Puerto Rican. Mexican. Colombian. Cuban. Salvadoran. These are just a few of the nationalities that make up Richmond’s Latino communities. But identity is so much more than a label — each individual encompasses a unique set of characteristics and cultural traditions that span generations. According to the 2020 U.S. Census, there were more than 90,000 people who identify as Hispanic or Latino living in Richmond, Henrico, Hanover and Chesterfield — and that number is growing.
Many Latinos are stereotyped due to language and cultural differences, but Latinos contribute to the rich diversity of Richmond’s culture and help the region to grow and thrive.
To commemorate Hispanic Heritage Month (Sept. 15-Oct. 15), we spoke with six Latino Richmonders who celebrate their roots and are working to cultivate a region that welcomes all. They share their thoughts on relocating to the area, cultural identity, what it’s like to be Latino in Richmond, and what we all can do to create a more inclusive and equitable future.
Speaking Up
Marketing professional Fernando Rodríguez takes time for teachable moments
Fernando Rodríguez (Photo by Monica Escamilla)
Raised in Puerto Rico, Fernando Rodríguez lived in Tallahassee, Florida, for 25 years before moving to Richmond in 2016. A marketing professional, he’s working remotely as the senior art and communications director of the Hispanic Communications Network based in Washington, D.C. One of the largest campaigns he’s involved with is the Biden-Harris administration’s “We Can Do This” public education campaign, assisting with developing TV commercials, print materials and social media content to share COVID-19 vaccination information with Spanish-speaking communities.
Rodríguez relocated to Richmond to live with his boyfriend, now husband, Jason Fair, but when he first arrived in Richmond, he says he didn’t feel welcome. Trying to find a job in public relations or advertising, Rodríguez says he would go to interviews and share his resume as an award-winning graphic designer with more than 20 years of experience and a background in Hispanic marketing but was shocked by the responses he received.
“To my surprise, the answer that they would give me is like, ‘Oh, we don’t do that here, and you shouldn’t be saying Hispanic marketing because it’s not really a thing for Richmond,’ ” Rodríguez recalls. “And it was not just one, it was several places that I would go to that I would receive the same response, and I would have to just kind of excuse myself saying, ‘Well, this is part of my expertise that I bring to the table, it’s part of my experience, it’s something that I’m passionate about, but I don’t want you to pigeonhole me in just Hispanic marketing.’ And that’s what it would eventually become.”
Though he doesn’t have an answer for why he experienced what he did, Rodríguez is giving the benefit of the doubt that it wasn’t due to racial prejudice. “I think there was a little bit of age discrimination, a little bit of that stigma, or just let’s say ignorance, of what Hispanic marketing is,” he says.
Though he experienced culture shock initially, Rodríguez says now that he loves Richmond.
In his daily life, respectfully speaking up is something that he feels strongly about, because when you witness prejudice and say nothing, nothing will change, he says.
“I know that sometimes there is something in our DNA that we want to just move on or let it be or not be confrontational,” he says, “but I think that speaking up and not excusing wrong behavior is the way to go, and it’s something that might change the other person, or it might not, but at least you feel good that you were able to express how you feel and what you believe in.”
Rodríguez says open communication breeds less divisiveness, and one way to rally community is through festivals such as Viva RVA!, which he organized with Diversity Richmond. It’s a multievent celebration honoring Virginia’s Latinx LGBTQ+ community that includes a music festival. Though the event was canceled this year due to the pandemic, he says it’s one way for people to come together through food, music and conversation.
“It doesn’t have to be complicated,” he says.
Tackling Prejudice
Tanya Gonzalez, executive director of Sacred Heart Center, embraces our shared humanity
Tanya Gonzalez (Photo by Tania Del Carmen)
If you ask Tanya Gonzalez how she identifies culturally, the one-word answer is Latina, but her DNA transcends the label. She was born in Texas at the southern border to a Mexican father and a Caucasian mother whose grandparents emigrated from Czechoslovakia through Ellis Island. She has dual U.S. and Mexican citizenship.
