Verónica Pérez has spent her life proving she belonged in spaces that didn’t seem to want her. She built herself into a professional footballer—84 caps for Mexico, clubs across the United States, Europe, Australia, and Saudi Arabia. But now, as she transitions out of elite sports, she’s done proving herself and decided to do something different: showing young Latina girls that they don’t have to build everything alone.

The shift hasn’t been easy. “Being in this transition out of playing, it’s different. That’s been my whole identity for so long, being a footballer, and letting that go is so, so hard,” she told FIERCE. “At the same time, it’s made me realize I’m so much more than that, and I want to share that with others.”

That’s how she began the path towards mentorship, school visits across the Bay Area and Los Angeles, and a self-published children’s book written with young girls in Latino communities in mind. She wanted to make sure the next cohort of players doesn’t have to figure out the path alone, as she did.

Built It on Her Own

To understand what Verónica is building now, you have to understand what she had to build then.

Her childhood wasn’t structured around soccer. Her parents didn’t come from a soccer background. In a way, soccer found her.

“Early on, it really was as simple as going to school and then going straight outside to play and be active,” she recalled. “We lived across from this lot. So I would cross the street, the curb was a bit high, then the sidewalk, then just a long stretch of wired fence. That became everything for me.”

The curb became a rebounder and the fence a goal. What she lacked in formal training, she made up for through repetition.

“There was no structure, no sessions, no plan…just repetition,” she said. “As I got older, some things changed. I didn’t always have a clear pathway early on, but even once I did find a pathway through club soccer, that mindset didn’t change. If anything, it grew stronger.”

Verónica stayed after practice, found extra fields, and worked on things alone that she knew she needed to improve. Soon, coaches began to notice and offered to train her.

The Absence She Lived With

When Verónica was young, her favorite athlete was Mia Hamm. Beyond that, the landscape was bare.

“Most of what I saw was men’s sports. That’s what was on TV, that’s what got covered. So even early on, you start to realize women, especially women like me, aren’t really being shown,” she explained.

This invisibility was the daily message that the game she loved might not have space for her. In fact, she didn’t see a Mexican woman playing at a high level until she was 20, when she was invited to a Mexico Women’s National Team camp.

“That was the first time I saw someone who looked like me in that space. So I was moving through all of this without really seeing myself reflected anywhere. I didn’t have a clear example to follow. I just had this feeling that I loved the game and wanted to keep going. It forced me to trust myself, to walk into spaces where I didn’t always feel as though I belonged, and figure it out as I went.”

What Young Girls Are Telling Her

Today, when Verónica enters schools and community spaces, the landscape looks different for young Latina girls. There’s social media, showcases, academies, and pathways that didn’t exist when she was their age.

However, there’s something more complicated happening in these spaces.

“What I hear from young Latina girls now is actually a mix of belief and hesitation,” she said. “On one hand, they really do believe they can go pro. They know there are pathways now, like social media, showcases, academies, and they understand there are ways to get seen that didn’t exist before.”

The hesitation, though, isn’t about capability.

“Not because they’re not capable, but because of things around them. The external factors, family expectations, financial realities, or just not always seeing themselves fully represented at the highest levels,” she explained. “I think what adults sometimes miss is that these girls are balancing both. They’re dreaming big, but they’re also carrying real-life considerations that affect how confidently they move.”

What stays with her most is what these girls are waiting for, the same thing that Verónica waited for and never fully received.

“My parents supported me, but if I’m being honest, it was still hard not hearing more encouragement or positivity along the way. I think a part of me was always waiting for someone to fully say, ‘You can do this, go after it all,’” she said. “So I had to learn how to give that to myself. I had to learn how to fight for my own dreams, even when it wasn’t being reinforced around me.”

Now, when she tells girls this—when she stands in front of them and says you don’t need permission, you don’t need a perfect situation to start—she’s speaking from experience.

That’s Why She Decided to Go One Step Further

Verónica had never planned to be an author. For decades, people had told her she should write her story—childhood friends, college teammates, people she’d mentored over the years. She ignored it. After all, she was a footballer. That was her identity. And it was enough.

