About V
As she sat in her car at the stop sign, Vanessa Castañeda’s white-knuckled hands gripped the steering wheel, trying to hang on to reality. Her chestnut colored eyes stared down at at her cell phone screen, not at it, but through it into a future where nothing made sense. Stunned by the conversation she had just ended with an Express News editor in San Antonio, Texas, the realization sunk in; the next day the obituary she had written for her little brother would run in the paper.
“It didn’t feel like he was really gone, before that call. I stared at my phone, hoping that Alonzo was going to call me. But he didn’t. And that’s when it hit me: I’m never going to talk to my little brother again,” Castañeda said.
Only days earlier, Stanford University had invited her to attend courses in their graduate journalism program. She was on top of the world, dreaming of who she would meet and the fascinating conversations she would have until she was shot down from the sky by her mother’s softly-spoken words: “Alonzo was shot. He’s dead.”
On March 7, 2009 her 20-year old little brother Alonzo Garza was murdered in an unprovoked act of violence. Devastated, Castañeda stopped working on projects, missed scholarship deadlines, and let unread e-mail accumulate in her inbox. The tragedy plunged her from the lofty peak on which she had so recently perched into an emotional darkness from which she could only temporarily escape with the aid of highly caffeinated beverages that she had recently quit consuming.
Before this event, the stories she wrote when she reported at KVR News 9 about shootings in the community were an everyday occurrence. She knew that people who had lost a loved one were hurting. But it was only when a local FOX affiliate reporter knocked on her door to talk about her brother’s murder investigation on camera, that she really knew how vicious the pain was. She agreed to do the story, because she identified with the reporter’s need to file a story by some deadline. In the process, she learned how it felt to be on the other side of the camera lens.
“The reporter wanted me to give him the shot where the member of the victim’s family is crying and screaming why,” Castañeda said. “I refused to give him that shot because it wasn’t going to propel the story in a responsible way.”
And she would know. Castañeda earned multiple awards for the broadcast journalism stories she filed for KVR News 9 and the news talk show she founded, In The Know. Those two and a half years of reporting experience elucidated the impact that journalists have on their viewing area, and inspired her to utilize her skills to advance humanity with her career. She now is more careful and deliberate when choosing whom she will use as a source and the specific things they can contribute to a news story before she picks up the phone and negotiates an interview.
One of the reasons she wants to pursue a journalism career is to highlight sensitive issues that people refuse to discuss out of shame or fear of repercussion. The survivor of a physically abusive childhood, Castañeda says that candid discussions with others helped her eliminate the destructive elements from her own environment. A community that is unable to publicly discuss its government’s detrimental practices will stagnate and fester, she said, drawing a parallel between the power abuse of a paternal authority over a child and a government’s power over a community. When power is abused, people suffer. The Mexican-American postulates that journalists have the extraordinary ability and responsibility to engage a community in discourse through the stories they publish, catalyzing positive societal revision.
Castañeda wants to overcome the historically oppressive stereotypes and environmental noise to create an intellectually diverse mediascape. She notes that Latinos rarely appear as sources in broadcast news stories which aren’t about immigration or crime. Castañeda wants to change the way in which the world views people of color by seeking intellectually diverse sources from different backgrounds for her stories. She intends to use her bilingual skills to communicate with both English and Spanish speaking communities to discover which issues are newsworthy.
Growing up, she bounced back and forth between her father’s and mother’s homes. Her father lived in an area rich in Mexican-American culture in California. Her mother lived in a part of Texas where the culture fell into the Caucasian-American category. Her ability to adapt socially and bridge cultures both linguistically and culturally will increase the probability that she will succeed in making Mexican- American women serious contributors to local and global discourse.
She fell in love with broadcast journalism on a blustery evening while standing on top of a chair to look taller as her camera man framed the image for a live shot. Her heartbeat was pounding in her ears during her report about a gubernatorial candidate’s speech on campus. Butterflies fluttered in her stomach.
“It was like a first kiss. You don’t really know how it’s going to go. But you hope that they like the way you do it,” Castañeda said. “In this case, it was so good that I fell in love. And the producers of the show kept asking me to do live shots for them, so I guess it was good for them too.”
Right now, she’s pursuing entrepreneurial endeavors, as well as navigating through mountains of assigned reading, while she discerns the career path that will keep her lights on.
Castañeda will graduate from Stanford University’s graduate journalism program in June 2010.
