Roanoke’s four quadrants reveal a deep and persistent divide. 

While legal segregation ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964, its legacy continues to shape cities and their neighborhoods across the country. In Roanoke, access to education, job opportunities and even how long you live can look vastly different depending on the zipcode you were born in. Just a few miles apart, life in Roanoke can often feel worlds away. 

In this new Q&A series, The Rambler invites members of the community to reflect on what it means to live in a divided city. By sharing perspectives across generations, backgrounds and quadrants, we hope to spark honest conversations that are too often left unspoken. 

This month, we spoke with Carolina Smales, known professionally as Carol Joy. Growing up in Merida, a Venezuelan mountain town not unlike Roanoke, Smales’ early life was filled with the joy of her bustling family and the music they played together — but it was also shaped by political turmoil. Facing persecution, she fled to the United States in 2003, leaving behind her family, her country and her successful career as a chemical engineer.

Decades after she first stepped off the plane in Boston, Smales has emerged as a multifaceted professional — an engineer turned health analyst, business owner and children’s author. Driven by her diverse research experiences and passion for understanding the human mind, she founded Joi Neuron, an educational company that teaches young audiences about the brain through engaging books and music. 

We met Smales at the Virginia Tech Carilion School of Medicine, where she previously conducted neuroscience research and often returns to work on her book series. In our conversation, Smales reflected on her professional evolution, the process of reuniting with her family and finding connection in Roanoke’s Latino community. 

This interview has been edited for length and clarity. If you or someone you know is interested in being interviewed for this series, please reach out to sinclair@roanokerambler.com.

Tell me what it was like growing up in Venezuela. What was your life like there?

I was born in Maturin. But then my family moved when I was very young to Merida, Venezuela, a beautiful mountain city. That’s where I’m from, and I love it. When I was growing up, it was a beautiful place to be. It was a happy and productive place and a good place to live in. So I grew up like that, and I have fond memories of growing up, until everything changed. 

Everything changed dramatically after the president back then, Hugo Chavez, started a so-called revolution, but ended up being a dictatorship — which is the dictatorship regime that Venezuela now faces. 

Why did you end up leaving for America? And how did you make the decision to leave?

You know, I don't know if I would say a “decision.” I never envisioned that I would leave my country. I love my country. And as I said, it was such a happy place. I love my family. I love my friends. I mean, I graduated as an engineer there, and started working in the oil company, and everything was magic up to that point when the president took power. 

One day I came to the company where I was working in petroleum. I entered my office, and I saw the military holding guns. They directed all of us in the company to go against a wall, and they put their rifles on our backs. I can still feel it, you know. I was so scared.

They said, “You guys are considered people against the government.” And from that day, thousands and thousands of petroleum workers were laid off. The military took over the company. I would say that marked the whole breaking point of Venezuela. When the petroleum company was affected, everything else came crashing down. 

Personally, my life was in incredible danger, and so were the lives of the other workers and our families, because the president, Hugo Chavez, made a list called La Lista Tascón, The Tascón List. Basically this was a database where he put the name of every single petroleum worker. And he had a speech to tell poor people that the reason they were poor was because of the petroleum workers getting so rich. 

My personal opinion is that many presidents in Latin America and in Venezuela were corrupt. But to me, worse than corruption is that hatred, and that division and segregation that happens when someone in a position of power is promoting hating one another. There's never, ever, something good that can come out from hate speech. And unfortunately, that's what Hugo Chavez brought to Venezuela. Hugo Chavez separated people, separated Venezuelans against Venezuelans. 

And then we started being persecuted. Many workers and their families were kidnapped. They were killed. When my name came out as someone of interest against the government, many people came by my house, threw things at my place, threatened my little brother, chased my sister. Ultimately, they entered my place at some point and tied my mother to the bed and threatened to also hurt her. 

So after seeing all that, my mother told me to get in touch with a friend that I had here in the United States. He was doing a PhD in physics at Boston University. And I connected with him, and I was lucky that he said, “Yes, come over here.”

And I remember the plane ticket was very expensive, and I didn't have enough, but between my uncles and my aunt and my mother’s friends and everybody, really, they basically put a pot of money for me to get that one ticket. I spent it mostly on one airplane ticket to Boston and the remaining, which was maybe close to $300, is what I brought in my pocket. 

