Claudia Amaro Shares Her Journey Unseen

Claudia Amaro’s journey to successful journalist, business owner and leadership coach had many twists and turns. She shared her Journey Unseen with the Wichita community at the Hyatt Regency Wichita on Tuesday, October 4, the first event in a two-part series sponsored by the Wichita Regional Chamber of Commerce.

Entrepreneurship, journalism and leadership are present in everything Amaro does.

“My entrepreneurial spirit comes from my father,” Amaro said. Two or three times a year, he would take blankets and gold from Durango, Mexico, and travel to Tijuana, Mexico, to sell those good, then buy goods to sell in Durango, Mexico. When she was 10, her father was shot, leaving her mother widowed with four young daughters.

Two years later, her mother left behind everything she knew to migrate to the U.S. with her daughters, where they first settled in Colorado. That’s where Amaro was hooked on journalism. She tried to join her high school yearbook, but she wasn’t allowed to because of her limited English.

Her mother remarried and the family moved again to California, where Amaro was able to attend a small private school of Latino Radio Journalists.

“At first I wanted to just be a writer, but that is when I fell in love with radio,” she said.

Her stepfather works in the aircraft industry and the family uprooted again and moved to Wichita when Amaro was around 19.

“This is the time where I can identify my first impactful act of leadership,” she said.

Before coming to Wichita, Amaro was a member of the youth group in her former church.. When she found one of the only two churches in Wichita with services in Spanish, the priest told her they didn’t have a youth group, but she was welcome to join the choir.

“Once in the choir, I identified other youth and talked to them about creating a youth group,” she said. “The adults in the choir were skeptical. It was the mid-‘90s, and we had a lot of drug and gang activity at that time in the city. But they decided to support us anyway.”

Amaro created a strategy to bring a priest from Mexico and a group of 14 friends who had a church youth group there to Wichita. Led by Amaro, the youth sold raffle tickets and collected $1,000. She convinced her priest to host the retreat at her church, and she sent to Mexico for the priest and her friends to come to Wichita.

“We invited youth to attend by making announcements at the end of the mass, sharing flyers and hanging signs on the Latino markets,” Amaro said. “Ninety-seven teenagers came to that first retreat.”

She had a moment of panic because she hadn’t taken into consideration the expenses of having the retreat, and she had not planned how to feed the teens. But her community didn’t let her down. Their parents, people from the choir and even businesses in the area came up with food donations.

Then 9/11 happened, and life became more difficult for immigrants.

“Laws were harder on us. By then, my husband and I did not have a way to legalize our status,” she said. “We visited immigration attorneys with no luck.”

In Kansas, they were no longer able to obtain driver’s licenses. When her husband was stopped for a traffic violation, he was turned over to immigration. Amaro went to help, and she was also arrested. Their young son was 5 at the time.

“We fought our cases for almost a year, until we had nothing left but our dignity,” she said. Then her husband was deported. She decided to follow him to Mexico, moving with their son.

“Mexico is beautiful. I am so proud to be Mexican, but it wasn’t our home anymore,” she said.

The summer of 2013, Amaro joined a civil disobedience at the border. The campaign was called “Bring them Home” and consisted of nine dreamers, people who were brought to the U.S. as children and that for different reasons were deported or left the U.S. tired of the oppression of being undocumented.

“The reality is that Mexico is not ready for us either, and all of us faced many challenges and in some cases, our lives were in danger,” she said.

Surrounded by community, priests, journalists, attorneys and other supporters, they presented themselves at the border and asked President Barack Obama to let them come back home. Amaro documented everything for the 17 days she was detained at an immigration detention center in Arizona while these supporters advocated for them.

“It has been nine years already, and I am still fighting for a green card,” she said. “At times, I feel like I get up every day and I have to prove that this is my home. This is where I belong.”

Upon her return to Wichita, she saw how the Latino community had grown, but many were still living in the shadows.

“Not only because of immigration status, but because they didn’t have access to news, information and resources,” she said. This led to her starting a weekly radio show she named Planeta Venus.

“I would interview anyone who spoke Spanish who wanted to share with the community,” she said. Four years later, she started her own online radio station, Planetavenus.online. “My social media channels have been a trusted resource of information for our Latino community in Wichita and southwest Kansas ever since.”

She was inspired by her love of Wichita to start AB&C Bilingual Resources in 2017 not only to make sure Latinos were included in the different conversations going on but also in the local economy. This year, she started a weekly Spanish newsletter sent every Friday via text and Facebook and a digital and print newspaper in Spanish.

“Entrepreneurship. Journalism. Leadership. Love. Determination, and a little bit of passion has led me to where I am now,” she said. “Maybe you didn’t notice it, but this isn’t my unseen journey. It is about my mother’s unseen journey. It is about all those immigrant women who work hard every day despite all the odds, language, and legal barriers. My story is just one story of 11 million stories.”

Mary Shannon, executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters, will speak at the second Journey Unseen event at 3:30 p.m. October 19. You can register here to hear her Journey Unseen.