Then the identity began to change. “I wanted to put something in a child’s hands that the sports world doesn’t always show,” she explained. “Yes, it’s amazing, the games, the travel, being on TV, but there’s also sacrifice, doubt, and a lot of moments where you have to choose this path over everything else. I wanted kids, especially Latina girls, to see that you can dream big, but also understand that the journey is yours. That it’s okay to be different, to be you, to be quiet, to not have a perfect path, and to still believe in yourself anyway.”

What “Safe” Actually Means

When Verónica talks about building safe spaces for girls in football, she’s being specific about what safety requires.

“To me, ‘safe’ means a space where girls feel comfortable being themselves, without constantly comparing themselves to someone else, or trying to fit into one specific mold. We’re all different, and that’s actually what makes the game special. You don’t have to look or play like anyone else to make it to the top,” she said.

Safe means freedom within structure. It means trying something that doesn’t work and knowing that failure isn’t a referendum on your worth.

But Verónica also knows the structural barriers that keep girls from ever reaching a space where they can be safe.

“A lot of girls leave the sport not because they don’t love it, but because they stop feeling safe in those ways. They feel judged, compared, or like they’re not ‘enough,’” she said. “There are also real barriers, cost, access, family responsibilities, but I think confidence and environment are just as big. If we can create spaces where they feel supported, seen, and free to grow, they’re much more likely to stay and actually reach their potential.”

And that’s precisely what she’s doing.

“The path might not be clear, but if you love it and you’re willing to keep showing up, you can create your own way. And now more than ever, there are so many avenues and platforms to get there. The opportunity is real, you just have to trust yourself enough to take advantage of it.”

When Eunisses Hernandez sits down to remove her makeup after a long day, the first question she asks herself is whether that day was as productive as possible. Whether she fought for her community or was a voice for people who don’t have one.

It’s a question that reveals everything you need to know about this 36-year-old councilmember who is running for re-election on June 2. You know from the first second she’s not chasing power and is well aware there is still so much work to do. Like many Latinas who put unrealistic pressure on themselves, Eunisses knows she can do it better now than she did four years ago when she first took office as the youngest member of the Los Angeles City Council.

In her first year, Eunisses Hernandez stood alone.

When she voted no on the city budget—the only councilmember to do so—she opposed it because the city was dedicating over 45% of general funds to the LAPD while cutting social services that her community desperately needed. She was voting no because that budget didn’t reflect the priorities of the people who elected her, and she was the only one to do so. She voted no on a decision that the mayor and her colleagues were pressuring her to reverse.

“I stood by myself,” she told FIERCE during our latest episode of Baring It All. “But the following year, when we voted on the budget, I was one of three no votes.”

And this might sound like a cliché, but it’s true, nevertheless: that’s what real leadership looks like. Not the one that relies on billionaire PACs or corporate endorsements. The kind that might cost you politically in the short term but builds the foundation for actual change. It’s the kind of leadership that requires you to stand alone until other people realize you were right all along.

Eunisses didn’t come to politics through traditional routes.

At first, Eunisses didn’t enter politics through traditional routes. She heard her mother’s voice in her head, telling her that if she could, she had to fight for her community, especially for people who don’t have a voice. She grew up in Highland Park, Los Angeles, as the daughter of Mexican immigrants. And she understood early what it means to live in a neighborhood where your family has less power, less access, and faces more barriers.

That understanding crystallized into her life’s work when she discovered the real challenges undocumented immigrants face in this city—many of them neighbors, community members, people who share her family’s experience of being marked as outsiders in their own country.

She started as a policy coordinator at the Drug Policy Alliance. She became a community organizer. She co-founded La Defensa, a women-led organization fighting to reduce incarceration in Los Angeles County. She worked on Measure J, which reallocated resources into community reinvestment and alternatives to incarceration—a measure that passed with 57% of the vote and, after legal battles, fundamentally changed how Los Angeles approaches justice.

And then, in 2022, she ran for City Council against an incumbent everyone thought would win. She beat him with 53.9% of the vote. It was a political upset. She was a threat to the status quo.

The first year in office nearly broke her.

“There were moments where I questioned whether we could move government to do the right thing,” she said. “Whether it could transform itself, stop doing the same thing over and over again, and expect different results.”

