The first day of my exciting new life as a working journalist started with a question.
“What are you?” the editor asked me. He said I didn’t look like “a minority,” and wasn’t that the reason I was given such a good opportunity?
What was I? I was a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hire long before the term existed. And I was Yvonne Condes (Cón-des) de la Torre, who grew up Yvonne Condes (Con-diss), a second-generation Latina GenXer taught by my hardworking parents to assimilate so I could have an easier life than they did. I may have looked white, and spoke only passable Spanish, but inside, I was a proud Chicana.
“I’m Mexican,” I said. However, that three-word question got me thinking about where I’d come from, how I’d gotten to this place in my life, and how different my journey had been.
Months earlier, a professor had taken me aside just before my interview with a newspaper editor hiring for a highly competitive “minority” internship.
