Click here for more information about the January 9, 2014 community town hall with the FCC
Gracias, Malkia y buenas noches a todos.
Mi nombre es Jessica Gonzalez and I represent the National Hispanic Media Coalition.
I am here this evening as an advocate, a Latina, a woman, and a mother, to give voice to the voiceless.
That’s what the Voices for Internet Freedom Coalition is all about:
- Ensuring the rights of all people to hear and be heard on the internet;
- Ensuring affordable access to open broadband internet connections.
This morning I logged onto one of my favorite blog sites,
DeSuMama.com. This Cuban American blogger writes love letters to her children. She isn’t a policy wonk, a journalist, or a racial justice activist but she is changing American culture one reader at a time by sharing her journey as the daughter of immigrants, the wife of a black man and the mother of bi-racial and bi-ethnic children. And she is earning a living this way.
Today, thanks to the FCC’s network neutrality decision in 2010, we can access DeSuMama on our fixed internet connections just as easily as I can access
FoxNews.com or
CNN.com. This means that we can learn about what it means to be “American” from a diversity of sources, not just entrenched media outlets that have largely ignored the positive contributions of people of color in this country.
Affordable, universal and open broadband internet access is integral to achieving equality in the United States. This is particularly important for people of color, who have faced not only media misrepresentation and discrimination from economic opportunities, but also lag behind in broadband adoption. NHMC thanks Chairman Wheeler for being here in Oakland this evening and calls on him to do everything in his power to ensure that all Americans, and especially our children, have first-class access to all of the opportunities that broadband internet affords.
With that, I will get off my soapbox, and finally do what I was asked to do here this evening: introduce an extraordinarily talented, intelligent and courageous public servant, and one of California’s own Public Utilities Commission members.
This person has an impressive resume with stints in academia, the media industry, at the FCC and in private practice. She holds a JD from Stanford Law School where she was a member of the
Stanford Law Review, a Master in Letters from Oxford University where she was the first Latina in history to win a Rhodes scholarship, and a B.A. in Latin American Studies,
magna cum laude, from Yale University. I could read off all of her accolades, but then we would be here all night. Please join me in welcoming this trailblazer, Commissioner Cathy Sandoval.
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Gracias, Malkia y buenas noches a todos.
Mi nombre es Jessica Gonzalez and I represent the National Hispanic Media Coalition.
I am here this evening as an advocate, a Latina, a woman, and a mother, to give voice to the voiceless.
That’s what the Voices for Internet Freedom Coalition is all about:
