept what is it that, what is it that God's trying to show us?

And it is that belief, that something good can come from all of this, that drives Angela still.

My goal is to have the level of passion. And people describe me as very passionate, but to have what you guys had in Puerto Rico, oh my God. I'm like, why can't we be like that when Ricky Martin was on top of that truck with the flag and how y'all, I'm like, whoa.

I would love to be a part of something like that. What you, man.

I think it's the same movement. And at Sheroics we often talk about the power of love, right?

Right.

Power of love for your community, the power of love for your country, the power of love for your children. Most of these women that you're dealing with, and these parents, cuz we, we cannot forget that they're, they're also males that are being very open about how they feel, probably never thought they would be in a position where their voice would resonate all over the United States and would become symbols, right? If you ask, if you ask Angeli, are you, are you a shero, she would probably say no, but when we saw her getting cuffed, getting uncuffed, running over that fence, taking her two children and, and, and, you know, uh, getting 'em to safety. Then we say, damn, you know?

Yeah.

That's some fearless behavior, which people do when love is bigger than anything else. When your goal is love, and especially I, I loved what you said: you may not know a lot about our culture, but you don't mess with our family. And you definitely do not mess with our children, right?

That's right.

What is next for FIerce Madres?

We're gonna do a lot more work with our allies like Moms Demand Action, Every Town For Gun Safety. I'm interested to see what we can do in the state legislature. So I know we're gonna be pretty loud in that sense. We're gonna fight hard for that. Whatever our students, our children deserve in Texas, they're gonna get it and nobody better mess with that. That's where you're going to see a lot from Fierce Madres.

There is so much at stake here. Nobody wants another Uvalde or Santa Fe.

We owe it. Every single one of us owes it to children. We, we, they're just children. They depend on us to protect them, and we need to protect them with our laws, with the norms of our society. We, we just can't keep living like this. We can't.

And thanks to brave women like Angela Villescaz and Angeli Gomez, we know that we have people on the front lines of this fight willing to take on those in power and do what is necessary to bring about change.

There's a saying that says, don't mess with Texas. This is: don't mess with the Madres. That's right. That's right. This time they messed with the wrong madres. They messed with the wrong mothers. They touched the wrong kids. So we'll bring that change.

The names of the 19 children and two teachers who perished in Uvlade should not be forgotten. Each one of them represents broken hearts and broken lives. They should have opened their eyes this morning. They were someone's daughter, son, brother. Somebody's sister, granddaughter, grandson, and so much more.

They are another painful reminder of the thousands of lives lost to gun violence every year.

Nevaeh Bravo, Jacklyn Cazares, Makenna Elrod, Jose Manuel Flores Jr., Eliahna Garcia, Irma Garcia, Uziyah Garcia, Amerie Jo Garza, Xavier Lopez, Jayce Luevanos, Tess Mata, Maranda Mathis, Eva Mireles, Alithia Ramirez, Annabell Rodriguez, Maite Rodriguez, Alexandria Rubio, Layla Salazar, Jailah Silguero, Eliahna Torres, Rojelio Torres.

We find sheroes in every community, and I'm sure everyone listening knows one that they can talk about. Well, we want to hear from you. We want you to tell us about those sheroes that change your community every day. Maybe they're not on the six o'clock news, but they should be. Because they do extraordinary things.

So email us at sheroes at Ozy dot com with your story. Who knows? Maybe their sheroics will be featured on an upcoming episode. Sheroics is an Ozy production. I'm your host, Yulin Cruz. This episode was produced and engineered by Pamela Lorence and written by Sean Braswell. Make sure to follow Sheroics on Apple podcast and subscribe on Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever your get your podcasts.
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The Women of Torres de Francia
7 dec 2022· Sheroics
Meet the Women of Torres de Francia. After Hurricane Maria devastated the island of Puerto Rico in 2017, a small group of women from a local housing project in San Juan rushed into action by organizing community soup kitchens and feeding hundreds of families. They saved lives and their efforts became a model that was replicated across the country.

Transcript

It's been more than five years since Hurricane Maria struck Puerto Rico in September, 2017. But for those of us who lived through Maria and its aftermath, it still feels like yesterday. The category four storm devastated our island. It led to unimaginable hardship and misfortune, but in every taleof suffering there is another story, one of overcoming.

When I recently returned to Puerto Rico, my home, Maria was at the forefront of my mind, and so were a group of women who still inspire me.

I visited the women at their home, a public housing project called Torres de Francia, located in a very poor neighborhood in San Juan, the capital of Puerto Rico. The day Hurricane Maria struck and the days that followed still haunt the residents of that community.