Can you describe your early years in the U.S.?

Well, to tell you that it was tough is an understatement. 

I did know a little bit of English, but when you don’t speak the language of the place you are at, you’re usually taken as someone who doesn’t have cognitive abilities, you know, who’s not smart, who’s not capable. So your skillset, whatever skillset you bring, means nothing in the new place. So here I am in this new country, and I felt at the moment very lost. I felt like I had lost my career. I was a very young engineer. I started school very young, so I was always used to success, in a way. 

I was very depressed. So I used to go, all the time, walking in the universities to try to clear my mind. In the middle of doing that, I found a flyer that said, “If you know math and physics and chemistry, come participate in a study at Harvard University.” Luckily for me, I didn't speak English much, but I knew my math. I was always good at math, and math is a universal language, just like music. 

So I took a very, very long test, and I qualified for the study. And with that study, I got to know the new world of neuroscience and biomedical research. In that same lab, I met my now-husband, who was a Roanoker. He was doing his internship in psychology in that lab. He knew a little bit of Spanish, and that, I remember, connected us. Because he, with his little broken Spanish, started talking to me, and that brought me such a moment of peace, you know, that someone was trying. 

And from that moment, I switched my career. So I was a chemical engineer back home. But since I moved here, I switched my career to the research sciences. So I guess that's when the next chapter of my life started. 

After Boston, you moved to San Diego before coming to Roanoke, where your husband is originally from. After settling in Roanoke, what was the process of helping bring the rest of your family from Venezuela to Virginia?

Even after I came to the United States and I was happy and things started to work my way — that wasn’t enough for me. That wasn’t enough because a part of me was missing. I mean, not having my parents here or fearing for their life when they’re away — I don’t know which was worse. So even though things were working well for me here, I had in my mind, I have to bring them. 

When we moved to Roanoke in 2016, I was a naturalized citizen of the United States, so I had the opportunity to do it. But then it was the barrier of how to convince my parents to leave Venezuela, because my parents would have not left if my siblings weren’t also safe. I wasn’t the only child — the oldest of three — so I had to do a lot of thinking, dreaming, and planning. 

That’s when I founded a company called Persunality. It’s an [engineering] consulting company, and it was the foundation for me to bring my family here. I grew up in a family of engineers. So my dad is an engineer, so is my sister, so is my brother. So I said, if I'm going to start a company, it has to be something related to that so that I can offer them support. 

So first came my sister, then my brother, and then after they were here, thanks to Persunality, then my parents arrived in September of 2017. 

That was a dream come true. That’s something that many other people and friends I know dream they could do, to be with their families again, but they just couldn’t. Some of them because they couldn’t get a visa to come to the United States. Others because simply coming here, even when you do things following the immigration process in the right way, the immigration process is lengthy. It’s lengthy and it’s costly. It’s never cheap. It’s not something that everyone can do, even if they want to. So I know that if people had an opportunity, if the process was less complicated and less costly, we would probably have more legal immigrants here than what we have, and that’s the truth. 

And now that you’re all reunited here in Roanoke, where are you living now? Do your parents and siblings still live close together? 

Yes, we are. We are living very close. Because after being separate for almost two decades, I don’t want to let go. At the beginning, they all came and lived with my husband and I. We live in Cave Spring. My sister and my brother-in-law and nephew were the first ones who arrived, and so they lived with us first. Then my brother arrived, lived with us, and then my parents and they also lived with us. 

And then everybody started kind of making their life. My sister, as I told you, is also an engineer. She’s a chemical engineer, and now she works for a car manufacturing company. So now she purchased her own home, and she’s very close in Cave Spring. My brother is also an engineer, a mechanical engineer. And then my parents. My dad spends hours and hours and hours watching YouTube and going to English classes. He went to the English classes in Blue Ridge Literacy and at the library. He also attended other Spanish classes in different churches here, and it’s just so beautiful to see him. My mom, for a while, was in a little bubble where she still didn’t assimilate. She is still very worried about the rest of the family. She’s the one who tells me everybody’s life and how everybody’s doing, and obviously from here and the distance, we try to help as much as we can. 