What she discovered, though, kept her going. Eunisses saw how organized people can make government do the right thing. Beyond the romanticized idea, one that, by the way, the establishment has indoctrinated us to discard, she brought that knowledge into City Hall.

She started bringing busloads of community members into City Council chambers. She co-authored the Sanctuary City ordinance that passed with unanimous support, protecting immigrants and making sure LA will not cooperate with federal immigration enforcement. She opened Northeast New Beginnings, an interim housing model that has already helped people experiencing homelessness transition into permanent housing. And led the effort to pass the strongest tenant protections in over 40 years.

But the work that she is most proud of—the work that defines what she believes real leadership looks like—is the unarmed crisis response program.

When people call 911 for help with mental health crises, behavioral health issues, or suicidal ideation, they don’t always need police. They need clinicians and peer navigators. They need people trained in trauma-informed care.

The program costs $35 per call to respond. Police cost $85.

In two years, the unarmed crisis response team has answered 20,000 calls. Less than 4% needed LAPD backup.

“These are not radical ideas,” she told FIERCE. “But doing the work to keep people alive, save us money in our ERs, and make sure we’re not spending millions on liabilities when people get killed by police.”

Just a few months ago, her colleagues voted unanimously to make this program permanent in the city of LA. Now, you can call 911 and get one of these teams, no matter where you are in the city.

She also transformed MacArthur Park—a neighborhood that people had given up on.

In one year, Eunisses reduced fatal overdoses in that area by 32%. She secured over $25 million in public and private funding to improve safety, cleanliness, and access to services. The densest neighborhood west of the Mississippi is now a place where people can survive and have a shot at dignity.

But none of this came without a cost.

“There’s a lot of personal sacrifices,” she said. “Mental health, behavioral health, physical health, time with my family, time with friends, seeing my nephews and nieces grow up, sometimes family events.”

What’s worse, she got doxxed. She had to change her phone number and implement security measures because she took a stand on protecting immigrants in a moment when the federal government was conducting raids in her district.

However, Eunisses persists in her mission.

What keeps her grounded through all of this is not the recognition or the title. It’s her family. It’s her dogs—“I go home, the first thing I do is pick up my dogs, and I just hug them, sometimes two at a time.” It’s going to senior centers, dancing with elders who are some of the city’s most vulnerable, reminding herself why she throws down every single day.

“These are people who know on SSI that if we don’t support them, they’re not gonna afford to live in this city that they’ve worked their entire lives to support and maintain,” she said.

The fact that Eunisses Hernandez is running for re-election in 2026 is not a small thing.

She is running in a moment when authoritarianism feels like it’s closing in. She is running while special interests and billionaires try to buy city council seats. She is running when every decision she makes is scrutinized, when she faces pressure from all sides, when the work feels like pushing a two-ton rock up a slippery slope.

But here’s what she knows that most politicians don’t: the power is with the people. Not the billionaires. Not the special interests. The people.

“Organized people can make the government do the right thing,” she said. “I’ve seen it happen. I’ve been a part of building that in City Hall, and I wouldn’t keep doing this if I didn’t think the system could change.”

When young people watch her, when they see her standing in chambers as the youngest, plus-size, Latina councilmember—breaking the system from the inside because “these seats were not built for us”—she wants them to know something: “You have what you need to change your community, this country, and this world already within you. The way you do it is by building with people.”

She invites them to become storytellers, artists, musicians, and organizers. She needs them to understand that everything in their life is political—their sidewalks, their streetlights, their rent, their ability to breathe clean air. And she needs them to know that they don’t have to accept the status quo.

“Politics is everything in your life,” she said. “You might say, ‘Well, I’m not into politics.’ But that’s a privilege. Every day of your life is dictated by politics, and it can either be run by people that are looking out for the best interests of you, or by people looking out for the bottom line of special interests, corporations, hotels, and billionaires.”

Most kids start their day not knowing exactly what will happen. But when Bella Olson was seven, she woke up sure of one thing: she was going to write a book.

“I was especially obsessed with books and was always carrying one around with me,” she recalls. “One day while I was reading, I randomly thought, ‘What if I wrote one of these?’ So I opened my notebook and just started writing ideas down.”

