By Venessa Deosaran –
International communications specialist Felicia Persaud has fought determinedly as a Guyanese woman to make a name for herself despite her “coloured” background.
Speaking with Guyana Times Sunday Magazine, Persaud said she faced many challenges being a Guyanese woman in the international media, “In the United States I’m not a Guyanese woman. I’m black. I’m an immigrant and I’m a woman! Those are all tags that are laid on me just on sight. And they are sadly all labels that are not at the top of the totem pole, more like the bottom of the barrel. So you have to claw your way up out of that hole literally; fighting off racism, sexism and stereotypes all the way. Then there is the whole issue of not knowing where we count as Caribbean people, since we have no category on the US census, so we can’t accurately self-identify, and that makes you feel like you don’t belong at all,” she disclosed.
Persaud was born in Guyana and migrated to New York City several years ago after earning her communications degree at the University of Guyana, and almost immediately continued her journalism career with a focus on immigration.
She has worked in the mainstream, Caribbean and Black Press before launching the syndicated Caribbean World News Network in 2004, now News Americas, to fill the void for a daily news service in the Caribbean/Latin Americas overseas market, and CaribPR Wire, which in 2009 became part of the PR Newswire family as the official PR Wire of the Caribbean.
The media expert is now sought consistently by many Caribbean media, including radio and local cable television shows, and has appeared on CNN International as well as the BBC. Her company, Hard Beat Communications Inc, works specifically with major entities and brands out of the Caribbean to tap into the Caribbean diaspora market.
Her column, Immigration Korner, appears in several papers including The New York Amsterdam News, and her emotional commitment to ensuring that nationals in her community are not taken advantage of, led to collaboration with City University of New York, which joined Felicia in presenting a joint immigration seminar in 2006.
In 2008, she formed CARIB ID, a campaign to get Caribbean nationals their own category on the US Census form. Persaud recently lobbied for and secured a congressional bill that would call for an ancestry identify category for Caribbean nationals, to be added to the US Census form, and continues the push to make this a reality. The Caribbean Count bill, or H.R. 2071, was introduced April 23 by Congresswoman Yvette Clarke and is now before the Government Reform Committee in the US Congress.
Felicia is the winner of a New York Association of Black Journalists Award, two Independent Press Association Award for excellence in writing; a Caribbean Tourism Organisation Award for excellence in Travel Writing, and is the recipient of several community proclamations and awards, including a 2007 commendation by New York Comptroller, Bill Thompson.
She sits on the Board of Advisors of the Bowling Green Association. Persaud, chair of the Committee to Celebrate Guyana, also initiated the first ever Guyana flag-raising ceremony to mark the country’s independence anniversary in the financial district of New York City.
Memories of home
Persaud grew up between Enmore and Paradise on the East Coast of Demerara. She remembers her days in Guyana as a child spent mostly with her late grandmother, Catherin Bobb.
“I still remember as a kid, running around behind her in her garden and beating the croton plants as if they were misbehaving kids. I also remember fondly the coconut factories at Enmore and how I would find a silly thrill in being invited up into the mash boxes to try my foot at pressing the milk out of the grated coconut,” she reminisced. “But those memories seem so long ago, it’s like another life,” she would also muse.
An alumnus of Queen’s College, Persaud recalled that the reason she entered the journalism field was because she always loved to read and write. She first fancied herself as an author, until she got a reality check that she needed to earn a living, so she quickly transferred from English to Communications at UG.
“I enjoy the fact that it’s multi-dimensional, so I’ve been able to grow way beyond just a journalist. And while it is stressful and demanding, and you’re constantly juggling deadlines, it’s also exciting and gets my adrenaline going, as it forces me to be creative and find solutions, not just focus on problems,” she explained.
