LC: Please give me a brief overview of yourself.

MVR: My name is Maria Veronica Reina. I am 40 years old. In Argentina, my home country, I was trained and worked as an educational psychologist. I have only been in this country for four years so I have been busy learning the language, studying for a Masters degree in Education of Distance Learning, which hopefully I will finish in December, and presently I am working as the President of the Center for International Rehabilitation (CIR).

LC: Were you born with a disability?

MVR: No, I had a car accident in 1981 when I was 17. I accepted my accident and most of the changes that came due to my accident. The only hard thing for me to accept was that before my accident I wanted to be a missionary nun. I was at the mission in the countryside living a rural life and after the accident I could not live the life that I had originally planned. My family and friends were very supportive. Aside from that, I did not have the problems that many people with disability face. The university in Argentina I attended while studying educational psychology gave me my first job as an assistant in the psychology department. After I finished school I opened my own office in Argentina.

LC: When and why did you come to live in the United States?

MVR: I first came to the United States in 2001. I went to Michigan as part of a volunteer program to teach Spanish to volunteers that were going to go to Guatemala. When my program was over I went back to Argentina. After that I came back in 2003 with a work visa, and have been back and forth several times since then.

LC: Do you live on your own?

MVR: Yes, I live independently, and it is important to me because I like to do things myself and when you live with your family they are still very protective and sometimes treat you as a child. In Argentina I was not able to afford to live on my own I was living with my family.

Variations on "independent living"

LC: Do you feel that independent living is right for all persons with a disability?

MVR: I agree with the independent living philosophy, but I don't like to call this independent living; I prefer the word "autonomy." To me if you can make your own decisions, it doesn't matter if you live with somebody else or not. I prefer the word autonomy because when you say independent in Spanish it seems like you don't want anybody's help.

LC: How did you get involved with disability work?

MVR: Since I am a person with a disability and have a background as an educational psychologist, I decided long ago to participate in social services and education. For many years I was a school advisor and I also taught at a university in my country. I have built my career outside the disability world and at first I tried not to mix the two because the disability world is very hard. But my career has shifted since my arrival in the United States. Now I am the president for a non-governmental organization (NGO), the Center for International Rehabilitation (CIR) based in Chicago, IL.

President of Center for International Rehabilitation

LC: Please give me a brief description of the work CIR does, and your role as president?

MVR: The CIR is a not-for-profit organization that develops technologies and programs to help people with disabilities worldwide reach their full potential.

LC: Does the CIR have any national programs for Latinos with disabilities?

MVR: No, no national program, but we have 34 researchers with disabilities who are working on behalf of CIR in Latin America. They produce for us annual reports on disability rights in the Latin America region.

LC: Do you see any trends in the living and working situations of Latinos in the US?

MVR: I don't know of Latinos with disabilities that work in other fields, but in the disability area I can see many people from Latin America developing programs in the disability field.

LC: What would you say is the biggest barrier that a person with a disability faces when finding a job in the United States?

MVR: I can see in general that there are barriers, such as the lack of awareness or the prejudice that people have towards people with disabilities. They believe that we are not able to do things or that we are sick. It is worse in Latin American but even in this country I could feel it is prevalent in the business sector.

For me it was not so difficult to find a job because I had a plan, and took it step by step. I learned the language. I volunteered in different areas and developed connections with different groups. Then one day the chairman of CIR called and offered me this position because he knew me and he knew my work.

LC: Are there other Latinos with disability working with you at CIR?

MVR: Yes, there are others, but in different departments.

LC: I understand that you have had a very active role in the meetings of the UN Ad Hoc Committee on a disability rights convention, taking place in New York. What does this role mean to you and why?

MVR: As you may know, in December 2001 the General Assembly (http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/disA56168e1.htm) established an Ad Hoc Committee "to consider proposals for a comprehensive and integral international convention to promote and protect the rights and dignity of persons with disabilities, based on the holistic approach in the work done in the fields of social development, human rights and non-discrimination and taking into account the recommendations of the Commission on Human Rights and the Commission for Social Development."