It was raining very late at night. It was also windy, but when the water began to pour in through the windows, I went into a state of panic. My apartment was completely filling with water. I didn't know what to do. I couldn't get the water out. The more I tried to push the water out, the more the water came in.

Maria turned public housing projects like Torres de Francia into human prisons, potential death traps. But the women who lived there quickly turned panic into action, setting up a makeshift kitchen to feed hundreds in their community. When I saw these brave women again, I remembered why they have remained tattooed on my soul from the moment I met them five years ago.

Their passion towards the wellbeing of others, their relentless pursuit of what was right for their community, even when faced with disaster is still palpable.

When there is a crisis and people's lives are at stake, there are only two options. You either stand up and speak up and take on whatever, or whomever you must, or you stand down and be quiet and allow yourself to become complicit to a narrative that will only end up costing more lives. So standing up is not only something that has to be done, it is something we have to be committed to doing.

The women of Torres de Francia never thought they had an option, a plan B. They just did what had to be done. They knew after Maria hit their community faced starvation if they did not act quickly. Sometimes doing the most ordinary thing, like cooking, is the most heroic thing that can be done under extraordinary circumstances, and it begins with a simple act of will.

We're going to start from scratch, but we are starting.

Welcome to Sheroics, a new podcast from Ozy. I'm Yulín Cruz. I was the mayor of San Juan when Hurricane Maria tore across Puerto Rico. In my career as a public servant, I've been fortunate to witness what it takes to fight today's battles for social change. Sheroics, it's about women creating transformational change for the world, and they're doing it one community at a time.

Each episode, we will meet an activist, advocate or citizen working to make her corner of the planet a better place. These are the stories of women who lead from the heart. Stories we hope might inspire you to take action when your time comes.

I wanted to begin this series with a personal story that is very near and dear to my heart. I realized during Hurricane Maria that as long as a tragedy touches another human being, it's also touching me and that I had to use my platform and my voice to help others be heard. I've learned that leadership is not an issue of titles or positions.

Leadership can be found in the most unexpected places. You don't have to be on the six o'clock news to be a leader. Every day in every community, there's almost always a woman or a group of women who are the ones who push things forward and change their corner of the world. The story of the women of Torres de Francia still lives in my heart.

These women exercise the most powerful leadership ever: the power of love.

We had to deal with what we had, and we had to move on, and we got ahead.

The world begins counting with Hurricane Maria, which hit Puerto Rico on September 20th, 2017, but we can't forget the two weeks earlier, Puerto Rico was also hit by Hurricane Irma.

Hurricane Irma, plowing through the Caribbean with 185 mile per hour winds leaving a wake of destruction in her path. Puerto Rico slammed with the one two punch pounding rain and howling winds sent residents searching for cover.

Power was already out in most of Puerto Rico after Irma, but it was slowly, very slowly but surely coming. We had already set up the largest shelter in Puerto Rico, which was at the Roberto Clemente Coliseum in San Juan. Then after everyone in the shelter had found a place to stay or gone back to their homes, that's when we hear another hurricane is coming.

Hurricane Maria, a powerful category four storm is now barreling towards Puerto Rico. We are very, very, very, uh, um, worried. Today in San Juan, a frantic scramble for supplies again just days after Irma. Maria has rapidly intensified. The government now declaring a state of emergency rationing basic provisions like water and baby formula.

The radar showed that Puerto Rico would disappear completely under Maria. We had about 16 hours of total silence as the storm swallowed the island.

Then, around seven o'clock that night, I went out with some members of the Emergency Management Office to explore the damage. There were still tropical storm winds. Because I don't weigh very much, they had to strap me to a car with a rope so that the wind would not blow me away.

I've never seen a war zone. I've only seen pictures. And in those pictures of wars, you see the desolation, the stillness, and that's what I saw. It was eerie. The silence, the total silence is only broken by the cry of someone who needed help. And that's when we knew we needed to go out every night to search for those who needed us.

Late that night, we started doing exactly that. We would find people that needed help and we brought them back to the shelter.

The first pictures now coming in from Puerto Rico after taking a direct hit. Hurricane Maria slamming into the island. And as you heard one official saying the island is destroyed. 150 mile an hour winds, ripping buildings apart, knocking out power everywhere.

All of the electricity is out tonight.

Things got worse by the hour. There was no running water, no communications, no working elevators. Buildings were becoming human cages, especially for people with mobility issues. It was tough to get help. It was even tough to get news. And on top of that, we were not getting much help from FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Agency, even though Puerto Rico had been a US territory, a colony of the United States since 1898. People had to become the first line of response.

Puerto Rico's in need of many things, massive amounts of food and water being delivered, but getting them distributed certainly is a challenge on that island.

Let me tell you what FEMA thought was food. I keep a photograph of that FEMA care package, and I still get mad just looking at it. The package had potato chips, beef jerky, chocolate pudding, apple sauce, and I will never forget this, a perfectly wrapped package with a plastic fork, knife, spoon, salt and pepper. What the heck were we going to need the salt and pepper for? FEMA would come and leave the food packages with the local leaders and then leave. It was soon evident that the US government was not going to do more.

I had had enough.

I am mad as hell. I beg you to take charge and save lives. We are dying here and I cannot fathom the thought that the greatest nation in the world cannot not figure out logistics for a small island.

Fortunately, relief started to pour in from other sources. Volunteers arrived from New York, supplies from the diaspora in Chicago Operation Blessing, food and water from Florida and from Goya, Chobani, Tres Monjitas, Suiza Dairy,

Core and other companies and non-governmental organizations. We formed a massive food collection and distribution center in the Coliseum with beans, rice, milk, Chocolate Cortes, and other vital supplies.

Thanks to this relief, we were able to give breakfast, lunch, and dinner to about 65 elderly homes across San Juan. I happened to visit one of these homes a couple of weeks after Maria hit. They had run out of water and out of diesel for their generators. While I was out in front of the home, a woman approached me on the street.

She said, "we're from Torres de Francia", and she pointed to the public housing building behind her. "We need your help". I thought so does everybody else. But there was something about the way she looked at me. Most people that we saw had given up. You could tell it in their eyes. They have that glazed stare that looks at nothing. But Luz Griselle Vasquez Rodriguez had this sharp look on her face. They say the eyes are the windows of the soul. Well, she took the windows out and shot right through my soul, and I could tell that she wasn't gonna give up and she wasn't gonna take no for an answer. I could tell this was a woman with a mission and that nothing was going to distract her from that mission.

I saw some of myself in her. I saw some of my mother in her, some of my grandmother in her, so I told her I would be there soon. She told me, "I am going to hold you to it."

At first, the inhabitants of Torres de Francia, like everyone else in Puerto Rico had been knocked off their feet by Maria.

There were a lot of people crying, a lot of people who were sad, and it was tough to see. It was very hard what we went through.

Everyone in the community faced the same level of devastation.

No one can say I'm worse than you because we're all living in the same situation.

You have to be able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. If I feel like this, how would a person that doesn't have anything feel?

Luz Griselle took me around the building where the women of Torres de Francia had begun to build a community kitchen, just outside. They had scavenged anything they could find from the rubble.

They had taken wood from the debris to build fires to cook over making sure the wood was dry before using it. These are the little details, the thousands upon thousands of small acts of logistics that make a difference. Soon, the women had the ability to cook for over 400 families. Lunch and dinner, large plots, cooking over wooden fires.

They didn't wait for anyone to help them. They asked around for anything people could spare, that they could cook. Beans, sauce, rice, meat. They put together their own community kitchen.

Five years later talking to them, I can see the tears welling up in the women's eyes. And I tell you, I get teary myself thinking about what they accomplished. These women said, we're gonna do what comes natural to us. We're not only gonna feed our family, we're gonna feed everyone's family.

My mom taught me never to give up. My mom was not the easiest, but when she wanted something done, she would do it no matter what. She never gave up. She said, I'm going to do this. I'm going to do it. I am going to do it. I'm going to do it!

And in a situation of life and death, it means a lot when you're taking the bread from your mouth and giving it to someone else that you recognize as more vulnerable. It is a lifeline. You put someone on the path to life and take them away from the path of death. These women did it without missing a beat. There was a rhythm to it. There was a let's get it done attitude all the time. Every single day. Every single day. And that type of perseverance is contagious.

It breeds hope.

I always say the same thing. Better times will come. The world doesn't end here.

Very quickly, the women of Torres de Francia became an example of how to weather the storm literally, and how to move forward. Whatever you do, just look ahead. There's no time for tears, although they shed tears. There's no time for emotion, although what moved them with pure and raw emotion.

There's no time for weakness.

We must keep moving forward. We have to be resilient. We must reinvent ourselves. We have to keep on going because it's not like the kids know that they don't have food.

Not long after I met the women of Torres de Francia I took them to the Coliseum. When they saw the food that we had collected, I remember them holding each other and crying. They knew that they were going to be able to continue to do good in their community, to give a lifeline to people in need. I don't think there's anything more important to a woman than making sure her family eats and survives, and here these women are not just helping their immediate families, they're taking the word community and giving it a whole different spin, saying, not on my watch.

You're not going to go hungry on my watch. You're not going to die on my watch.

And that strength and resilience will help guard their community against future disasters and setbacks.

The need is there and we will have the need again, because Maria is not going to be the only storm that is going to pass through Puerto Rico.