Another thing we do now with my family to try to lift our spirits is we put together a musical group. Years ago in Venezuela, my mom and dad used to play music in the living room and invite everybody to come over. And when they came here, I said, “Well, my band is complete.” So I started the musical group TriColor, which means three colors. 

Three colors at the beginning meant the three colors of my Venezuelan flag. But now three colors means more the fact that we are three generations playing music together. And that is one of the most precious gifts in life. My oldest son is a drummer. My youngest one is multi-talented — he sings, he plays bass guitar, he plays guitar. My husband also is a piano trained musician, and he plays guitar. I sing, my mom sings, my sister sings. My brother is an amazing keyboard and guitar player, and my dad plays the traditional instrument of Venezuela called cuatro. So all of us together, we are TriColor, and we always perform in the festivals here in Roanoke, since 2016.

How would you describe the Latino community in Roanoke? 

A: One of the ways to see what your Latino community looks like is to go to Williamson Road. Williamson Road has this beautiful mixture of Latin stores. They’re actually people who I know and love deeply. They're from Mexico. They’re from Honduras. They’re from Colombia, and even though I don’t see many Venezuelans who have started food businesses or things like that, I know that they are still around. So it’s an environment. There is a beautiful, I would say, landscape of Latin American families, and it’s beautiful to go to Williamson road and experience that. 

I love working for the Latino community. I have contributed sometimes with Casa Latina, although I don't want to take any credit for what Casa Latina does. One of the persons that I can mention is my good friend, José Bañuelos-Montes. And he, in Roanoke College, inspires many of his students. And sometimes I get to host a radio show with him, which is his show called Puentes Culturales, where we try to connect culturally among people, to help us not to be segregated, to find what are our commonalities, rather than those things that separate us. So it’s a beautiful environment, the Latino environment in Roanoke.

And that leads me to the question, what does segregation mean to you, having lived both in Venezuela and America? Have you seen or experienced segregation here in Roanoke?

Have I experienced segregation? Yes, absolutely, I would say, all my life. From the moment I came to the country and I couldn’t speak English well, people looked really condescendingly to me. They not only looked down, you know, they ignored me. Treated me very differently.

There is always that fear that what I experienced in Venezuela, that I could experience it here in the United States, solely on the basis that when Hugo Chavez did his speech, as I told you before, it was filled with hatred and in no way unity. It was filled with segregation and in no way unity. And he was very popular. 

I have experienced segregation in many places, but I have to say that in Roanoke, it has been less. But I’ve been told, especially by my husband, who did grow up here in Roanoke, that there were not many immigrants in Roanoke before, and that has increased over time. I feel that in Roanoke, I have seen many efforts by the Taubman Museum, by some of our governance, by people, to really create an environment that is welcoming. And I think part of it is because of the diverse leadership I think that Roanoke has. And I think that’s very positive for Roanoke, because I did feel the welcoming space in Roanoke as a city overall. 

And even though things have changed, you know, the way things are done right now in the [federal] government that are so… I don't have another word, they’re so terrible. Many people have had to live in very harsh conditions, and many families have to be separated. And as I said, for us Latinos, family is everything, so breaking a family is never going to be something that I am going to say I agree with. 

What is your hope for the future of your work? Do you think about sharing a sense of unity?

All my books talk about that, yeah.

I wrote a song called “Belong,” because the sense of belonging to a place is psychologically one of the top priorities. You as a human being, you want to belong. 

However, since I told you my life story, you know that I am not a person that fits necessarily in a bucket. When people see somebody else, they always try to put you in a bucket. They always try to say, “Oh, Latina woman, business owner. What do you do?” And I say, “Well, I’m an engineer, and I work in medicine and I write children’s books.” You confuse people, right? Like, because you don't belong, it’s like, where do I put you? Which bucket do I put you in? 

So I wrote, “Belong.” And basically, it is based solely on how our brain and our body works. But it's funny because it connects to this whole message of segregation and unity: 

“We can be different on the outside, in the sun or in the rain. But when it comes to our feelings — and how our body reacts to things and to anxiety and to fear and to judgment and to not belonging to all of us — we are the same. I don't fit in many places, but when I am with you, I feel at home. And I belong, and I belong.”