The urge to create rather than just consume, to build new worlds rather than scroll through them, is rare among children today. Bella is bilingual, Brazilian-American, and already the author of her first middle-grade novel, Trapped. She acts as proof that not all children in Gen Alpha are defined via screens and shortcuts.

She started writing her book at seven and published it years later after many rewrites. The story follows Ava, a girl who learns she’s stronger than she thought and travels the world, including a visit to Rio de Janeiro, which reflects Bella’s Brazilian roots. It’s an adventurous story for readers who, like Bella, want to escape into new worlds.

“I wanted readers to feel transported into another world the same way I did when I read those books,” she says of her Harry Potter-inspired vision. “I also love stories with adventure, mystery, and characters who discover they’re stronger than they think.”

Imagination Without Limits

The beauty in Bella’s history is not necessarily that she finished a book at a young age. It’s also the way she writes and what that shows about her generation’s real desire for creativity.

“I just love how free it is,” she says of the writing process. “You can literally do whatever you want, and there are no limits. There are no exact rules for creativity. You just follow your imagination and what feels right to you.”

This way of thinking shapes everything Bella does. Besides writing Trapped, she runs a YouTube channel called Avocado Awesomeness, where she makes content that is “fun, creative, and maybe just a little bit extra.” She has performed in major theater productions like The Lion King, Descendants, and Matilda, and she can sing the entire Hamilton soundtrack without missing a word. She’s also the Chief Imagination Officer at the Salt and Light Coalition, a role in which she uses her ideas to try to change the world.

Culture, Language, and Belonging

Bella’s Brazilian-American background influences how she tells stories, even if it’s not always obvious. “Not directly in every part of the story, but definitely in some ways,” she says. “My family has always encouraged me to be creative and dream big, which helped me believe I could actually write a book.”

And you can see this in Trapped through Ava’s journey around the world, particularly to Rio de Janeiro. “Including Brazil in the story felt really special to me because it’s part of who I am!”

Just like Bella, her dog Miso is bilingual, too. It’s the kind of casual code-switching that’s central to many Latino kids’ lived experience but rarely centered in children’s literature. Her team notes that her voice has already resonated across generations and communities, with endorsements from #1 New York Times bestselling authors Katherine Applegate and Gordon Korman, as well as support from Brazilian cultural icons Carlos Saldanha and Alessandra Ambrosio.

A Message for Her Generation

One of the most important things Bella shares is what she hopes readers will get from Trapped.

“I hope they feel like they belong and know they never have to change for others,” she says. “I also hope kids feel inspired to use their imagination and be confident in who they are. One of the messages in the book is that ‘weird is the new cool,’ and I hope everyone remembers that sometimes the things that make you different are actually the coolest things about you.”

Her message, that being different is a strength and not a weakness, might be the most important thing an 11-year-old could tell her friends today.

Barbara Rivas knows that having a seat at the table lasts only if you understand how it was made. And if you need to, you should be ready to build your own.

When it comes to putting her rise in the music industry into words, she hesitates to describe it as overcoming adversity, even though she faced a lot of it. Instead, she describes what she saw growing up. She watched her mother leave everything behind and work hard, carrying a burden she shouldn’t have had to bear alone. That experience shaped her drive and her refusal to accept ‘no’ as an answer. Most importantly, it gave her a strong belief that representation is more than just being seen. It’s about having access, making decisions, and shaping what comes next for future generations.

Today, Barbara Rivas is Head of Label & Artist Development at Mr.305 Records, has been recognized on Billboard’s Women in Music 2026 list, and was recently named Assistant Vice Chair of Events at Women in Music Miami. But her titles don’t capture everything. They don’t show how she noticed the lack of women like her in decision-making rooms, or what she chose to do about it.

Before the industry, there was her mother’s sacrifice.

Before anything else, Barbara Rivas was an immigrant girl who watched her mother start over and rebuild their life from scratch.

“Seeing her strength, her sacrifices, and the weight she carried shaped me early on—it became the fuel behind my drive,” she told me. “I wasn’t just chasing my dreams for myself, but also with the intention of one day easing that burden for her.”

Like many Latinas, for her, ambition wasn’t just about personal success. It was about gratitude and the deep motivation that comes from seeing someone you love work so hard.

Barbara didn’t have a clear path into the music industry, but she knew what she wouldn’t accept: staying small, waiting for permission, or letting the industry or the world limit her.

