I know YOUR secret and I'm going to tell...

My mom named me Trilce in honor to Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo’s book and opened a door none would have expected. My grandfather used to say I was born with ink in my veins, instead of blood.

I started writing before I began to talk. I didn’t speak a word until I was five years old. I began keeping a diary when I turned nine. Over the years, it grew into a collection of notebooks of different colors and shapes filled with dreams, hopes, secrets, wishes and frustrations. The world of written words represents a cave, a get-away in which I have made sense of what I have seen in the world around me and have interpreted my reality.

As I reread my journals every so often, I recognize that my views on humanity have changed with me over the years. I have traveled to different countries. I’ve worked with people from different economical, cultural and social backgrounds. My perspectives of the world have become more open, analytical and mature. The one constant through the pages was my commitment to documenting my thoughts and feelings and my desire to communicate them in an artistic, creative way.

At age 16 I had a crucial experience, that re shaped my life and gave me much of what I am today. September 5^th 1998. It all had happened so fast. I had lived in Colombia my whole life and, within three weeks, my mom was forced to leave the country for political reasons. I left with her. We arrived in Seattle after a 14-hour flight. My life as I knew it stayed behind. Like most Colombian teenagers, I wanted to find my version of “the American dream.” I had forgotten about something: the language difference.

It was like being a newborn all over again. I had to depend on my mom, who spoke fluent English, for everything from buying gum at a convenience store, to finding the house we lived in. She started working as a Spanish teacher the day after we arrived. I locked myself in my bedroom and started learning to communicate once again. I read everything I could get my hands on, from Laura Esquivel’s “Like Water to Chocolate” to the “Cosmopolitan” magazines to “The Seattle Times.” I watched every TV show I could, from “Schindler’s list” on the Friday night movie channel to “The Nanny” to “Animal Rescue.” trying to pick up words and sayings. The landlord said I was wasting a precious summer. My mom told her I was studying.

I began attending an “English as a Second Language” school. By the end of the first quarter they told my mom I was ready to enter Roosevelt, the local public high school. It quickly became the center of my life. I served as president of the Spanish club so that I could help others learn a second language, as I had. I focused on photography, art, history and English classes. I made friends with as many people as I could and enjoyed my new reality; surrounded by thousands of restaurants from all over the world, different fashion styles in every corner, and thousand of different languages, some of which I had never even heard of. I transferred to Middle College High School, which focused more on the creative developing of its students, and found myself hanging out with a crew of young artists. We got together every day after school and shared our videos, pictures, poems and lyrics. We became each other’s feared critics and biggest fans

One night I had a phone conversation with my aunt who was still living in Bogotá. She was concerned about me becoming “Americanized.” She was afraid what she called “my artistic soul” was going to be crashed by the madness of capitalism. I explained to her that for me, the arts are a universal language. That’s so cliché, she said. We laughed. But we both knew exactly what I meant. No matter the environment the artist is on, his/her art will remain true and valuable to the eyes of many around them. My aunt was a “film purist,” or so she called herself. She liked to watch movies in their original language. I always thought she was mad. One day she took me to see “Tuvalu,” the 1999 German film directed by Veit Helmer and, although the characters did not speak any language known to me, I cried for an hour-and-a-half after it ended. The movie was made to be understood by the soul of humans.

In 2001, when I was 19 years old, I moved back to Colombia and started my college education to become a journalist. At the beginning of my second semester, the Communications Department posted a news story contest. I entered with a story on domestic violence in Teusaquillo, my neighborhood in Bogota. The writing portrayed the reality of many women who are daily abused by their husbands without getting any help from the government agencies.  It won second place and it was  used  for a series of video clips for a TV workshop. The professor asked me to work with his students on the script and participate in the production process. During the two weeks of production, I got so involved I forgot about virtually everything else I had to work on. I was sitting at the cafeteria having breakfast the day they showed the final product on the school network. I couldn’t believe it: my words, ideas, and writing were turned into images.

After that experience, I became increasingly involved with the school’s television station, which created programming for students at the fifteen largest colleges in Colombia. I applied for the director position and got the job – despite the fact that freshmen were generally ineligible. I helped develop a new show called “Urbano” (Urban), a series about the various cultural groups co-existing in Bogotá. This show soon became a vehicle through which Bogotá’s urban youth could express themselves to the viewers of the network around the nation. This was my entry into the visual arts. I fell in love with the process of turning an idea into words and then into images.

By my senior year of college, I had taken four television and two film production classes. My thesis 9^th and final chapter consisted of a documentary on hip hop and the way youth had been using it in Colombia as a tool of political involvement. Before the reality of a corrupt, poorly developed country, an increasing population of young people in Colombia choose to use hip hop and its fourth expressions (Mc, DJ, graffiti and break dance) as a way of building themselves a new society.

Since  graduation I have taken into any mean possible of writing: printed press, creative writing, blogs, web content, press releases, articles, social media.. The universe of communication is endless so it’s my desire to write about the world. I have a deep interest on journalism: social and political topics, not only because of he situation in my home country, but because I understand the important role of social topics in the building of better futures. The struggling of women in the developing countries, the constant changes in art making, youth organizations, coexistence of diverse cultures in certain geographical areas, are all part of the subjects I am particularly interested on.

However I also have a strong passion for creative arts, I have a deep appreciation for films based on creative writings as well. I strongly believe in the power of written words and images. I have a deep undergoing passion for hip hop and all its means of expression, as well as the development of the fashion industry and fashion design. I strongly believe a human exposed to a certain reality through art is more likely not to only believe the content but to react about it. Writing and art  for me represent a window on reality, whether fiction or nonfiction. Through writing imagery, one person’s universe – or a group’s universe – becomes a solid idea.