My Accent, My Identity
Liliana Soto with videographer Peter Scholz. Photo by José Ochoa, ABC15 .
She was a pregnant teenager in Mexico. Later, she was told her background and her accent would limit her English-language journalism career. Today Liliana Soto has nine Emmys decorating her home, and scores of followers as an investigative video journalist in Arizona.
Apolinar Sosaya, a 75-year-old street vendor, probably never thought he’d hear his voice and his words, in Spanish, aired on television in Phoenix, Arizona. The popsicle seller was robbed of $300 he’d planned to use to buy his diabetes medicine and became just one of the unlikely characters whose stories have been told by Liliana Soto, a veteran investigative reporter with ABC15.
Amplifying voices of underrepresented people was Soto’s dream when she earned acceptance to the Walter Cronkite School of Journalism at Arizona State University. Her goal was bringing to light the people who looked and sounded like her father, a Guatemalan farmer who immigrated to Mexico when he was 12 years old, or people like her neighbors in Maryvale, the diverse and culturally rich suburb of Phoenix, where she settled 17 years ago after leaving Caborca, in Mexico’s northern state of Sonora.
In college, one professor tried to pigeonhole her. Soto remembers him saying, “You have great on-camera presence, you would do great in Spanish news. But with your accent, you will never do it on English news.”
Those words haunted her, she said, even though she excelled at Arizona State and eventually graduated magna cum laude.
Today it’s hard to see any limits on Soto’s career. Her presence and abilities are on display in her TED Talk.
She was raised in the tiny town of Pitiquito, in Sonora state, across the border from Arizona. As the oldest of four siblings, she was expected to be the role model. Instead, she fled with her boyfriend to Lompoc, California, to avoid facing the disappointment she thought her teenage pregnancy would bring to her parents. She then left the abusive boyfriend and set out to make her own way in the United States.
Soto is now 36. She is a nine-time Emmy award winner for her work. She’s turned her accent, her language skills and her bicultural expertise into effective tools. She is also mother to 18-year-old Andrea, who is now selecting the college where she’ll study in the fall.
“I told the three members of the selection committee that my accent was my weakness. Now I know that my accent is my strength.”
Soto ends her Ted Talk by dedicating her story to the social worker who helped her build the tenacity that’s kept her going, despite the odds. She says it’s that kind of support that everyone can pay forward.
“If you help someone, it could be someone like me, who didn’t even know that doors existed,” Soto says.
A real struggle
Away from the television spotlight, Soto is candid in confessing that “good people” have paved the way for her. Those who have “encouraged me, instead of telling me what I can’t do,” she said.
With a smile of immense gratitude, she describes her boss as one of those “good people.”
Instead of hiding her voice and forcing her to change her identity, her editor provided her with a coach to learn “the tricks of where to place the tongue when saying th or d, like a kid who is learning phonics.”
But the coaching was not for erasing her accent, only to smooth out a “singsong delivery that emphasized words that made it hard to listen to,” said Mark Casey, former ABC15 news director.
“Lily is a unique, hardworking, passionate individual, and we are lucky to have her,” Casey said, in an interview with palabra, two days before he retired after more than 40 years in journalism. The station’s effort to bring the best out of Soto was not random, Casey said. He described an intentional effort to reflect, for the Arizona audience, the diversity of the community.
A scene from Soto’s feature story about a popsicle vendor who was assaulted and robbed.
“When I interviewed for the position at ABC15, I told the three members of the selection committee that my accent was my weakness. Now I know that my accent is my strength,” Soto said. In her reports, she talks about paletas and pan dulce. On air, she says MEH-he-co, not Mex-ee-co. It’s infectious. Newscast anchors make sure to pronounce her name correctly.
Praise drowns out the backlash
There was some pushback from the audience. This is still Arizona.
“Lili’s on-air reporting brought more positive than negative comments,” Casey said, putting a polite spin on demands from a few viewers to “send her back to Mexico,” or on complaints that someone was “having a hard time understanding her.” ABC15 decided to screen out hateful online comments aimed at Soto. Despite the controversy, Casey said, the ratings have gone up since the station decided to dive into in-depth community coverage of a diverse Arizona. He credits Soto -- and the recruitment of several other journalists of color -- for the success, as the station has benefitted from stronger connections to its audiences.
It was Marcelino Quiñonez, the coach brought in to work with Soto, who instructed her to stay true to her voice, accent and all.
“You will never sound like a person from Iowa; you will sound like Lili,” Soto said, repeating what Quiñonez had taught her. She remembers screaming in his office, “I’m Lili. I’m a Mexican immigrant. And this is my accent. This is Lili’s accent. This is my identity!”
Liliana Soto. Photo by José Luis Median
It’s the same identity she breathes in when she drives five hours south to visit her family in northern Mexico. It’s the identity she embraces when she recalls her father’s love for working the land, enjoying the soil and its fruits. It’s the identity she said she admires in her mother, who, while working as a nurse, also earned a law degree in Mexico. It’s the identity she forged working three jobs and raising a child when she spoke no English. And, it’s the professional identity she built, first by reporting in Spanish as a multimedia journalist in Texas for Univision Austin; as a weekend anchor and reporter at Univision Arizona; as a correspondent for the newscasts Primera Edición and Conexión Texas; and as a freelancer for NBCUniversal Telemundo network.
Along the way, Soto said, she learned the value of her identity and her journalism skills. She described one scary human resources encounter: “I was placed in a corner and told: Sign this or you are out.” It was a new, two-year contract that did not include a raise. She immediately quit, even though it meant her daughter would lose medical insurance.
Soto set out to find a better deal, and she did, watching her paychecks grow by 50% as she displayed her investigative skills. As a multimedia journalist she had also become accustomed to doing everything herself that she was surprised, and happy, when a videographer was assigned to work with her.
“When I worked as a multimedia journalist, I dreamed of somehow recording my standup, walking.”
That goal was checked off, and now she’s working on making others come true. One day, she said, she will be a journalism professor. She will also write her book, and become a national correspondent, in English and Spanish.
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Dagmar Thiel is Ecuadorian-German journalist and CEO of Fundamedios, a non-profit organization dedicated to press freedoms and freedom of expression throughout the Americas. In her native Ecuador, Thiel reported for Ecuavisa and TC TV, and contributed to Spain’s El Pais newspaper and the German broadcaster Deutsche Welle. She is also a Donald Reynolds Institute fellow.