This is Latino USA, the radio journal of News and courtur latin US.
Latin Latino USA.
I'm Maria Inojosa. We bring you stories that are underreported but that mattered to you, overlooked by the rest of the media, and while the country is struggling to deal with these, we listen to the stories of black and Latino Studio United Latino Front, a cultural renaissance organizing at the forefront of the movement. I'm Maria Ino JOSSA. Dear listener, heads up here that there are mentions of suicide and some explicit language, so be prepared. Thank you back.
It's a cold autumn night and the streets of Chelsea, New York City are bustling. I'm on my way to meet comedian Ada Rodriguez at the Chelsea Music Hall. She had the comedy show tonight. I've never seen her life before, but I really enjoy her work because she really goes there, especially when she talks about Latinos.
And I grew up going to the hair salon with my grandmother every week, and every week they try to blow dry the Dominican out of me because Latinos are racist. They can be very racist. They're racist with others, and they're racist with each.
Other too, Like Either's mom is Puerto Rican, her dad is Dominican, and her stepfather is Cuban.
Some of them think they're better than Haitians because they speak Spanish right, and Cubans think they're better than the Dominicans because they're a little lighter and they think they speak better Spanish. And Puerto Ricans think they're better than all of them because they're citizens.
Once they get to the venue, I meet Eithera, Hi, ayva, It's so nice to meet you. Thank you for making time. I really appreciate it. She's headlining the venue and she loves it.
I always get nervous. I'm exhausted, but I'm excited new material, but very excited because there are not many Latinas in stand up period, specifically the ones that get the opportunities to headline. So I don't take this stuff lightly.
I Either takes the stage in front of a packed audience.
Wow me, Handa, how beautiful you are. I'm so happy to see you. Wow. All right, let's get started.
From Vuduro Media and BrX, it's Latino USA.
I'm Maria Josa.
Today, Comedian Aida Rodriguez on family and comedy, and how she fuses both of these to heal our Latino USA producer Ronaldo Lanos Junior recently met up with Aida Rodriguez for a conversation, and he's going to pick up this story from here.
Aida Rodriguez was born in Boston. Her first comedy gig on stage was in the late two thousands, but her breakthrough came later when she was a top ten finalist on The Last Comic Standing in twenty fourteen. Here's Aia talking on the show at the time about a moment when her daughter told her that she had a bully.
I said, a bully that's called writes a passage. You're gonna always have a bully. Right one day, a bully's name is going to be taxes and Supervisor. You don't have a bully. She's seventeen years old. I said. What you have is a year to do something about it before it's a felony. Yea you have.
In twenty twenty one, Either released an HBO Max comedy special named Fighting Words. It's also part documentary to this journey.
I had an opportunity to go to the Dominican Republic and meet my father for the first time. And it's funny because we sat at a restaurant and every time a woman walked in, he'd be like, that's your sister. It happened a few times. He was so generous. He gave us each our own mother's. He was like, Oprah, you got a mother, You got a mother.
The special dives into some tough subjects like eye that's upbringing without her father, being homeless, and how her family helped her get through it all. At times, Ida's comedy gets political. She addresses anti blackness in the Latino community and fighting words.
I was dealing with this shit my whole life. Listen, My family was religious, anti abortion until I got pregnant from a black dude. Then they became pro abortion in the name of Jesus. They were like, He'll forgive you too much truth for you to night, said Joe.
Just recently that published her memoir Legitimate Kid, which dives even deeper into her personal life and some of the subject matter of her comedy. We're going to hear Aida read from and talk about why she decided to write Legitimate Kid and how it's helped her heal. And Ida also brings us moments from her recent comedy show in Chelsea.
Here's Aida Rodriguez. So my name is Iva Rodriguez. My title is Queen of the Universe. I actually I'm a stand up comedian. I'm a writer, I'm an actor now an author, and I'm also a producer and a director. So it sounds weird saying all of those things, but we have to claim our space. So yeah, I'm all of those things.
Aida says she learn a lot about herself and her comedy by writing her book.
