05/03/2025
As a 5 yr old, recent immigrant from Ecuador I moved here without a lick of English. I was dropped in white, suburban Dallas, TX where there was not one bilingual person to help me. As a latch key kid I came home and watched non stop, it was my lifeline as a confused child who had just left her family and home. Sesame Street taught me English, Mr. Rodgers taught me kindness (I just heard a tik tok saying the exact same thing, there are many of us). The ground-breaking 1970 era after-school PBS programing was a lifeline to myself and countless other kids in the 50+ years it’s been on TV. Aside from Maria on Sesame Street nobody else looked familiar, there were no Latinas on any of the other shows I saw. And this is why diverse representation, in TV, movies, politics, Academia, or on the cover of Vogue, matters, a lot. Collective ideas of beauty are nurtured by what we see on these covers, and if media only showed us thin white women shot by men, (Hello TRAD wife!) then we are left with a pretty narrow and distorted idea of what constitutes beauty. I digress, cutting funding for Sesame Street is an assault not only on diversity but on immigrant kids. F*Ck you know who 🤡 we need to wake up asap before it’s too late.
