Meet Angelica Gonzales, the tatted, sarcastic, probably-laughing media major and (up and coming) marketing maven. Right now, she is working on a promo for a radio class she is taking here at SUNY College at Old Westbury. She doesn’t like doing promos because she says, “They require a lot of thought and creativity which I do not have.” She blames this on being exhausted after a 40 hour work week at “a strip club – no I’m kidding,” she says laughing. She is employed at an outsourcing marketing company where she works on different campaigns. Right now, she is working on projects for a company that sells Medicare and another that sells supplements.
She doesn’t believe many people would like her job because, “It’s a lot of work – I get the campaign, and then I have to work on their website with IT, on different marketing strategies, on creating pre- and post-marketing strategies and programs, how to implement them and then keep track of the analytics.” She manages to do this without an assistant while also being enrolled full-time here at Old Westbury where she has a focus on radio broadcasting.
When asked why she chose Media and Communications as her major, she says “I was hitting my sophomore year, and I didn’t know what I wanted to do, and I was doing education. I wanted to be a teacher but I found very quickly that I don’t like interacting with children.” She claims this as her most honest response towards her choice of major.
“My friend was doing media, and she was telling me about it, and when I was a sophomore social media was taking off so it seemed like this was something I could make money from.” She says that she kind of fell into it and chose marketing because she liked being creative.
When I pointed out that she didn’t consider herself to be creative, she immediately answered, “I’m my worst critic and I’m a perfectionist so I take my time doing things.” She does not like to feel rushed, or do things “half-assed,” and she does not believe in doing something just for the “sake of it.”
Now, Angelica is hosting her own show for Old Westbury Web Radio this semester. It is an hour long Spanish music/talk show that helps her gain experience. “I sit there and I play music, but I try to make it flow, so I don’t just throw random songs in,” she laughs with a tired sigh, “I try!” She continues, “Sex sells – that was the first thing I was taught – so when I do my show I talk like this,” she jokes around, changing the tone of her voice. “I talk in Spanish, I talk like this…” speaking in a promiscuous Sofia Vergara whisper.
Angelica does not have a favorite color because it depends on her mood. “Right now I like black, most of the times I just like white,” she says and I laugh and mention that she likes no color and all colors at the same time. “I think white is very minimalist and simple and its like a platform that all the other colors are based off of. I’m weird, I like white and black.” She starts chuckling a little bit repeating that she is weird but also a dork. Her explanation for that is that she likes to sniff things, “Particularly my cat when he’s sleeping – he hates it. He growls at me and literally I can sense that he sighs like “ugh” when I walk in to the room.” She was originally going to name him Gatsby but decided on Ace.
“Dogs require walking and I’m never home,” Angelica states. “I needed an animal that could take care of itself, but interact with me on a level other than a fish or a gerbil,” she continues. She has lost gerbils before and she says, “I needed an animal big enough so I wouldn’t lose it and lazy enough so I wouldn’t have to interact with it that much.” The first gerbil she owned squeezed through the iron of it’s cage because she didn’t latch it correctly and escaped.
Angelica is an interesting woman and adding to her allure are eight different tattoos on various parts of her body. She has her parent’s birthdays tattooed on her forearm in Roman numerals. She has “love” written on her left wrist. “I like to tell everyone it’s the symbol of anti-suicide,” she says. However, this meaning has evolved because she was 18 when she got it for her ex-boyfriend and the ‘V’ in the word originally symbolized the number five, the number on his jersey. She also got a second tat with him when they got engaged after a year. “It said ‘To my love’ but it clearly didn’t work out,” Angelica remarks.
She got a tattoo on her hip based on a dream she had and, blushing, she says, “Oh man, it’s a dirty quote… It says ‘Make my body your temple, and I’ll make of you my religion’ in Spanish.” Her ankle bears a more religious mark of ink: “I got it when I was still really religious. The tattoo says ‘God walks with me.'” She also has a Latin quote on her outer ankle which translates to, “Always love yourself first.”
Then, like most conversations, we eventually got to talking about food. One of the interesting traits about Angelica is her ability to have multiple different conversations at once. She gets distracted by a variety of subjects that interest her so it is never a dull conversation with her. She does not have a favorite kind of food, however she does not like Italian food because she considers it to be too heavy. “I hate hotdogs because they are gross, and they have fillers and intestines in them,” she adds, her usual spontaneous and sarcastic self.
“Right now, I have like a really weird obsession with glazed donuts, like I want them all the time and I gained two pounds from eating glazed donuts everyday for a week,” she says with a disappointed and confused look.
Gonzales migrated to the U.S. when she was twelve years of age. She attended a Catholic boarding school in the Dominican Republic until she moved back to the United States. She didn’t like having nuns as teachers and says, “Some of them were nice but most of them were evil!” According to Angelica, she was bullied by the girls in her class because, “I was considered a gringo because I was born there but then I came here [to the United States].”
She is not effected by these incidents from her childhood but she is a firm believer of social media being a terrible influence on women today, especially with eating disorders, self-image values, and so many expectations. “Everything is a quick fix, everything is about surgery, everything is about extensions, everything is about makeup,” she says. “But it is also because we have access to things more than we did before, like in the 1990’s I don’t remember stressing about it because it wasn’t in my face all the time.”
“Our conception of beauty is different, really different, like you have to have a thick butt, thick thighs, slim waist, long hair, luscious eye lashes, and your eyebrows have to be ‘on fleek’, and I hate it but I think it is evolving because a lot of people are embracing the more natural side of beauty.” She continues about how she loves watching African-American women with their natural hair.
So, if you like Spanish music and want to hear more of our sassy, honest, and unique senorita Angelica Gonzales, tune in every Thursday from 7-8 p.m. on OWWR for her show. Download the Tunein app also to show some support!