Everything I Do is an homage to the people and the community where I grew up. You know, a marginalized community of Latinos Latine black people that are working class, considered poor, but show up every day to work. And I am one of those people. I stand on the front lines for them because I do feel like some people call me problematic, or they say that I say things that are incendiary, and I do. I think it's important to push the buttons and to talk about it.
But I also don't think it's cool to go leave El Barrio, the hood, the neighborhood, and go get an education and within the economics realm, and then come back and weaponize that education against people who didn't have it. So I find myself in this place where I feel like I need to stand up for that, and I'm comfortable calling it all out. I really lean forward towards progress. I'm really about that life when it comes to the people, you know, from the immigrant to the black Latino to
the lgbtq IA person. I was raised by all of those people. That's my whole family, and so I do stand up for that. But I think it's important not to let people who think it's cool to rock with us when it's trendy to jump aboard and then jump off when it's not cool anymore. When you talk about politics, right wing and left wing people both do it. But beyond that, I think there's just a lot of people who, as black people, say they love our rhythm, but they
don't love our blues. And I think that's applicable to people of color, that people think it's cool to be Latino and call you spicy, and we love tacos and all that stuff. But when it comes to like the real movement and all of the stuff that is happening underneath to all of us, the numbers get really small in terms of people who are still standing with us.
Hi that says she wrote her book because she wanted to tell her story and she didn't want to be the punchline.
Specifically, when it comes to comedians, people see us like as their personal gestures, their clowns. They don't realize that it is an occupation. It is a profession and a skill, and we employ that at our workplace, and it's a very very hard job to do, which is why a lot of people are afraid to do it. I've been wanting to write a book since I was a little girl. Writing has always been my therapy. My writing process started a long time for this book because I had been
writing essays. You know, I write journal entries. The journal entries either become essays or they become jokes, and sometimes they become both. I want you to understand what that story is and at the same time, I want people to understand how I mind my comedy and where it comes from. And I went away. I went to a rubo and I took my mother and my kids with me, and it was so triggering because my mom was very
raw at that time. Was the first time she had been out of the since she was a baby, and she triggered me, and that is what led me to like get a lot of it.
Out during this process. I that reflected on her childhood.
My childhood was filled with trauma, and there was a lot of horrible things that happened, but there was a lot of great things that happened and a lot of people that showed up for me. I used to think of myself as Dorothy from the Wizard of Oz, and I was like, my grandmother is the good witch. My mom is a bad witch because my grandmother never disciplined me. My mom always did. And then my uncles were the Lion, the tin man, and the scarecrow combined, and you know,
it was a bunch of adventures. My grandmother was the landlady of the building, so I would collect rents with her, so I was hearing information like who was cheating on who who? And I was around a lot of adults all the time, and they felt very comfortable talking about adult stuff around me and all the other kids. So I just think I had a really interesting childhood. But I still played a lot of cakeball, lived at the
truth row Man and the ice cream truck. I ran, I climbed trees, I hung out with my little brothers until they got old enough not to want to play with me anymore. I was blessed. I had a lot. Some things happened, but bad things happened to everybody, and so I've never just been one to think that, oh, it happened to me, trauma doesn't make you special, because it happens to everybody.
In third grade, Either was called a bastard by a little girl who had her father's last name, something that didn't have because Either had her mom's last name, not her father's, and that moment became a theme in her book.
I was an innocent minding my own business when one a rotten kid in my class named Beth, called me a bastard. Beth was the first child that I described as evil. All the kids laughed and taunted me, except for Alvaro, my cute, chubby Cuban buddy. But Alvaro was also kind, and he responded in my defense, no, she's not a bastard. I am sure he didn't know what the word meant either, since he barely knew English. Still, it was as though someone saw me at the moment
and knew that I was feeling naked. I was eight years old. When I became conscious of the absence of my father in a real way, Beth made sure of it. It set me off on this journey to find legitimacy. I really learned a lot in my journey, and even though I didn't have the words for it, but the way patriarchy plays a role in placing the importance of father versus motherhood and the way a child's life is shaped.
In my family, there was ma chismo and there was all of this patriarchal framing where the people were like, you guys are doomed because your father isn't in your life, and you heard that all the time. I think that it really impacted me in that way where I was like, oh, I'm doomed because I don't have my dad, and girls that don't have their dad usually end up pregnant or in jail, because that's the stuff that I would hear.