“I personally feel like identity is fluid and not a check-box type of situation,” she says. “So, for me it involves really being able to explain all of these different pieces of me, and there’s pieces that maybe I’m more connected to than others, but all of them compose me.”
She was 14 when her family moved to Richmond in 1990, and she recalls that there were few who identified as Latino at the time. She noticed a lack of Latino representation throughout local organizations, government positions and community boards.
“Even today, I’m the only one in the room depending on where I am or what kind of meeting I’m in, unless it’s in specifically Latinx spaces like Sacred Heart Center,” she says.
Gonzalez is the executive director of the Sacred Heart Center, which serves the needs of Latino families as a conduit for access and equity, as well as adult and youth educational programming and community and family services. She says the Manchester-based center is a safe space where many Latinos feel welcome. Whether intentional or unintentional, that feeling can be lacking in other places around the region.
“It’s also not just about diverse people fitting into what already exists because I don’t know if what already exists is quite working,” she says. “I mean, we have incredible disparities and continued oppression and institutionalized racism, so it does have to be kind of that two-way approach. And we see that even when we talk about immigrant integration: It’s not only about the arriving community, but it’s also about the receiving community — both changing to create something new.”
Stereotypes, racial profiling and preconceived notions related to the color of someone’s skin run rampant even today. It’s something Gonzalez has experienced. Though she was born in the United States, she receives remarks on her lack of an accent and her grasp of the English language.
As a method to tackle prejudice, she uses the term “cultural humility,” the ability to maintain relationships and be open to facets of cultural identity other than one’s own.
“It is being humble enough to take a step back instead of thinking that your culture is the best or the only one or having this U.S.-centric point of view,” she says. “It is taking a pause and really seeking to understand … another person’s culture.”
Gonzalez says cultural humility is beneficial for everyone. The more we interact with other groups, the more inclusive we will become.
“There’s many other cultures and experiences and realities, and it’s what makes us human,” she says. “It makes me think about Sacred Heart Center’s vision that speaks to seeing that shared humanity and being able to see that in whatever person is standing in front of you, no matter what language they speak, what skin color they have, where they’re from.”
Keyris Manzanares (Photo by Monica Escamilla)
Informing Others
Keyris Manzanares’ WRIC 8News Spanish newscast, ‘Hoy en RVA,’ helps break the language barrier
Growing up in Arlington, Keyris Manzanares was exposed to local Spanish-language news outlets. When she moved to Richmond in 2015 to attend Virginia Commonwealth University, she noticed a lack of local access to these sources of information — and she was surprised.
“When I got here, that was kind of my question, ‘Where are the Latinos? Where are these services that I grew up with? Why aren’t they here? Why [is Richmond] so behind?’ ” Manzanares asks.
Her parents emigrated from El Salvador and learned English as they went through the process to become U.S. citizens. They primarily speak Spanish to remain connected to their Salvadoran heritage and to communicate with their friends and neighbors in their Northern Virginia community. Manzanares and her two sisters were raised bilingual, learning Spanish and English at the same time.
“I get this question a lot: ‘What language did you learn first?’ And it always kind of trips me up because I learned both at the same time,” she says. Manzanares would mostly speak English with her sisters and Spanish with her parents.
“As I’ve gotten older, though, I do realize that even though my parents have been here for quite some time, their English is not that great,” she says. “They’re still really attached to who they are, which I feel like makes me who I am, if that makes sense, so that’s kind of my cultural journey. I feel like it has a lot to do with language and food specifically.” (Manzanares often cooks Salvadoran dishes she learned from her mother.)
Pursuing a career in journalism, Manzanares always thought she would first work in Spanish-language news and make a transition to English later, but after noting the lack of access to Spanish media in the Richmond area, she thought about where someone like her parents would go for local information.
“If you don’t have news to filter that important stuff out, most of the time you’re going to be out of the loop, especially if you’re working 12-hour days and don’t have time to try and find a translation somewhere,” she says.
When Manzanares (a former Richmond magazine intern) was hired at WRIC 8News in 2019, she wanted to establish a Spanish-speaking newscast. After adjusting to her role and the development process, she created “Hoy en RVA,” a series of video news updates that usually run about a minute long and are added to the station’s website every weekday.
