What: A social service agency whose mission is “eliminating racism, empowering women.”It works with domestic violence and sexual assault victims, children in foster care and many others.
Where: 3609 Main St., Vancouver.
Call: 360-696-0167.
Online: ywcaclarkcounty.com.
Serves: More than 11,800 people annually.
Sonia Manzano grew up loving television.
“But I never saw anyone who looked like me” on the small screen, said the native of New York’s South Bronx, whose family hailed from Puerto Rico. For that matter, she said, she didn’t see blacks or any other minority groups — and certainly no women in leadership roles — on the TV of her childhood.
“I’ve become what I needed to see on TV,” she said. “A Latina role model who’s contributing to the society she lives in.”
Manzano has played Maria — a wife and mother but also a business owner and skilled professional — on the public television show “Sesame Street” since 1971. About a decade after starring on “Sesame Street,” she began to write scripts for the show and has gone on to win 15 Emmy awards as a writer. Manzano has also written children’s books and appeared on Broadway.
What: A social service agency whose mission is "eliminating racism, empowering women."It works with domestic violence and sexual assault victims, children in foster care and many others.
Where: 3609 Main St., Vancouver.
Call: 360-696-0167.
Online: ywcaclarkcounty.com.
Serves: More than 11,800 people annually.
Manzano, 64, was keynote speaker Thursday at the YWCA Clark County’s 20th annual fundraising luncheon, which was focused on one Y program in particular: the in-house childcare program called Y’s Care. Y’s Care is aimed at bringing young children who are low-income or homeless, and likely have experienced serious trauma, up to speed behaviorally and socially — not to mention intellectually — so they’re just as ready for kindergarten as their middle-class peers, according to director Leah Reitz.
The Y’s Care goal, Reitz said in a video presentation during the luncheon at the Hilton Vancouver Washington, is pulling those kids back from the brink and helping them grow into positive, contributing members of society as adults.
That’s despite a world that’s grown far more complicated and challenging for parents. “We never could have imagined the situation of our children now,” she said. “Kids face more obstacles and harder obstacles than we ever could have dreamt of in the idealistic year of 1969.”
That’s the year “Sesame Street” went on the air, and its primary challenge then was creating a realistic, multicolored cast that reflected the demographics of America, Manzano said. Today, she said, the show’s challenges are the challenges of our times: fragmented families and poverty, bullying, mental illness, parents addicted to drugs or traumatized by war or serving time in prison — not to mention the cultural traditions that may hold some groups back.
In families like her old-fashioned Puerto Rican one, she said, the emphasis may be on quiet obedience and staying close to home rather than reaching your potential. Manzano said she knows talented students who have turned down scholarships to Ivy League universities because the parents couldn’t stomach sending their kids out of state.
“It’s not in their culture. Their wonderful close family ties … prevented them from succeeding in American culture,” she said. “So many kids hear NO all the time. They’re never applauded. They’re only disciplined.”
That’s a shame, she said, because her belief — the “Sesame Street” credo — is that children are born with confidence, curiosity and common sense.
“Every generation of children offers me a whole new set of challenges … and a whole new opportunity to do better by them,” she said.
‘Real’ love
That’s why Manzano has stayed with the same job — being Maria — for 44 years now, she said. A quick video review of her career, before her Thursday appearance, showed how the role has covered many of life’s major milestones, from marriage and childbirth to parenting and even calling the fire department in an emergency.
A television tenure that long and realistic gives rise to plenty of popular confusion. Manzano once was approached by an admirer who said her children’s lives were enriched by the example of “real love” they saw in the durable marriage of Maria and husband Luis; Manzano felt she had to confess that the actor who plays Luis is not actually her husband. (His name is Emilio Delgado, and he’s still on the show.)
The woman was taken aback for a moment, then concluded: “Well, as long as you really love each other.”
Another searing revelation: A visitor to the set saw the top half of Big Bird’s big yellow costume come off, revealing the 72-year-old white guy inside. The disbelieving reaction: “Does Big Bird know there’s a man in him?” (His name is Carroll Spinney and he’s the same puppeteer who also plays Oscar the Grouch, Manzano’s personal favorite Muppet.)
While Americans like to think that they “think outside the box,” they actually seem to prefer easy answers to complex questions, Manzano said. But life — and parenting — are far more difficult than they used to be, she said. “What we have to help us, and you don’t, is the Muppets,” she said.
Muppets with real appeal, Manzano confessed, probably ought to be a little neurotic or compulsive. Like the one who can’t control himself around cookies, like the one who can’t quit counting.
Childhood memories
Manzano’s childhood home was literally without pencil or paper. She has a vivid memory of her father digging an eyebrow pencil out of her mother’s purse and using it to write a telephone number on the wall. Another memory is looking at subway advertising and realizing that she was capable of reading it — and that it was hinting at a whole new world for her.
Since then, Manzano has led a literary life as well as a dramatic one, producing numerous scripts for “Sesame Street” as well as several children’s books, including the award-winning “The Revolution of Evelyn Serrano,” which reflects the turbulence of her South Bronx neighborhood in the 1960s.
But what if her family background had been a literary one? What if she’d been steeped in reading and writing from an early age? She would have started earlier and gone farther, she said.
Manzano mentioned a nonprofit environmental effort that she volunteers for called the Bronx River Alliance. It brings together the efforts of diverse people who are all touched by the river, she said — from the super-rich of suburban Westchester to the working poor of the South Bronx.
“It is a spectrum of characters,” she said, and — like the spectrum on “Sesame Street” — that’s what gives it strength.