Those words really do affect you. Going on throughout my life trying to understand why I was the kid that didn't have their own father and what that meant for me in terms of my trajectory and where I would go, but also where it made me feel vulnerable to the world because I was taught that father meant protection, and so I was thinking, like, compared to some of the girls that I knew, who was going to take care
of me? And it just made me feel like I was easy access to predatorial behavior, and I called it into my life. It came out in my personal relationships with friends, romantic, everything that I did. It kept showing up because it really became a part of my identity, and it manifested in ways that I had challenges having this deficit in my life, which was I started looking for that in my relationships and my romantic relationships, and when someone made me feel protected, that was the way
in for me. I remember having a guy that liked me and he would try to beat everybody up who tried to do anything to me, and I didn't even think about how that could be harmful for him, but it was just like, Oh, he really loves me, he cares about me. I would gravitate towards that. It was a pattern Either writes about in her book. The red flax kept showing up and I kept ignoring them. Kept his phone on silent, would always place it face down
so that I couldn't see the caller. ID He would disappear at night after leaving my place and tell me that he fell asleep the next day. I was willing to overlook so much just to be with him. It was real and mine, and at least I had someone I had no idea of what a healthy relationship was. My grandmother was a woman who came from Puerto Rico in the fifties, who never had an opportunity to have an education. She moved to America with her two children
and then have four more kids here. My grandmother was a door to door saleswoman. She's probably the smartest person I ever met in my life. And it was so funny because she was illiterate, and her and my stepfather would go back and forth, and he would point out that she was illiterate, and she would always say, yeah, I can't read, but I can count, and I know you broke.
Hi.
That's grandmother with a little rough around the edges. But she was always there for Eida when it mattered.
She had come to rescue me. I just knew it. I ran as fast as I could grabbed her and never wanted to let her go. I would finally be free from the horror that was that man. My grandmother was here to take me home. I remember asking, are we going to go get my mom? And my grandmother quickly replied, she'll come later. I was so sad to leave my mama, but I really couldn't take the struggle anymore. I had been cold, hungry, tired, and molested. It was time for me to go. She's just my hero, so
much of my hero that when she got cancer. I was angry with her when she got sick because I couldn't process the fact that she was weak. In my mind, it was like, this is not okay. But she was always there for me, my mom, who I thought was
my sister in real life. And it was really hard growing up in a house with a mother that was so young, and my mom was a very beautiful woman girl, and to think about the fact that she was involved with somebody that was so many years her senior and moved out of the country with and had a child, and I was like, that's human trafficking now when you think about the things that they were dealing with at that time that were normal or acceptable, because they weren't normal.
But my mom is one of the most spirited, fearless people I've ever met in my life.
Rai that says she considers her mama Queen and that she has a lot of respect for her.
My brother's arrival was not the best. He was born days after Kuriano beat our mother. He cheated on her, and when she found out and confronted him, he didn't appreciate her tone or questioning and decided to teacher a lesson. He beat a nine months pregnant woman and left her for dead in Central Park, and those people who many saw as undesirables in society were the ones to take care of her and deliver her to the nearest hospital, saving both her and her baby's lives. To this very day,
she says never looked down on anyone. It was the prostitutes and junkies that rescued us. I had to grow up with her, so it was really hard, was painful, and sometimes fun to have a very young mom that would dance with you anywhere. That was the thing about her. She was misinformed about discipline because she was hit with an extension cord. She thought hitting us with the belt was a step up. And so thank God for growth, because now I've never hit my daughter or my son
and she's always been like good. So a lot of people don't know. My mom went back to school and got her and then she went to a technical school and became a pharmaceutical tech and she graduated from there and she had the highest GPA in her class. She's really, really smart. And in spite of all of the things that have happened to her, and a lot of bad things happened to her, she still fights. And she's my favorite fighter. Mike Tyson ain't got nothing on my mama.
I cry when I watch movies about family, right like we all cry when we saw Setlanta. Selena was, you know, a biography, but it was also a story of family. None of us are alone, as much as we'd like to think that we are. We see that tour bus, we see those people. I see movies like Soul Food or La Familia, and they would make me cry, and I had to sit down with myself and say, what is it about this stuff that makes you feel this way? Why do you feel sad or why do you cry?