She’s aware that some people may not understand the need for Spanish-language news, but she says the mass awakening that has been ignited over the past year to racial disparities and inequity has proven that now more than ever, we should be open to cultural understanding.
“If I were to get hate mail, let’s say, from a viewer who thought, ‘Oh, she should just speak English. Like, why are we even doing this? Why are we putting Spanish-language content on the 8News Facebook page?’ ” she says. “The answer to that would be we’re growing, and we’re growing with the time, and that means being more inclusive towards other people and communities.”
Forging Bonds
Juan Santacoloma of Chesterfield County Public Schools connects with immigrant families
Juan Santacoloma (Photo by Tania Del Carmen)
For Juan Santacoloma, immigrating to the United States was a matter of life and death. Twenty years ago, while living in his native Colombia, a Marxist guerilla group targeted him for assassination. He fled to the United States in May 2000 while his wife and two young daughters remained behind. At first, he thought he would stay in the U.S. for a few months until the threat died down and he could return to his family, but when his wife began receiving threatening phone calls expressing that the group would kill him upon his return, Santacoloma thought it was safer to relocate his family. In August 2000, they were reunited using tourist visas that were valid for six months. Once the visas expired, the Santacolomas were granted political asylum to remain in the United States.
The family settled in Chesterfield, where Santacoloma worked in several positions within the county government. In December 2020, he joined Chesterfield County Public Schools as the multicultural outreach specialist, working with immigrant communities throughout the school system. Given his background as an immigrant, he’s able to connect with families and share his knowledge with them. In his position, he makes sure immigrant parents are informed of school news, events and activities; provides community resources; and supplies bilingual and translation services. He also listens to families to find out how the school system can improve and better meet their needs. As a result of meetings with Latino parents, 13 bilingual family liaisons were hired to directly connect with Latino students and parents at 13 schools within the county.
“One good idea was to create these 13 positions to facilitate the communication with Latino parents and Latino students,” Santacoloma says, “and of course, besides the language barrier, we are more than sure that the job of these liaisons is crucial in order to avoid conflicts, avoid situations, avoid maybe discrimination issues and get easy access to materials.”
Santacoloma recently spearheaded a series of virtual forums on immigration through CCPS covering a variety of topics, from the basic legal process to stories of contributions made by local immigrants.
“One of the goals with these forums was to provide the residents tools to understand better what immigration is because culturally most of the Americans don’t know about immigration,” he says. “They know about immigration because they watched something on the news.”
Santacoloma acknowledges that attempting to reach someone who is anti-immigration is difficult, but he can still try to establish open communication.
“I cannot do any other thing more than letting them know about what’s going on and accept the way they are,” he explains. “So I cannot attempt to change them if they don’t want, but what I really can do is to say, ‘OK, you don’t agree with this, which is fine ... but please look at these other things. You don’t agree with [my point of view], but maybe you can have a different idea about your initial perception.’ ”
Creating Visibility
Author Meg Medina exposes children and adults to Latino culture through literature
Meg Medina (Photo by Monica Escamilla)
As the first American-born member of her family, Meg Medina says she has lived a hyphenated life. Identifying as bicultural, she grew up in Queens, New York, after her parents immigrated to the United States from Cuba, then the family lived in Florida for 10 years. Celebrating her Cuban heritage but also embracing her American life, she says cultural identity is not always easy to explain.
“Some people have a very narrow definition of what it is to be Latino that has to do with language or a particular shade of skin or a particular situation in terms of your politics or your immigration status or anything like that,” Medina says. “It’s a very narrow view, when in fact it’s a really huge umbrella that spans many countries and many realities and many experiences, and that’s really the challenge, I think, of building community.”
Medina, who has lived in Richmond for 20 years, is a New York Times bestselling author of fiction books that embrace Latino culture. In 2019, she was the first Latina woman to win the John Newbery Medal for her young adult novel “Merci Suárez Changes Gears,” which follows sixth grader Merci Suárez as she navigates middle school in Miami. Medina drew from her life and childhood experiences to share a story that all families can relate to, not just Latinos. The sequel, “Merci Suárez Can’t Dance,” was released earlier this year, and the final book of the trilogy, “Merci Suárez Plays It Cool,” is scheduled to publish in 2022.
