A new feature on VL, Community Cara profiles Latinos y Latinas making their mark in the community and the world at large.

She may be the President and CEO of a multimedia entertainment company, Latino Flavored Productions Inc., a writer with numerous award winning and critically acclaimed theatre productions, and a mami, but Linda Nieves-Powell doesn’t feel like she’s doing any more than the average Latina. She just wishes there were more hours in the day to do all she has floating in her head and flowing from her pen.

Nieves-Powell, a native New York Rican currently calling Staten Island home, told me in a phone conversation last week that the internet played a powerful role in her development as a writer. With a background in the Puerto Rican Traveling Theatre, Nieves Powell was asked to perform a monologue at a barbecue from a then work in progress YO SOY LATINA!. She never made it to that barbecue but she did post pieces of the work in progress online and received hundreds of responses from Latinas to her exploration of the different faces of Latina identity. Nieves-Powell knew she was onto something, that despite fact that magazines and other media were always telling mujeres what their identity meant, there really was no static answer to that age old question: “what are you?”

If you press Linda Nieves-Powell to define her primary career identity, since she wears so many hats ranging from playwright to film director to webmaster, she says all her work is born from the written word. Her words which have been translated into plays which range from the humorous to serious were written specifically with Latinos in mind. She admits to being inspired by Latina only spaces, like the ones that spontaneously happen in your abuelita’s kitchen, and wanted to recreate that warmth and sense of sharing in her stage productions. Part of that process involved seeing the audience reaction to confronting aspects of Latina identity, a process Nieves-Powell calls “healing”. At the same time she didn’t want to make the actual structure of the shows “too Latino” and alienate non-Latinos. This partially explains Nieves-Powell’s decision to write, produce, and stage productions in English. Nieves-Powell is one of the many Latinas born and raised in the U.S. that do not dominate the Spanish language. Her mission is to reach Latinos like herself and affirm their identity in spite of criticism for not speaking the “mother tongue”.

Working with Linda Nieves-Powell is less work and more like being in familia. She likens rehearsals to “empowerment sessions” and views herself as “mami’ing” the actresses the way she needed to be mami’ed when she was a lone Latina girl in mostly white Long Beach, Long Island, NY.

Her experiences moving and living in Long Beach, Long Island were the inspiration for Linda Nieves-Powell’s most first short film Mimi’s Portrait, which deals with a young Latin girl confronting and coming to terms with her ethnic and racial identity. She admits to being moved by how much the actress, Liana Ortiz, in the title role of Mimi reminded her of herself. “She gave me goosebumps” Nieves-Powell confesses. The subject matter, her identity, is something she’s come to terms with. “The process was emotional”, Nieves-Powell told me referring to the long hours of filming and post production on an independent movie. Part of this process included funding the filming. It is important to Nieves-Powell that the film be on a tight budget without looking cheap. It is after all her name on it. She hasn’t been opposed to fronting money herself as she has done in the past for her theatrical productions.

Nieves-Powell isn’t afraid of facing the tough issues, those often not spoken about out loud in the Latino community. That is why one of her most recent projects is the Latina Sex Project, which brings mothers and daughters together on camera to talk about sex. She feels such an endeavor is important because of the growing issue of unplanned teen pregnancies and sexually transmitted diseases within the Latina community. What has surprised Nieves-Powell the most so far from the interviews she has filmed with mothers and daughters sitting next to each other, is how sexual the mothers are and how it has been the daughters scandalized by their mothers’ sexual behaviors.

But Linda Nieves-Powell isn’t all about the mujeres. Responding to demands of male audience members of her comedic stage show Soul Latina led to the creation of Jose can Speak. The process of writing a stage show in a masculine male Latino voice involved treading lightly because she didn’t want to be judgmental of men. She wanted to portray them with a compassionate eye and felt she had to “protect” her male characters. Nieves-Powell recognized that “women purge while men say things in a different way. They undergo a process of holding, holding”. She had to hold too until she found various male voices that men have found as empowering as women have found her earlier works.

Linda Nieves-Powell is now in a period of “reevaluation”, something she does annually to put her projects in perspective. That doesn’t mean she’s stopping. She’s working with her sister on developing music. She wants to create a podcasted The View style talk show revealing the diversity and points of unity among Latinas. Linda-Nieves Powell is a dynamic, talented and creative force of a Latina woman. She uses her gift not just for its own sake but to reveal and give voice to the dynamic and diverse Latino community in the U.S. Pa’lante Linda!

Learn more about Linda Nieves-Powell at her company’s website: Latino Flavored Productions Inc.