Natasha S. Alford has always been three things: Black, Latina and an overachiever. Weeks after a historic presidential election, Maria Hinojosa sits down with the political analyst, journalist, and media executive to talk about solidarity between Black and Latinx communities, as well as Natasha’s latest achievement—her debut memoir American Negra.
Read the episode transcript here.
It was the first time Maria and Natasha got together to speak at length, but this wasn’t the first time they’d met. In American Negra, Natasha writes about the very first time she and Maria spoke.
In 2014 Natasha was a graduate student at the Medill Journalism School, at Northwestern University in Chicago, and Latino USA put together an event called, “Quiz the Media.” At the event, Latinx journalism students asked questions of working journalists on a panel, and as luck would have it Natasha was there as a student and Maria was there as a journalist.
Natasha remembers the feeling of validation in her Latinidad for being included in the show but remembers feeling awkward because she was the only Afro-Latina participating. But then, Maria said something that stayed with Natasha till this day and would end up being reflected in her journalism journey.
From local news to being a media executive at The Grio, the news site focusing on the Black experience. A theme Natasha’s memoir continues in its opening words: “I am a daughter of northern migrations. A lovechild of American dreaming clashing with conquest and flight, sending two populations who should’ve been basking in the suns of Southern states and the heat of Caribbean islands, to a new, cold, snowy land they would call home: upstate New York.”
In the interview, Natasha shares the stories of the “two northern migrations” in her family. Like millions during The Great Migration, her African American father’s family fled the South to work in industrial factories in northern states and escaped the “racial terror and the KKK,” Natasha said.
Her mother’s family also went through another mass migration heading north. Her grandmother, originally from rural Puerto Rico, migrated in the 1950s to New York City, fleeing the unemployment that plagued the Caribbean island and resettling her family in the mainland.
As a working-class Black Puerto Rican girl in Syracuse, Natasha always felt like she was between two worlds —a Black world and a Puerto Rican world. But when she got accepted to Harvard University, the world of “class” became much more visible. A week before college started, she joined the “clean-up crew,” a group of students who arrived at college early to clean the dorms. She didn’t blink at the situation, it was good pay and her father was a janitor. But at Harvard, her class became visible in a way it hadn’t before.
“At that institution, there are hidden rules that you don’t know that you have to learn,” she said. “You may go through those four years and get the degree, but your experience is going to be different from someone coming from a different class.”
Today, ahead of a second Trump administration, a new master’s degree in Public Policy from Princeton, and after a decade of working in journalism, Natasha now understands the rules but she’s changed. Today she says, “I see the journalism I’m doing as a public service. I plan to do public service, which is part of why I went to policy school. [But] I’m okay with not being part of the clean-up crew.”
Graphic by Monica Morales-Garcia.
Produced by Monica Morales-Garcia with editing by Marta Martinez. It was mixed by Andy Bosnak.