And it's because I realized that above all things, I value family. And my children make fun of me because I like to eat family style. So when we go out to eat. They're like, oh, oh, we're gonna have to, you know, But I believe in con partiendo, like we all eat together, we all taste. It's communion, community. It's always been the center of it all. And it took me a long time to discover to realize that that
was what was everything to me. And yes, my father wasn't there, but there was a father there and it might not have been the traditional father role, but it was everything that I needed and then some.
It was later in life that Aida had a full circle moment with her own daughter when it came to their last name.
I asked my baby if she knew her name, and she looked me in the eye and confidently said, yes, I'm a Kayla. Do you know your last name? Akayla? What a Kayla Rodriguez, she said, looking me straight in the eyes and punching me right in the face with it no hesitation. She knew her name. I want to be Rodriguez like you, she said, I don't want daddy's last name. So many emotions swept through me. I was so confused and at the same time flattered. She was
proud of me and wanted to be like me. She didn't even think about her father, and because he wasn't there, she didn't know him enough to like him, let alone carry his name. The way she saw it, it was a privilege for her to claim me. What a beautiful perception to have at that young age. Damn, she was my hero. Forgiveness is not a gift that you give other people. Forgiveness is a form of self care, and I think that a lot of us hold on to forgiveness.
I will say that human error is inevitable. We all do it. And one of the best things that I did for myself was to forgive the people who hurt me. That doesn't mean that I allowed them back into my life, that doesn't mean that I am buddy buddy with them, that doesn't mean that I even speak to them anymore. But what I did do was really come to terms with understanding that forgiveness was me taking care of me, and it released me from the chains and a lot
of the pain that I was holding on to. That allowed me to move forward in my life.
Before the show, Either told me that she feels like she's in a new chapter of her life, and her comedy and set Tonight reflects that.
Among the people are suffering from depression, and I want you to know that I see you.
And then you have found about taking your wife.
If you are paddling, dad, please talk to somebody.
Please, sare me regular somebody and don't go to people.
Don't tell people who are suffering from depression, who are thinking about killing yourself.
Think about your mother, right? What about your children? That could very well be the reason a lot of them people want to killing themselves. And there you go, agitating the wom I want you to be here.
You are they that says she has struggled with depression in her lifetime.
And I was gonna kill myself and I was gonna take my children with me. And I drove to the top of the cliff with my two kids in the car and I was gonna drive off.
And my son said, I love you, mommy, and I was like, I can't drown him.
She's a good person. But if that would have just been me and my daughter, I don't know if.
I'd been here today.
If you or someone you know are struggling with thoughts of suicide, contact the Suicide and Crisis Lifeline at nine eight eight. And just so you know, this book will be available in Spanish in early March.
This episode was produced by Rinaldo Lanos Junior and edited by Haley Sanchez. It was mixed by JJ Grubin and Special Things This Week to Harper Audio for letting us use excerpts from the audio version of AIDA's book Legitimate Kid. The Latino USA team also includes Victoria Estrada, Andrea Lopez Grussado, Bilordi, mar Marquez, Marta Martinez, Mike Sargent, Nur Saudi and Nancy Trucquillo. Beni Lee Ramidez is our co executive producer. Our director
of Engineering is Stephanie the Beau. Our senior engineer is Julia Caruso. Additional engineering support by Gabrielle Abyez. Our marketing manager is Luis Luna. Our theme music was composed by Zenia Robinos. I'm your host and executive producer Maria Jojosa. Join us again on our next episode. In the meantime, look for us on social media and remember nottevayas nunca estella proxima.
Baye Latino Usa is made possible in part by the Heising Simons Foundation. Unlocking knowledge, opportunity and possibilities more at Hsfoundation dot org, the Ford Founding, working with visionaries on the front lines of social change worldwide, and the John D. And Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation.
I want to turn that off. See Chris, can you turn this fan off? I don't want to mess with one of this, so both of them, because this is audio, all right, thank you so much. If you want that one off too, if possible, yeah,