María Suárez Toro

María Suárez Toro and Laura Asturias editor the newspaper La Cuerda, Guatemala.
María is co-director of AC FIRE and also produces the English language program of FIRE.

María speaks about what joining FIRE and more recently AC FIRE has meant to her. "The uniqueness of AC FIRE and FIRE also have an expression in my personal life, and I believe that the personal is political. You see, when I was hired to work on FIRE, it was the first time in my life that I was given a job because of who I am, not despite who I am. Let me explain: I was hired because I am a woman, a Latin American, because I am bilingual, and because I am a feminist. Now that's quite a combination for a Puerto Rican who has lived and worked in Puerto Rico, the United States and Central America."

"As a woman, I have had to struggle to have a profession and exercise it. It would have been harder if it were not for the strong women's movement demanding our rights in the late sixties and seventies, but it was hard nonetheless. Men have first choice no matter what. I worked in schools, universities and mixed non-governmental organizations and movements, always knowing that I was second choice. But FIRE's staff was to be only women--our place at last.

Paraphrasing the words of an African-American woman I put on the air, I can say that FIRE saved my life. This is because it has given me a place, a space where I can live and grow and be all I am, and speak to the world in my own voice and through the voices of so many other women I get to know; through radio and its links to the women's movement.

AC FIRE and FIRE have saved me, and perhaps many other women from political genocide, gender genocide, cultural genocide, language genocide...and what I mean by that is that the threat of homogenization of all of us according to dominant powers can kill all that we are. Feminism and women's media definitely are making a contribution to counteract that. And it does it at all levels. By that I mean that in doing feminist media we each have a life of our own to share with all.