Unity in Broken Spaces with Theresa Gonzales
How access to reproductive care broke the poverty cycle and eventually led to peace in becoming childfree
This is the final installment of my conversation with Theresa Gonzales, the CEO and producer of Latinas from the Block to the Boardroom podcast, with over 18 years of experience in Silicon Valley.
How did a Chicana “from the block” end up a successful CEO? You’ve read about the pain of assimilation, and Theresa’s mission to empower more Black and brown girls to enter the tech workforce, and also build their own platforms to succeed.
To wrap up this story, and in keeping with our new tradition of Non-Mom May on La Vida Más Chévere, here’s how Theresa (and her husband) arrived at what she refers to as “otherhood.”
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Theresa: I just feel like we didn't have the space. You're creating space. We're giving these spaces [as in, podcasts] because it's time. It's time to stop. And that's where technology has enabled us and that's why all these stories are coming out now.
It's maddening when you think about all that information! How do you digest it? It really just comes down to little bits and pieces. (Editor’s note: this made me think of how you eat an elephant.)
Don't get me wrong, I love my journey. It's part of who I am today, but it was rough. And the assimilation process into tech…there's a whole podcast I think about called Code Switch. And it really does talk about how people of color, to be accepted, there are things that we have to do—just like when I was that little girl—to fit in so that we're accepted.
And we have to deny that authenticity of who we are. A good friend Denise Soler(-Cox), she does a podcast. She's a first gen Puerto Rican, and she talks about the belonging aspect.
We're not accepted by our community here, and then we're not accepted by society there, so we're kind of stuck and lost in the middle.
And how we navigate that sometimes is very challenging.
Paulette: And then here's where me and my platform come in: on top of all of that, then there's a subsection of us who decide not to have children. So we're already fighting the battle of assimilation or non-assimilation, just being accepted, and then against the societal norm of having children.
I love that I found you and I didn't even know you were childfree. Like one day, you just told me this as you were telling me about your chickens.
Theresa: Those are my children. I have feathered children.
Before we continue, here’s a trigger warning: we’re going to touch on infertility and the political issues around access to birth control.
Unlike most of my guests, Theresa also wanted human children alongside her feathered ones. One other guest, Julie DeLucca-Collins, shared her struggles with infertility, but also came to enjoy her life as a tía.
Theresa: Being childfree in a Latino culture, people really question you. The majority is like, “why is that?”
Early on when I was talking about how my mom was single with two kids and she had no skills, that was really hard. And I think that was a very impressionable time for me.
I saw my mom struggling. We were struggling, and her opportunities were to find a man for economic stability.
And then what did that mean? Her possibly having more children because that's what we're taught, with toys and the society: just to have kids.
It's the first thing we're always asked, when are you gonna have kids? When are you gonna get married?
I had some rough relationships in high school. And thank God, and I'm just gonna put this out there: having access to planning your future with children early on, because I was not in the best relationships, if that was not accessible to me, I don't know what my life would be like. [Not] having the choice and the accessibility to plan that would've really put me into another cycle of my family growing up in poverty.
And that is what having access to healthcare planning is really about in this discussion that's happening today, very apparent today, extremely important.
In other states, there are people banning access to pills and that want to trace your credit card information if you are going to try to do that. That's a bill that Texas is trying to pass. It's bullshit!
Anyway, now that I got married now and I said I wanna have children because I was planning, my body was not accessible for that.
And so that's what happened. It was not by choice.
And we went through the motions and I said, “there's a plan here that the universe has me on with my husband.” And it's not because…people will say, oh, you're being punished because of early…whatever it is with the religious aspect that comes in.
People wanna throw that religious narrative in there and they don't even understand how it came to be in putting women in a very disadvantage and patriarchal underpin of being subservient.
So that is something that I have always been critical of. My husband is very open to whatever plan we had. And we tried, we spent a lot of money and we said, is this really for us? In our retirement age? Why do people want to have families? It's legacy, but you also have to have means, right?
And we just said, we have done so much (and my husband works in education) that we said: if this doesn't happen—which is a real conversation—is this going to be a part of what you really want versus what I really want and maybe we shouldn't be together?
And he was very clear and said, “I want this unity of us to be together.” Which is very profound to me, coming from broken spaces. And so the child aspect was, how can I give now when I'm barely giving to myself?
And that's where I talk about the self-sacrificing that is always upon women versus men. And I think I've talked through that thread of the self-sacrifice of women, of how we are supposed to make that sacrifice.
[But] how do we express and live in joy? Based on my narrative, I want to live in joy. I want to live in giving purpose to myself and to community.
And I feel like that was what the powers that be said, that's where you start. And you have other nieces and nephews to give to, to see that journey. And then they start the new cycle of love and breaking the poverty cycle.
Which they are, by the way! They've all graduated from college. They're just doing really well and they're reclaiming their Spanish language!
So for me, it just decided to be a choice after the struggle of like, why? Why is that? And it's purposeful for joy for me, and that's not being selfish. That's just breaking a generational cycle of poverty and bringing more love as a person into this world. That doesn't take any money at all.
Paulette: Thank you for that. I've had another guest who also wanted children and it just wasn't gonna happen for them. And she's also living her best life just like you are, La Vida Más Chévere.
Some of us come to be childfree, not by choice, but by circumstance and can still make the best of it. Can still put out love into this world and leave a legacy.
Theresa: Absolutely!
This is a legacy Paulette, you and I right here talking, creating these platforms, sharing our experience, and giving hope to another generation or older generations that maybe just feel like, “I am not heard?” or “I don't know other women like me.”
And other women have the platform and they're moms and they do the same thing, and they talk about motherhood. That's great. We're the otherhood.
That's what I say. We're the otherhood. And I'm grateful. I know that not having children has been a blessing for me because of just everything.
I wanna kiss the feet of mothers that survived through covid with their children and their families. That takes an incredible amount of strength. And that's why I get fired up also about the inequity of pay.
For Latinas especially, because usually they live in multi-generational homes. I'm a third generation. And then there's also women that are first gens that are like, “if I have children today, is that gonna affect everything that I do?”
We're giving them that space to think about how to plan their families, without saying what the Catholic message wants to say to them otherwise. But it's you have free will. And there is choice and we have to keep that choice available for everybody, all women and folks that want to have children.
It's really important.
Paulette: Hundred percent agree with you. We're the “otherhood.” Otherhood is also available and it's great!
Find Theresa and her podcast Latinas from the Block to the Boardroom on her website, Latinas B2B.
To read the rest of the conversation, check out these posts in chronological order:
Or listen to this episode at Apple:
Or Spotify: