Welcome Greek you Nation to episode number 433 of the fraternity foodie podcast I’m your host Mike Ison CEO of Greek University I’m a speaker and an author our fifth book just came out it’s called perseverance and how to be a great fraternity or sorority alumnist so
Go and pick up that book on Amazon or Barnes & Noble today we call these episodes the fraternity foodie podcast because there is nothing like great food to bring college students together fun fact San Francisco is one of my all-time favorite cities maybe it’s the delicious Seafood maybe it’s the cool weather
Maybe it’s the stunning views maybe it’s Alcatraz or maybe it’s all of it go spend time there and go and see Napa Valley as well while you’re there you won’t be disappointed speaking of Francisco let’s talk to our next guest Irma Herrera is a civil rights lawyer turn playwright and solo performer and
She uses storytelling and theater to Open Hearts and Minds after three decades of working in pursuit of fairness and Justice she turned her attention to storytelling on stage this work is an extension of her social justice advocacy and she uses the skills developed as a lawyer to explore themes
Of othering and belonging her onew woman show is called why would I mispronounce my own name this is a work of creative non-fiction that is a mashup of personal narrative lessons in American history and stories about respecting people’s names even when they don’t sound and look like real American names welcome to
The show Irma thank you so much Mike it’s a pleasure to be here with you this morning it is great to be with you this morning your story is just fascinating and uh I love that we were talking about language before we got started on this
Podcast because I do have a few podcast episodes that talks about language and I’m so glad that you found the one that you did um what’s interesting is is that studying languages and discovering how words from different languages connect that seems to be something that you really really enjoy probably from a very
Young age as well so when did you notice that you had this love of language I’m not sure when I noticed but I grew up in a bilingual household uh I’m Chana Mexican American my parents were born in the United States but in South Texas
Which I often refer to as Mex America a lot of us grew up speaking Spanish and then uh I’ve always known both English and Spanish so I didn’t have the experience of showing up at school not knowing a word of English which is true of so many kids I’ve always known both
But the language of our home was Spanish and I think as I in high school I studied French and I began to see the commonalities between French words they may not sound at all like the Spanish I knew but I recognized the root and then
I had this goal of I wanted to speak five languages before I was 30 I didn’t make it I didn’t make it but I did study French and I’m still studying French and most of us do not learn a language in high school or college our language
Teaching is not so great in this country and um you know it’s really important to speak English because it’s the language of the world no matter where you go in the world people speak English some people not everybody of course so I’m I’ve always been very fortunate that I
Was fluent in in English and also that I speak another language and I did study Italian which I speak fairly fluently and recently my husband and I went to Egypt and I thought well I should learn a little bit of EG Egyptian Arabic because Arabic has many different
Forms and Egyptian Arabic is the most commonly used and I didn’t want to learn to write it just to say a few things to be polite you know to be kind and uh express my gratitude for the people who are showing us around and it was so fun
To see that some Spanish words have roots in Arabic and of course it’s because Arabic people came to Spain and people from Spain and Portugal came to the Americas and so when we talk about globalization yes we’re seeing it in steroids in our lifetime but it’s been going on for
Centuries yeah it’s been going on for centuries so I’m fascinated by all of that so when I saw the commonalities in language it just Thrills me to no end but I love just thinking about the way we use the English language and what words how one word can change the
Meaning when I was a a young lawyer and I worked on cases involving language minority children they used to be called if you were not an English speaker when you got to school you were called limited English proficient LEP students today they’re called English Learners that’s a really different
Mindset right limited proficiency well yes you don’t yet know English but you’re a learner and I’m really a big fan of lifelong learning and engaging ourselves in the process of expanding our mind in whatever way we can with with topics that interest us I’m so glad that you had access to
Both English and Spanish as a young child uh growing up uh for me you know I had access to both Hebrew and English both of my parents happened to be Israeli and uh they came to this country after serving in the Israeli Army and uh what was interesting was is that I have
Two younger siblings and they really only spoke English to us because they felt that somehow their kids would be at a disadvantage if they didn’t know English well so they made this conscious decision to only speak English to the kids now I went to a private Hebrew
School from 1 to 8th grade so luckily I still have that ability to speak Hebrew and English but my two younger sisters they just went to regular public school so they never had that opportunity to really understand both Hebrew and English so anytime my parents would be fighting amongst themselves you know my
Two younger siblings would say what did they say what did they say and they’d ask for me to be The Interpreter well speaking any other language is a gift it doesn’t matter what language it is it just opens your mind in a different way and of course
Now there’s research that people who are truly bilingual tend to develop things like dementia and Alzheimer’s at a much later stage because it is preserving your brain that’s great news it’s also really good for my daughter who uh is studying both uh Spanish and French uh
In high school and she plans to continue that in college when she starts up uh this September so that’s always really good for her yeah it’s fantastic she really also has a love language and so we we’ve embraced it and it’s been really good for her and so uh yeah
That’s wonderful now you know the interesting thing about you is you actually decided to become an attorney you attend Ed Notre Dame law school what was the reason why you wanted to go into law I wanted to go into law because I am deeply passionate about Justice and
Fairness and I grew up in a community that was very segregated most people don’t know that mexican-americans in the southwest experienced the same level of segregation and Prejudice as our African-American brothers and sisters we had Jim Crow growing up I mean the laws had already changed but it was very
Clear that Mexican amans occupied a an inferior position in society and the community where I grew up and as I saw the black civil rights movement I thought to myself well they’re fighting for the same things we’re fighting for and I greatly admired both the preachers
And the lawyers well I sure wasn’t going to become a preacher and so I was drawn to law also as a little girl I was also speaking up for other people when I saw something that was wrong I was the kid who would say that’s not right you know
How come this or that I think kids generally have a sense of fairness that’s innate in us you know if you have multiple children I only have one but you see it in in in young kids at schools that even as toddlers if you’re with a group of Toddlers and one of them
Gets something and others don’t they speak up it’s like well she didn’t get one right and so I am really passionate about promoting fairness and equality and the law was a great tool for giving voice to the needs of my community and so as a young lawyer I worked first
Because I speak Spanish I was able to work representing Spanish-speaking Farm Workers in Washington state and then I moved to San Francisco to work with the Mexican-American legal defense and education fund that was an the premier Latino civil rights organization in the country and it was a wonderful experience to work on civil
Rights cases but I also had a level of frustration because we would win cases but there was so much misunderstanding about what we were seeking to do in the cases we brought and that led me to journalism and I remember uh I was working on a desegregation case in
Denver but we represented the limited English proficient children who weren’t getting their needs met educationally and we got a a good decision from a federal district judge and one of the Denver papers has an article an oped or an editorial that says oh these outof state lawyers because we were in San
Francisco don’t want these kids to learn English well that’s not true as we started this conversation the importance of learning English in this country to success is key right communication is key you have to speak good English so I went back to the office in San Francisco
And I was complaining that what’s the point of winning cases if in the court of public opinion people don’t get what you’re doing and so uh the person who was head of media said why don’t you write an opet about that and I’ll try and place
It in a newspaper I said okay so I wrote this piece and she placed it in the New York Times so I thought okay I’m going to quit my job and become a writer and indeed I did I saved money and I I quit my job and I traveled and
Then I worked as a a freelance writer I also had a little gig with a news uh service that I would write a couple of Articles a month and I wrote about law I wrote about culture I wrote about the rice in the rice in uh Spanish language advert enement Billboards at
The same time as there were moves of foot in Congress and local legislatures to ban the use of Spanish inofficial and I’ve always been interested by the conflicts that we see in American society and how we resolve them and how we try and change the reality for
Example we’ve always had gay people in in the world right and then as we see more rights giving people in the lgbtq Plus Community greater um protections then we see a push back it’s like no we we don’t want people we don’t want gay characters in our our books that our
Children are reading well why not they’re part of our community right and so in terms of my my legal work I’m passionate for civil rights and equality but not just for my group for any group you know Dr Martin Luther King said an injustice uh anywhere I forget the exact
Quote but you know an injustice is an injustice it doesn’t matter who it’s happening to and we should speak up and that’s what I seek to do now using theater I love it I absolutely love it and you do this one woman show it’s called why would I
Mispronounce my own name where did you get the idea to create this show and what is it all about yeah yeah so so I practiced law for all these years then I was going to take a year off to work on a novel I had started many years earlier
And so I was working on this novel and I I just wasn’t feeling it and a friend of mine who happens to be a medical doctor but also a fabulous writer and a playwright she said take this class with me it’s so much fun the guy who teaches
It is so good at helping you connect with your stories so I signed up for this theater class called telling our stories and I didn’t know what to expect it was a chance to hang out with my friend and I fell in love with The Art of Storytelling and every class was once
A week you showed up and you stood up in front of 10 people or five people whoever was there telling a story and often my stories were about something that had outraged me the mispronunciation of someone’s name maybe uh so when federo Peña he was the Secretary of Energy and the Secretary of
Transportation often in the media he was called freder Rico paa well paa is pineapple that wasn’t its last name it’s paa it’s not so hard right and so I would just yell at the radio or the TV and say he’s a secretary of a big department in this country why can’t
They get his name right they get franois mean’s name right they get all these French names right wh why is it so hard for them and who are the editors that are letting these things go through and so it became apparent that there was a theme that I cared about that I wanted
To talk about and it was about Prejudice and who gets respect and who doesn’t in American society so the use of stories about names was the entry point to telling my stories but in my solo show I you know deal with the history of Mexican Americans in the
Southwest uh the civil rights movement in the United States uh the Muslim ban when it came in I want people to understand that sometimes the group that’s the receiving end of prejudice changes but the the hatred that’s fomenting fed against groups is the common theme when immigrants came from
Europe from Italy from Germany they’re used to be German bilingual schools and then they got rid of them there used to be Swedish bilingual schools and so when the when the Irish came they were looked down as inferior when the Italians came they were looked down as
Inferior and then at some point this great Melting Pot Theory they became White but that’s not true of all groups and also we live in different times where today we embrace our background rather than try and erase it it’s like yeah I’m South Asian and I’m Hindu or I’m whatever and I don’t
Have to feel that that’s not okay I can be who I am and be part of this great American experiment in creating a Multicultural Society where we live in relative peace and give each other the opportunity to be our best selves you know I want to drill down on
This a little bit more because you know my wife and I we talk about this quite often I have um a lot of relatives who died in World War II in the Holocaust um and so you know whenever I’m talking about my family history that’s a piece
Of me that I bring um and you know we were talking about uh Nazi Germany right how can um how could that happen right how could how could we persecute one particular group like that to the point where we’re literally sending millions of Jewish people to their death right um
And then I start thinking about what’s going on in this country today right so help us connect all of these dots right you mentioned the Muslim ban before I know you’re very familiar with the racializing of covid-19 and the rise in hate crimes against asian-americans uh during the covid-19 pandemic um and
Today we even have laws that are targeting trans youth as well so how are all of these things related oh they are related we start by demonizing people we demonize entire groups one second there’s a lot can you I’m sorry about that you’re okay go ahead well let let me say that many
Years ago I visited the Holocaust um museum in Washington DC and I think at that time you walk in and you see a bunch of shoes and you see all these things then you see how things began to change in Germany how we required people to or we banned them from certain jobs
We required them to be identifiable as Jewish um the fear we create fear about the other and so in Germany and some other places it was it was Jews it was the Roma it was people who were gay it was anybody that was identifiably different got labeled and
We started seeing this in the United States especially around the Latino Community you know they they are criminals they’re um they’re full of diseases they don’t want to learn English they’re not part of our culture they’re never going to fit in and you start seeing that the images that get
Portrayed and you see especially in certain television channels and networks are all very negative images of these people I had an incident involving me I tell it in my one woman show at the time when they were passing the anti-immigrant laws in Georgia Alabama I called A legislature I wanted
To interview and when I gave my name and I used the pronunciation I usea the operator at the state legislature said that is not an American name I cannot talk to you wow she hung up on me I’m a journalist in in San Francisco covering a story about anti-immigrant
Sentiment she assumed I was an undocumented immigrant I guess and she thought she couldn’t talk to me because the laws that got passed most of them were by the courts found to be unconstitutional said you couldn’t give a right to someone who was undocumented you couldn’t do all these
Things that’s how it starts and it starts by caricaturing people if you’ve studied the Holocaust you can see that there were posters that were being put up that had a caricature of who Jews were and you know some of those things are still alive and well and thriving in
This country and elsewhere and we’ve seen a huge spike in an anti-Semitism especially with what’s going on in Israel and Hamas and it’s all ugly and bad right and it affects people very negatively uh so I think we have to be mindful of how um how we go down this
Slippery slope towards a society that’s filled with hate and demonizing and attributing our problems to a group of people yeah well said really really good you know it brings me to this concept of identity you know when I think about my own identity I think about being a New
Yorker being Israeli being Jewish being uh a speaker being being a fraternity man um so I think about all of these things and you say that you have multiple identities as well that are indivisible at all times you were all of these you are Chana Latina Madre lawyer playright writer standup comic feminist
And much more so when you say all these pieces of your identity are indivisible what do you mean by that well you hear the word um intersectionality right that that sort of was coined in the legal framework of when people experience discrimination there have been cases where it’s like well you didn’t experience
Discrimination because the person who was acting against you was also black it’s like yeah but that black person was a very light-skinned black person and I happen to be a dark skinned black person who comes from a lower income Community as suppose from someone who is from a professional class multiple Generations
It’s like all of our identities are tied up into one and we sometimes experience discrimination that it’s it’s hard to tease out and and discrimination either positively or negatively like some people we have stereotypes about some people that work in a favorable way supposedly such as oh my God how can my
Kids compete against these Asian students have you heard that I have heard that they are so super smart and they’ve got tiger moms and everybody and they’re getting all this tutoring and my kids’s never going to get into an Ivy League College because it’s going to all
Of these Asian kids you know so sort of a positive stereotype but it really isn’t and we we need to learn to judge people as individuals but an individual has multiple identities just like you gave yours as being several things like are you more Jewish and you are a
Southerner now that you live in Atlanta I mean uh in Nashville yeah all those things right and so wanting to understand who is the whole composite of whik is so I have a favorite bumper sticker I want to show you have you seen that never I haven’t
Seen that yet well the first time I saw it in a car I don’t actually have it in my car I have it here in my desk don’t believe everything you think you know we we grow up with so many beliefs that we didn’t have a choice about whether we
Were going to have that belief it came with our family it came with our community it came with our region of the country and what I love to do when I talk with folks and it’s part of my play is to challenge what people believe and there are things that we
Believe that just aren’t true but we make generalizations that’s how we make sense of the world so I used to lead a women’s rights organization and all the lawyers in my office were women I started that job when my son was maybe four years old and when he was in first
Grade he came home one day he goes mommy even a man can be a lawyer I said of course a man can be anything he wants just like a woman he said I didn’t know that but Brennan’s dad is a lawyer I said yes I know him and he made that assumption because
Every lawyer he ever met was a woman when he came to my office my spouse is not a lawyer right so in his world lawyer was a woman’s job right and I had to disabuse him of that so when we talk about representation yes representation does matter because we
Make assumptions about the world based on what we see around us right 100% And if you see only images of brown people like we’re seeing at the border brown and black people who have been traveling for days who are not bed who are weary who look bedraggled and you assume that
Every Latino every black person every immigrant who wants to come to America is really a threat to our nation’s security you’re going to want to keep them out and that’s a microcosm of of uh Humanity that is face certain situations that CA them to take these big risks of coming to this
Country anyhow we we’ve got so many issues that we need to be thinking about how how do we how do we create a compassionate Society how do we create a compassionate family unit well how do we do that I mean you know if we talk about many of our listeners are in
Fraternities and sororities um some of them are in traditionally white fraternities and sororities for the last hundred years um and some of them have you know some of these organizations have been accused of racism um so you know I guess that is the question how
Can we as individuals what can we do to create organizations let’s say on college campuses that are more diverse than ever I mean you understand the demographics of today’s college students how can we create organizations that treat everybody with respect and dignity well I think it’s starts with educating
Ourselves and if you do not have an understanding of our nation’s history and the role that slavery played in creating this very successful economic engine that is America and has had had so much power in many many spheres you are you’re losing out on an important
Part of learning who we are as a country and how we can become better so part of it is educating yourself we have access to education 247 that’s free in the internet but you need to get it from sources that are legitimate there’s wonderful books there’s wonderful movies
The book cast for example by uh Isabelle Wilkerson who won a Pulitzer Prize for the warmth of other sons that talks about the Great Migration and how in the United States we basically have had a cast system based on skin color and your position as either having been an
Enslaved person or not and so it starts with educating ourselves and also by asking ourselves well what kind of person do I want to be you know do I want to be a person that’s filled with hate and distrust of other people I don’t think most of us want to
Be that kind of person and you learn so much by befriending people who are different from you and different from you can be racially ethnically socioeconomic class religion and to approach these friendships with an open mind about like Wow first and foremost we’re all people
Right we we love we feel pain uh we feel jealousy we feel all these human emotions it doesn’t matter what your background is we have that in common and that was so interesting to me I didn’t have a white friend till I was a junior in college my world was entirely Mexican-American
So I have a 31-year-old son he happened to have gone to a French Bilingual School because I wanted him to grow up bilingual um and I didn’t much care which language I would have preferred Spanish but there was no Spanish Bilingual School in the community where
I lived and as a child he had friends whose family spoke other languages who had different socioeconomic backgrounds uh when he was maybe 10 a friend of his was coming over after school and he goes mom om’s coming for for after school and he’ll have dinner with us don’t make pork because he’s
Muslim I thought oh my God I didn’t know what a Muslim was till I was a grownup and already as a kid he knew and I tell him that is such a gift to grow up around people so different from you and to learn that people have different customs different religions different
Language families they grew up in and that you see each other as friends and peers yeah really love I love it I love it now you know I know San Francisco I’ll tell you is one of my favorite cities certainly has tons of culture uh which is one of the great things about
San Francisco but you know I’m always concerned with where am I going to go to eat okay I like to eat I like all different kinds of food so the next time I’m in the area speaking where should I go for a great meal well first call me
I’ll take you um I love I love Mexican food I sometimes say oh I’m so glad I’m Mexican we have the best food but then I’ll eat Vietnamese food or Thai food or Japanese food and I’ll say oh I love this food so much yeah um there’s lots
Of wonderful restaurants in the mission in San Francisco I love a place called chavas c h a v s that’s little hole in the wall but they have great I which is goat meat I which I love they have great tacos they have great Chile Reno whatever you like they have really good
Food but wow are we blessed in the San Francisco Bay area with just food from all over the world the highest quality uh authentic food I just down the street for me we we have all kinds of wonderful restaurants it’s it’s U it’s a wonder we ever cook yeah exactly I love that
Variety probably another reason why I love San Francisco is because I can get all the variety in food that I I really crave I’m somebody that grew up in New York City in Manhattan and so you know in Manhattan I mean you get access to everything yeah and that is what I
Really miss I mean I listen I love being in Nashville don’t get me wrong but it doesn’t have the variety that I seek in New York or San Francisco and so well you may not have the the the great immense variety of a New York or San Francisco but Nashville has become very
Diverse I took my place to Nashville last year I performed at teapac yes and I visited Nashville several times and I loved your city yes it’s a wonderful City and you’re right there are a lot of really really talented chefs that are coming in and are bringing just
Wonderful food so it is getting better in terms of the variety uh which is great and the quality of the food is very good but like there are certain things I can’t get you know like bagels and pizza from nework these are things that I really crave but
I just can’t find the real deal in Nashville now if you want barbecue there’s wonderful barbecue in Nashville but oh yes so you know you have to make do with what you got and then I go to San Francisco or New York when I’m feeling adventurous uh in the food realm
So uh so that’s really good all right so I’ll definitely check that out um fantastic if our students if they want to hire you as a speaker on their college campus or maybe they want to see your onew woman show it’s called why would I mispronounce my own name on
Their college campus where should they go to connect with you Irma if you go to my website Irma era.com you can connect to all my social media and I am performing in college campuses and I find that so rewarding last year I performed in two campuses in uh Texas
And I’m going to Princeton in uh next month I’m going to perform my play at Princeton and later this year I’ll be performing at Trinity University which is in San Antonio there’s another Trinity somewhere in the east coast but Trinity colle I think that’s Trinity College this is Trinity University so on
My website and I also do a one to two minute storytelling it’s in my stairwell of my home so it’s called my stairwell theatro and I tell stories about names that don’t fit into my play for example I’m doing a little series on the word latinx because some people love it some people
Hate it and I’m just like digging into well why did people come up with this term and what does it mean and who uses it and it’s all to lead us to talk about how do we include people is it inclusive is it elitist and perhaps it’s all those
Things but most importantly when you meet somebody how do they refer to themselves and that’s the thing about my name theme and my play why would I mispronounce my own name now I won’t mispronounce my own name but if somebody wants to call me Irma I have no control
Over how they say my name I would like them to say Irma but if they don’t want to it’s on them if they want to show respect to me they’ll try at least to say it correctly but um why would I mispronounce my own name and I meet so many people who say
You know what I’ve been mispronouncing my own name for other people’s convenience I don’t want to do that anymore yeah and earlier we talked about whether you want to be called Mike or Michael right and you don’t have to be une ethnic or have a an unusual or
Uncommon name to deserve the respect there’s people who are named Alexander who don’t want to be called Alex there’s Kiren and Kirsten and often we get the names confused and if I call you Kiren and you tell me your name is Kiren I don’t take offense in telling
You well this is America you know actually Kirsten and Kiren are not American names they come from the Scandinavian countries right nobody will complain about that but for some people with Latino names I have been told this is America say your name in English it’s like well do you tell
Bianca that she has to call herself white because the word biano means white in Italian right so true only bianc guy is the feminine version and it reminds me of this joke that a comedian said it’s he says uh uh my name is Miles if I go to England do you think
Someone there is going to tell me oh here we’ll need to call you kilometer no that’s not how names work so respect starts with learning a person’s name I love it very very good this is really great conversation I absolutely love the play and I I think
You’re going to be on college campuses all across the country so I can’t wait for all of that Trinity University has fantastic students I’ve spoken both there and at Trinity College which is in Hartford Connecticut um okay and uh yeah and so both colleges have amazing students I can’t say enough good things
About both places but you’re really gonna enjoy saying and I’m excited to go to Princeton yes Princeton I mean fantastic fantastic school um so all good things ahead so thank you thank you so much for sharing all this great information with USA I really thank you for inviting me it’s been a pleasure
Mike yes it has been a lot of fun and to our listening audience if you enjoyed this conversation with Irma I want you to like it and I want you to share it with other students on your college campus we can’t wait to see you on another episode of the fraternity foodie
Podcast thanks for joining us we’ll see you next Time
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