Not wanting her daughter Emily to come out to her ailing grandmother, singer-songwriter Gloria Estefan told Chris Wallace, “In the Latin community, a lot of these subjects aren’t touched on, they’re taboo… I told her, ‘Just take it slow.’ .'”
In the latest episode of “Who’s Talking To Chris Wallace” on CNN+, veteran journalist Estefan asked about past family drama, which she felt needed to be handled cautiously with the eldest matriarch.
Wallace showed a clip from the Facebook Watch series “Red Table Talk: The Estefans,” in which the Estefan women emotionally discussed Emily’s coming out and Gloria’s reluctance to come out to her grandmother before her daughter died, Wallace said : “That’s pretty raw.” Estefan replied: “It was completely raw.”
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Estefan said she received countless letters from people who used this show to get to their parents who were watching with them.
“In the Latin American community, many of these issues are not touched upon, they are taboo,” she said. “People see, but they don’t want to talk about it, they don’t want to see it. And the whole point of those 20 episodes was that I have all these people who have loved and supported me over the years. And I want them to realize that we’re all just families trying to get through the difficult moments in life.”
While she thought Emily would feel comfortable because of her open support for the LGBT community, she felt differently about how her own mother — Emily’s grandmother — might take the news.
“I had a mother with ulcerative colitis who, even if I brought up a bill or something unimportant, [she] would get very upset and get sick,” Estefan said. “So I said (Emily), just take it slow. Do it. Don’t just sit her down and say, boom, give her a minute to process this. And while all of this was happening on the show, I kept thinking, I kept thinking, ‘If you had sat your grandma down and told her that… What would you think now that she died, it had nothing to do with your message.’ to her or the service of it?’”
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“So yeah,” she continued, “and life is complicated. Life is hard. And we wanted to share these things with people. So you would realize that these are conversations that we need to have. And it was really wonderful. The answer.”
But the clip that Wallace played cuts Emily’s version of what her mother told her. In this episode, Emily remembers Gloria telling her, “If you tell your grandma and she dies, her blood will be on your hands.”
Emily remarked, “Well, I can tell you why I didn’t feel that.” She continued, “I was like, ‘Hey, I’m in love with this girl. The first thing you said was, ‘If you tell your grandma and she dies, her blood will be on your hands.’ I just wasn’t ready for this because I understand my grandma was old but I was [was] made to feel ok whatever it is how to hide it. it’s not ok So that’s where my pain started. I will never forget that.”
Who’s Talking to Chris Wallace releases new episodes on HBO Max on Fridays, with a highlights show on CNN on Sunday nights. Watch the full exchange above via HBO Max and CNN.
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