Voices of change: a journey of intersectionality and empowerment

by Damilis Fernandes, (she/her), Talent Acquisition Operations Analyst at Warner Bros Discovery.

I am a Black, Latin American woman who comes from a working-class family in Brazil, and I identify as pansexual and aromantic. Many labels, right? How do I manage to be part of so many minority groups at the same time? I think it's worth telling my story, right from the beginning. Daughter of a seamstress, Dora, and a mechanic, Carlos, notice that I like to name people.

I was born in the suburb of the city of São Paulo. São Paulo is the largest city in Latin America, both in terms of population and economic value. I was born in the extreme south of the city, in the region of Jardim Ângela, Capão Redondo, Parque Santo Antônio... Anyone who knows Brazilian hip hop music has heard of these neighborhoods because of their violence. Jardim Angela was once considered the most dangerous neighborhood in Latin America in the 1970s and 1980s; luckily,

I was born in the 1990s, when things were calmer there. Fortunately, I was also born the granddaughter of Dona Laura, a Bahian hairdresser full of faith who navigated between Candomblé (an Afro-Brazilian religion), Catholicism, and Spiritism. It was my grandmother who gave me an amulet (Patuá) as soon as I was born to protect me from respiratory problems that have haunted the family for generations, and so I am the only one in the family to this day who does not have respiratory problems, thanks to Grandma Laura's faith.

Growing up in the suburb of São Paulo is not easy, but I was lucky, again,  to have a father who, despite not completing his studies, did everything so that my sister, Daísi, and I had the opportunity to dedicate ourselves to studying. We even took private English lessons, which was almost a luxury in that time. My generation was the first in the family to go to college, my sister in Advertising and I in Tourism. It was very difficult to choose which course I would take in college; I had no basis for choice.

At 17 years old, I didn't know exactly what I wanted to be when I grew up. I chose Tourism because I liked to travel, even though the only trip I had ever taken was to visit my family in Bahia, but I already knew that I would like to see the world. Well, I graduated, started working in tourism, and tourism gave me opportunities to visit several cities and countries. And in 2016 we went on vacation, my sister and I, to South Africa.

I consider this trip my personal change to understand my history, what it means to be a Black woman, and what I can offer to other people like me. In South Africa, I got to know deeply, through museums, people, stories, and books, who Mandela was and all the people who fought against the Apartheid regime. In 1994, when Mandela became president of South Africa, what he said was that there is no South Africa for whites and a South Africa for blacks, there is South Africa enough for all people. He preached unity.

It was with this thought that I returned to Brazil questioning, why in the private places where I studied was I always the only Black person? Why in the places where I worked was I one of the few Black people? Why when I stayed, in a work trip,  in a 5-star hotel in Switzerland, the guy from an African country who brought me room service stood still for 2 minutes looking at me without saying anything and then very impressed told me that it was the first time he saw someone of the same color as him staying at that hotel?

As a resident of São Paulo, a metropolis full of buildings where Time is money, I began to study the issue of diversity and inclusion in the corporate world, and this has been my mission since I returned from that trip to South Africa, to do everything possible for people like me to occupy all the spaces that I occupy, and don't get me wrong, but I am many people, I am LGBTQIPN+, I am a woman, and I am Black, and I will never again accept being the only one in any place that should be for everyone.