The writer who put Latinos centre stage

Witness History

BBC

History, Personal Journals, Society & Culture

4.4 • 1.6K Ratings

🗓️ 27 July 2020

⏱️ 10 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

The Cuban-American Dolores Prida wrote with a distinctive voice in her plays, newspaper columns and as an agony aunt in the Latina magazine. She challenged perceptions of how Latin Americans should be viewed in the US. When she died in 2013, President Obama paid tribute to her "conviction, compassion and humour." Mike Lanchin speaks to Prida's close friend, the former editor at New York's Daily News, Maite Junco.

Photo: Dolores Prida (left) with Maite Junco, Jan 2013 (courtesy of Maite Junco)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Just before this BBC podcast gets underway, here's something you may not know.
0:04.7	My name's Linda Davies and I Commission Podcasts for BBC Sounds.
0:08.5	As you'd expect, at the BBC we make podcasts of the very highest quality featuring the most knowledgeable experts and genuinely engaging voices.
0:18.0	What you may not know is that the BBC makes podcasts about all kinds of things like pop stars,
0:24.6	poltergeist, cricket, and conspiracy theories and that's just a few examples.
0:29.7	If you'd like to discover something a little bit unexpected, find your next podcast over at BBC Sounds.
0:37.0	Hello and welcome to the Witness History podcast from the BBC World Service.
0:45.6	I'm Mike Lanchin. Today we're going to hear about the pioneering Latina
0:50.4	playwright Cuban-American, Dolores Prita.
0:54.7	Prita's bilingual and bicultural work was first performed in the US in the mid-1970s, and it offered
1:01.2	a new and different perspective on being an immigrant from Latin America.
1:05.4	I've been hearing from one of Prita's closest friends. Dolores to me was always an optimist. She always could see sort of the better. She had hope
1:25.3	even at the time that it was very hard in the seventies of the 80s. She wrote her plays, she
1:30.4	published them, she staged them. The struggles I think she had plenty but Dolores could look beyond them.
1:36.0	When Dolores Prida died suddenly at the age of 69 in 2013, US President Barack Obama wrote to her family.
1:48.0	Dolores, he said, used her gifts with conviction, compassion and humour to connect with people across the Latino community
1:56.0	and around our country.
1:58.2	It was a fitting tribute to the trailblazing writer. Doliz was writing about our potential as Latinos and our power and our future power
2:09.0	before we even sort of knew it in a sense before we realized it.
2:14.0	My Tehunka was like Dolores Prida, born to Cuban parents and they were friends for more than 30 years.
2:20.0	She was sort of making the case that we were rich culture, we were very mixed, you know, we came in all shapes and forms, we were not one thing or the other, we were not all, you know, from one color or all
2:35.0	educated or all not educated, that we were this enormous group of people with a tremendous
	...

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