Latino Professionals Association Celebrates Yo Soy: Rewriting People’s Histories
Through Midwest Mujeres, Araceli Esparza helps women of color and others collaborate and to find their voices and define their personal narratives.
Part 1 of 2
By Jonathan Gramling
Interviewing Araceli Esparza is like listening to a poem being read. While you think you understand it as you hear the words, just to make sure, when you read it — or transcribe it — you have to make sure you are unpacking it and understanding its full meaning. It isn’t linear. It’s more like a stream of thought that drifts over us as we conduct the interview.
Esparza is a poet after all whose work has been included in 11 anthologies. She also writes for children when she isn’t engaged with Midwest Mujeres, an online community that she founded several years ago during the early days of the pandemic. Her roots are in Mexico while she has spent most of her life in the Midwest.
“We are from Guanajuato,” Esparza said. “My grandmother came first and then my mother did. My grandmother was already a resident because she came in 1923 when she was six-months old, part of a bracero program. I’ve had so many beautiful experiences from all of the seasons. My mother and grandmother came here in the early 1970s when Centro Guadalupe was on Beld Street. I have fond memories of being part of the first Hispanic Church."
And while she often appears in public and online by herself, she has a strong family life behind her.
“We are celebrating 15 years of marriage,” Esparza said. “My parents were married for like two years. Both my husband and I came from families of divorced parents. We found each other and he was undocumented when we met. It’s been such a journey. I’m thankful for the community that loves us together and keep us together. I wouldn’t be able to do half of what I do without him. He helps me with everything like carrying heavy things to taking care of our kids to just being a supporter of my creativity and all of the volunteer stuff that we do together. He went golfing with me with LPA. It was the first time for both of us. Of course, he did better than I did. He didn’t know anything about golf and he did it and we had fun.”
Esparza has lived a very enriched life. While she grew up in a household of limited means, she got an undergraduate degree from the University of Minnesota and an MFA in children’s literature as well. In many ways, she is a Renaissance woman.
“I moved up from organizer to leading different non-profit organizations in southern Wisconsin in marketing and development,” Esparza said about her professional career. “I have a lot of experience in conducting fundraisers, strategic planning for outreach, executing programs, social media marketing, all of that. And now I work as a speaker for diversity, equity and inclusion, specifically speaking to storytelling and the importance of storytelling in honoring the storyteller. Organizations utilize storytellers, but they don’t compensate them. They don’t compensate the communities from which they come. We want the stories to ignite donations to ignite a movement ‘Well What about the Storyteller?’ I am a speaker about that position and how we can move away from complacency into action, doing real action. I talk a lot about that in my speaking career.”
She also produced an animated short film based upon scenes from her childhood for PBS.
“It was nominated for an Emmy,” Esparza said. “It’s 4-5 minutes long. It’s all about living in Wisconsin. There is a young girl and she has a different family. And it’s a lot about my own story. Growing up in an apartment community and everyone is talking about everyone’s news. Who did they play with? And there were all of these different intersectional identities. It’s called Las Chicas y Chicos de Blossom Street. Blossom Street is a real street here in Madison. The characters are all fictional. I have the child of an activist in there. I have two kids where one child might be transitioning. There is gender bending in there. There is another child in there who has two fathers. Another child is in a wheelchair. All of these characters come together on Blossom Street. And they are just having fun. It makes me want to cry every time I watch it. There is a beautiful piece there where Amada is in her wheelchair. They never told her she couldn’t walk. They told her she could fly moving her wheelchair. I was so present when I was reading this. I even hired a speech coach, Dina Martinez. She is a local transgender comedian here in town. I hired her as my voice coach. And one thing that she stressed to me was how I really needed to envision and be there. I had to make myself literally embody these characters. It can be hard after you’ve read your story a whole bunch of times and you read it and you edited it. That day in the recording studio, I could feel Dina’s presence pushing me to really embody the emotions of these children. I truly enjoyed recording it.”
And then there is Midwest Mujeres, which utilizes all of her past personal and professional experiences to create an online collective.
“Everything from my degrees to working in the community helped me grow this idea of having a new organization, a foundation, a digital online community center for women to exchange information, access resources,” Esparza said. “I truly believe that my work is making an impact for other women of color living in the Midwest who feel isolated from their communities and their culture because we live in a 90 percent white society, because of the political division that we have going on in our state and now more than ever, with abortion being so restricted it certainly helped amplify those resources for women now more than ever and create a safe space where they can talk about those challenges.”
Next issue: Midwest Mujeres and Decolonization