I wrote the following piece “The Phoenix: A Transgender Activist Rises” as my capstone project for the Interactive Journalism Master’s Program at American University. It is the story of Ruby Corado, a Latina transgender activist, founder and president of Casa Ruby, an LGBT community center in Washington, D.C. This is why I wrote about her.
What Was My Motivation?
Knowing that you are a transgender person is difficult. But facing the world as a transgender person is even more difficult. Stigma and discrimination are faced every single day.
Transgender people are a socially marginalized population. In the United States, they live divided along racial, class, and immigration status.
The purpose of writing about Ruby Corado, a prominent transgender immigrant Latina activist in Washington D.C, is to raise awareness about the difficulties she has faced as a transgender woman and to teach the lessons she learned through out her convoluted life.
Corado is currently the founder and president of Casa Ruby, an LGBT community center in the Nation’s capital dedicated to shelter the District´s downtrodden LGBT community.
What Was My Inspiration?
I am an Economist and I have worked for the Inter-American Development Bank for the past 12 years. Every year we lend several billions of dollars to the Latin American and Caribbean countries. We also provide technical advice and research to the governments in the region.
However, I have always felt that we, as economists, fell short in explaining the reasoning behind our ideas or proposals. Reaching out to people to convey the “buried message” became central to my work and my purpose, and that’s why I decided to become a journalist.
In one of my classes, we dived into a piece by The New York Times, “Invisible Child”. A very touching long-format web story about an unspoken reality in New York: the homeless population in the capital of the world. The New York Times told the story through the eyes and experiences of a 12-year-old girl called Dasani. A homeless girl who lives in a homeless shelter called Auburn Family Residence, in Brooklyn’s Fort Greene section.
As a development economist and soon to be journalist, I was fascinated with Dasani’s story because it raised awareness about a complicated issue and costly problem for the future generation of New York City.
As soon as I finished reading Dasani’s story I knew I wanted to emulate what they have done with another unspoken reality in the city in which I work – the difficulties of the transgender population in the Nation’s Capital.
