2. I was born in Uruguay
A lovely small country in South America. Land of 10
million cows and 3 million people.
3. My family comes from Spain
Both my grandparents have a rural background and
immigrated to Uruguay from Spain (Galicia and Asturias)
to look for better economic opportunities. In Uruguay
they became small entrepreneurs.
5. Everything was fine…
…Until dictatorships hit Latin America in the late 60’s
and 70’s. Leftist guerrillas, urban turmoil, economic
hardship, kidnappings and torture became part of daily
life. My parents decided to move to Brazil to look for
better economic opportunities… I was five.
They took me to this gigantic city of 20 million people
called São Paulo, in the Southeast of Brazil…
6. São Paulo is New York on
steroids…
Lots of traffic, urban chaos and violence, but also a
vibrant and exciting city, full of immigrants willing to
make a better living…It is still a land of opportunity!
7. I decided to be a journalist
Because I liked to read and write (and was good at it)
I had a sense of what is fair or not in the world
I read Little Women
at the age of 9, fell in love
with Jo. I was also a bit
of a loner until I was 10.
8. My career started in…
A big newspaper (Folha de S. Paulo)
I was accepted at Abril trainee program(one of the
biggest publishing groups in Latam, the Conde Nast of
Brazil). My dream was to become Elle Brazil director at
that point…
I went to work for Veja Sao Paulo section (one of the
biggest weekly magazines in the world, actually the 4th).
My first cover was a story about a week I spent inside a
circus…
9. My first cover a Veja SP…
Was about the biggest Circus in the country. It was
called… Circo Garcia! I spent a week there. I have a
picture holding a baby chimpanzee using diapers as a
memory of that week (unfortunately that stayed in
Brazil…)
11. My mentor at the beginning…
…was David Drew Zingg, legendary American photographer
who fell in love with Brazil in the 50’s…
He encouraged me to aim high.
He was a creative, irreverent and
a Macintosh maniac.
More info and pictures:
http://www.zingg.com.br/bio_ing.html
http://www.blogdoims.com.br/ims/david-drew-zingg/
12. Then in 1998…
I decided I wanted to do “serious” Journalism. I had been
covering city issues, arts and entertainment, fashion and
writing lifestyle and career features for magazines. The
internet was there and I wanted to experiment with it.
So I took some time off and went to New York to study
Computer-Assisted Reporting at Columbia University
during the Summer of 1997.
Coming back to Brazil I moved soon to Exame, Brazil’s
top business magazine. It was 1998, and I hated the
individualistic and ultracompetitive culture of the place.
14. Party like it’s 1999…
Both my dreams of working with the internet and doing “serious”
Journalism came true in 1999, when I joined Reuters to start it’s
Portuguese Online Service. We were 3 people, having to deliver 200
stories a day (most of them translations) to clients like
MSN, Terra, Yahoo, Aol, etc. So that year I got a new job and… a
husband! João and I got married in December.
There I had my first experience as an editor, I learned to manage
teams, to report and coordinate complex coverages (like
presidential elections, business mergers, kidnappings, urban
violence, World Cups, Carnival, etc… and yes, I kept covering arts
and fashion anyway…) I also coordinated many intense coverages
like 9/11, the Bush/Gore election and other key world events for
Brazilian readers… I was 26 when I took the job.
16. Busy and exciting times…
During that time I wrote stories in Spanish, English and sometimes
Portuguese (I covered 34 countries of the region from the D.C.
perspective)
I also covered Latino issues, from the marches of 2006 to the
housing crisis to the influence of the Latino vote in the Obama
election in 2008.
I covered the IMF, World Bank, U.S. Congress, the State
Department, the White House, the U.N. Assembly in NY and all
presidential visits from Latin American leaders to Washington D.C.
Then in 2008, I got pregnant… Martina was born right before
Obama got elected and the U.S. economy melted completely. We
both worked really hard during that year…
18. If you can make it there…
João wanted to move to New York for a while to try his
music out there. So I took some time off and went with
him. We lived in Brooklyn for a year. After 8 months, I
took a job share the Reuters Time Square office working
for Reuters Summits, a global event where we interview
global key players in every industry. I helped organize the
event and coordinated international teams.
By December of 2009, my U.S. contract ended and I was
repatriated to Brazil.
20. Miss Business
Back in Brazil, I became an Editorial Business Manager. I
helped launch new editorial services (like Trading Brazil, an
online financial community), worked with automation (which
meant dealing with developers in China to categorize data from
the Brazilian Securities Exchange Comission) and became a key
ally of Sales and Marketing, helping promote our Editorial
operation among clients (especially against Bloomberg and our
local competitor, Agencia Estado). I also covered a bit the last
presidential election, writing about Marina Silva, our “green”
candidate, who ended getting 20 million votes on the ballot that
brought Worker’s Party Dilma Rousseff to power.
21. Next chapter?
To be continued…during my backstory session on Monday.
See you there! ;-)
