By Luisana Ortiz
When I was born, Black was beautiful. So there’s a lot of influence on Black consciousness from my mom and how we grew up, even though it wasn’t in the mainstream, so to speak in the 80s.
A lot of that was this is how you were supposed to behave as a woman, a girl. And then there are other things where I was taught to behave as a black teenage girl. I learned a certain way to be. And then I said, Well, I don’t want to be like that, and my mom’s like, you don’t have to.
And I was like, in my late 20s, I was on this Black newspaper, free newspaper in Chicago called Indigo. And they had an advertisement in there, and my mom saw it because I had always talked about it. And she said, Laverne they’re doing this kind of applications for Black and brown people. So I just took in all of my materials, and got the interview, and then you know, next thing I know I was in West Africa.
It wasn’t just being in a Peace Corps. It was my dream to live somewhere else. And to be out of whatever I was programmed to do in my life. The blessing was my mom gave me space to do that. As long as I was doing something she could support me.
LaVerne is…
- 56 years old
- Female
- African American
- Straight
- Middle Class
- Catholic
- More West Indian than Anything