“In those books I wanted to feature a happy and functioning Latinx family,” Medina says. “So they are not necessarily very well off, but they’re also not super needy in terms of their economic situation, but mostly what I wanted to show was a family where there was an enormous amount of love and also a family that’s negotiating various realities.”
She notes that a diverse library of literature breeds cultural understanding.
“I think children’s literature has been having a reckoning for quite some time over the fact that for a long time, most children’s literature centered around the middle-class white American experience,” she says. “That’s fine, I read tons of books, I loved ‘Nancy Drew.’ I was fine with all those things, that’s not really the problem. The problem is when it’s mostly that and everybody else is invisible.”
Medina applauds libraries, classrooms and parents who stock a diverse collection of books from authors of all nationalities, telling stories that represent cultures from across the globe.
“I think if we can create this beautiful bubble of books where our child is quiet with their imagination, I think it builds empathy,” she says. “I think it builds an ability to just understand and not feel so threatened — not to interpret difference as something that is threatening, but rather difference as something that is interesting, worthy of being explored and an asset.”
Exposing young minds to different cultures via literature plants the seeds for a more inclusive society of the future, Medina says. And this child of immigrants hopes others can see themselves in her words.
Michel Zajur (Photo by Tania Del Carmen)
Providing Access
Through education and business resources, Virginia Hispanic Chamber founder Michel Zajur helps Latinos thrive
Originally from Mexico, Michel Zajur was a child when his family immigrated to Richmond in the early 1960s.
“There was probably a handful of Spanish-speaking families in Richmond, and it was a different world,” he says.
He watched as his parents learned English, adapted to life in a new country and opened La Siesta, one of the area’s first Mexican restaurants, in 1972. It became a hub for the Latino community, with many people converging there to seek help with finding a place to live or connections to community resources. La Siesta was also a space for non-Hispanics to be immersed in Mexican culture. Zajur took over the business from his parents in the late 1980s and continued to use the restaurant to educate and provide connections to resources, even developing a popular educational program for children that taught cultural and Spanish-language lessons. He says one day someone suggested he open a chamber of commerce, and he realized it was a good idea, especially because when he founded the Virginia Hispanic Chamber in 2000, there was no other minority-based chamber locally.
At its heart, the Virginia Hispanic Chamber is a business incubator, but it provides a multitude of services, from connecting individuals with jobs that match their skills to legal clinics for civil and immigration cases.
“People come to us, and they think we’re a government agency, but we’re not,” Zajur says. “A lot of times they just come in for help, and we’re doing a lot of the work that nobody else does, and the main thing is we do it both in Spanish and English. We understand the language, we understand the culture, and we’re in there to help people succeed and empower them in building their American dream.”
Part of that American dream includes access to education, and that’s why in 2000, Zajur and his wife, Lisa, founded the Virginia Hispanic Foundation, which offers programs such as Passport to Education, a bilingual service established in 2013 to provide Hispanic students with information and resources as they navigate the region’s educational system and apply to college.
“The city of Richmond had a 65% dropout rate among Latinos [in 2020, according to the Virginia Department of Education], which to me is a tragedy because these are individuals that are smart, they’re intelligent, but it’s the language and cultural barriers that they’re not addressing or can’t address, and our program really can make a difference,” Zajur says. “We have been working with some of the schools in the city of Richmond, but a program like this makes a difference to so many people. We would love to make this available to all the Latino students, but we just don’t have the resources or funding to do that.”
Ultimately, Zajur says, it would be great if one day the Virginia Hispanic Chamber was unnecessary because the services it provides were available universally, but until then, the chamber will continue doing everything possible to help Latinos thrive. “The ideal behind the chamber is to help people up the ladder,” he says. “Not only are we going to help you grow your business, but we also help others and newcomers come up the ladder and build their American dream.