As a person with a disability, it was important for me to be able to contribute to a convention that will address all our needs as individuals with disabilities. My role is to help coordinate the communication among all the organizations that are participating. I am also helping to organize the disability caucus. This is very important because if we are not communicating and we don't build bridges among interested parties we will not do a good job of including as many people as we can. I am taking this job very seriously. There are probably about 200 people involved and we will be acting as the voice of millions of people who do not have the opportunity to participate in this process.

Our first priority is to understand each other and try to cover the diversity of the disability world, including different cultures, ideas and needs of people with disabilities in all parts of the world. We need to ensure people from the Third World have a voice in this process. I think everyone wants to include as many people as possible but it's not so easy to do.

LC: Are Latinos playing an active role in this process?

MVR: Yes, I know that Rosangela Berman Bieler was one of the first people to start this group, and other Latinos who have been very active during the process are: Luis Fernando Astorga from Costa Rica, who was the representative of the American Region for the working group who drafted the convention; Wilfredo Guzman, the President of Disabled People's International (DPI) Latin America; and Sylvia Quan, an official delegate from Guatemala; and many others who I can't remember right now.

LC: How do you see the process of the Convention taking shape?

MVR: If you compare it with the beginning of the First Ad Hoc meeting when we thought we were not going to have a convention because some countries were against it, I believe we are getting a step closer to having a successful convention. With this Sixth Ad Hoc meeting we are expecting hard times, because the non-governmental organizations (NGO) participation will diminish. Government delegates will have many informal meetings, which means that the official delegates will dominate the meetings and will not allow us to speak or intervene. Because now they need to reach an agreement and refine the text, they will most likely hold private sessions or closed meetings and that will make it more difficult for affect the outcome of the meetings.

LC: What do you feel the NGOs and disability experts should be doing in order to achieve an acceptable convention?

MVR: We need to strength our own network, we need to train our people and inform them about the convention, and let them know what we are advocating for and prepare them before the convention. What we need to do is knock on the doors of our foreign ministries and go to them with reports, summaries and other documentation. For example, the caucus is preparing a draft convention summarizing in one page what we need from each article, like for education, employment, etc. We should provide this to our grassroots organizations in each part of the world and they should present it to the government office in their country.

LC: What do you think would be the result of the convention? And in what timeframe do you think we will have a convention?

MVR: There is a rumor that we will have a convention by 2007. I think that is a reasonable estimate. What we need to do is have a strong, national monitoring mechanism. I believe the US should create a program to consistently monitor activities at a national level.

LC: Do you think we will have an acceptable convention?

MVR: It will all depend on us, the people with disability and the NGOs working for people with disabilities. If we see that the draft is not acceptable we should not accept it. During the working group discussion I was an observer and I remember a delegate being very much against some points in one of the articles. We told him that if they draft a convention that is lower than the Standard Rules, we would not endorse it, as that is not acceptable to people with disabilities. Of course we need to be flexible, and we need to understand that we won't get everything we want. We need to know how to negotiate. I am sure that we will not have a perfect convention, but we can try to get a convention that is usable in different realities.

LC: I'd like you to give some advice to others with a disability that would motivate them to achieve their full potentials.

MVR: First advice I can give the Latinos is to learn the language. You need to learn the language and improve the language because that becomes a big barrier for finding work and getting through everyday life.

Second thing is to make a plan. You cannot just say I want to have a job. You need to evaluate yourself, see your strength, weakness and work with them to overcome the weakness. Study the market, the demand in the workforce. A bilingual person has much to offer this country, because the Latin community is growing and many of the companies don't have people that know Spanish. For example my first goal was to get a Master's degree but I did not have the money to do it. I needed a scholarship but all the scholarships required the recipients to speak English, so I decided to volunteer somewhere where people speak English. I came to Michigan to teach Spanish and contacted the Hispanic Community they offered me a trade: I worked with a child who has a learning disability and they helped me secure English classes.