And they were right. As of this taping Hurricane Fiona brought devastating losses and historic flooding to Puerto Rico. An island wide black out struck. Many people were cut off from services and had no access to clean water.

It was evident we had wasted five years in the reconstruction process. And that we were no further ahead than on that September of 2017.

The state of emergency in Puerto Rico. At this hour, hurricane Fiona is slamming the island with 85 mile per hour sustained winds. The governor of Puerto Rico is calling the damage catastrophic.

The women of Torres de Francia showed us that people are not waiting for the government to do everything people need.

If they have the raw material to do it themselves, they do it. Sometimes we think helping people means giving them what we think they need, but often helping is just about being a platform for them to achieve what they know they need. When other people and organizations came over to us and said, we need help in the community, I would respond, do you have a place where you can cook.

I would talk to the women of the community and say, all right, if you can cook, I can give you the food. Using the model set up in Torre de Francia, we put together 26 additional community kitchens around San Juan and a 27th for the students of the University of Puerto Rico. It was amazing. The organization was impeccable.

What happened as a result of those women at Torres de Francia was that communities began to understand that the strength was within them and that they didn't need to look outside of the community. Their heroes were living amongst them. They were already there.

I asked the women of Torres de Francia if they consider themselves to be heroes.

No, not at all. I understand that what I did, I will always do because I will help those in need.

But to do what they did, you need a good heart. And the most powerful tool these women had was their ability to love and lead with an open heart. When all there is around you is darkness, literal darkness, then acts of love are like sparks of lightning.

In a situation like that, when we're all having problems with our necessities, I believe it's not thinking about taking credit for being the hero, but how to help each other as a community.

For me, this isn't the story of women cooking to feed people. This is a story of women using food as a platform to redirect desperation and instill hope.

They used food to engage and they engaged because they love. And as a result, they did what FEMA couldn't do. And I often wonder to this day, how can the experts not get it done, when these women did get it done? That's what, to me, makes them sheroes. They took a very difficult situation and they brought life out of the clutches of death.

They took care of one another. They became the ultimate relief organization.

People often ask, so how are things in Puerto Rico? And of course they're hoping for the good answer. They're hoping for, oh, every home is fixed. The electrical grid is working fine. The problem is that this is the crisis that just keeps on going. The electrical grid remains unstable, we had a political unrest, two earthquakes, and then the pandemic, and of course, hurricane Fiona after that.

This morning across Puerto Rico, an urgent power struggle, frequent blackouts at times impacting hundreds of thousands of people.

We are having, practically weekly shutdowns. Four years ago, hurricanes Irma and Maria slammed into the island decimating Puerto Rico's already crumbling infrastructure. Now, officials say the island's power grid is in critical condition.

There are also more than 200 schools that could not open at the beginning of the school year because of the poor conditions they are experiencing. So this is a crisis that has not been fixed.

My grandmother used to say, did you start the fight? She expected the answer to be no. She would then ask, did you finish the fight? I learned that you may not start the fight, but you must always, always finish it no matter what. No matter what the odds are or the price you must pay, you must always finish the fight.

And these women of Torres de Francia, these sheroes, they keep on fighting. They fight every day for their children and their community, and they are determined to finish this fight.

We find heroes in every community, and I'm sure everyone listening knows one that they can talk about. Think about it. We want to hear from you. We want you to tell us about those sheroes that change your community every day. Maybe they're not on the six o'clock news, but they should be because they do extraordinary things.

So email us at [email protected] with your story. Who knows? Maybe their sheroics will be featured on an upcoming episode.

Sheroics is an Ozy production. I'm your host, Yulín Cruz. This episode was produced and engineered by Pamela Lorence. And written by Sean Braswell. Special thanks to Tim Rogers, Roberto Tito Terro in Puerto Rico and Bev Watson. Make sure to follow Sheroics on Apple Podcasts and subscribe on Spotify, iHeartRadio, or wherever you get your podcasts.
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17 nov 2022· Sheroics
What does it take to fight today’s battles for social change? From the minds at OZY comes a new podcast about women creating transformational change in their communities. Hosted by author, advocate, and iconic former Mayor of San Juan, Puerto Rico, Carmen Yulín Cruz, each episode of Sheroics introduces you to an activist, public servant, or citizen working to make her corner of the planet a better place, and celebrates the stories of brave women who have responded to the injustices that life throws at them by finding the strength to fight back and forge new paths forward.
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Afleveringen

A Family Legacy Continues

Making a Better World Inevitable - Jess Morales Rocketto

Mission to Save The Mission

Nicaragua’s Voice for Freedom

The Mothers of Uvalde

The Women of Torres de Francia

Sheroics Trailer