“I didn’t grow up seeing many women who looked like me in positions of power, especially in music,” she said. “That absence teaches you something early: representation isn’t just about being seen, it’s about having access and being part of the decision-making.”

In other words, she wanted more than just a seat at the table. She wanted to know how the table was built from the start.

Broadcasting taught her to read people and systems.

Before becoming an executive, Barbara Rivas worked as an on-air talent. She spent years at Spanish Broadcasting System, Mega TV, and Rapetón, interviewing artists, building audiences, and learning how the industry worked from the outside. This taught her a valuable skill: listening to what people say and what they don’t say. me that this industry is both real and constructed at the same time,” she explained. “It made me a sharper listener—not just hearing what someone is saying, but understanding what they’re navigating behind the scenes.”

After all, when you interview artists night after night, you begin to notice what’s behind their public image. You learn to wait for those honest moments that reveal something real, and those moments are what make stories meaningful to audiences. She soon understood people don’t tune in for music alone but for connection. And when they do, they choose to stay because they feel seen by the person talking to them.

“Your personality, paired with great music and intentional programming, is what turns listeners into loyal fans,” she said. “That’s something I carry into artist development now.”

From covering artists to developing them: A different kind of listening.

On the surface, the move from on-air talent to executive might seem like a natural step, but Barbara Rivas calls it a major change. She took what she learned from watching performers and used it to help artists build lasting careers, especially in an industry that changes fast. “Balancing identity, expectations, and emotion in real time,” she said. “So when I’m building with an artist, I’m not only thinking about what will work commercially. I’m thinking about what feels authentic to them, what they can sustain long-term, and how to protect their vulnerability while still allowing them to grow.”

Her approach has influenced her work with artists at Mr.305 Records. She played a key role in Omar Courtz’s global success. His debut album, PRIMERA MUSA, passed 1 billion streams and went multi-platinum. His next album, POR SI MAÑANA NO ESTOY, debuted at #1 on Spotify’s Top Albums Debut Global chart and reached over 100 million streams in its first week.

With Vikina, she pushed for Latin EDM to be recognized in the industry, which helped create a new category at the Latin GRAMMY Awards. She also worked with IAmChino to shape key creative moments that drove growth.

The barriers that don’t announce themselves.

Whenever people talk about women in music leadership, the topic of barriers always comes up. Barbara Rivas knows this well and addresses it directly.

“A lot of the barriers aren’t loud—they’re structural,” she said. “They show up in who gets trusted with bigger budgets, who gets second chances, who gets listened to the first time they speak.”

For Latinas, there’s an extra challenge. You have to prove yourself in places where people already doubt you. You try to be assertive without being called difficult, and strategic without being questioned. You show your skills but still try to be agreeable. You take up space, but not too much.

“Those things don’t always get named, but they shape how women move in these spaces every day,” she said.

Beyond these daily challenges, there’s a bigger issue: the lack of mentorship and sponsorship. It’s one thing to get into the room, but it’s another to have people there to support your growth when you’re not present. It takes someone with influence to say, “This woman should be in the next room too.”

Barbara Rivas has become aware of that gap and of her responsibility to close it.

For Barbara Rivas, burnout is not a personality flaw. It’s a design flaw.

For a long time, Barbara kept up with the industry's fast pace: always working, always pushing, and never stopping to ask whether it was sustainable. She noticed burnout, anxiety, and disconnection in herself and others. That’s the cost of ambition without healthy boundaries.

“This industry moves fast, it’s high-pressure, and it doesn’t always encourage you to slow down or check in with yourself,” she said. “For a long time, I operated in that rhythm. But I started to see the cost of that.”

She reached a breaking point, both personally and by seeing it happen to others. This changed how she saw her own responsibility.

This experience led her to start The Blissful Project, a wellness initiative that promotes balance, sustainability, and mental health in the music and entertainment industry.

“Wellness stopped being something optional and became something necessary to sustain any kind of long-term career or impact,” she explained. “I wanted to create space for conversations we weren’t having—especially within the Latino and music community—around mental, physical, and spiritual health. Because if we’re building careers but losing ourselves in the process, then what are we actually building?”

She is building her legacy in places most people never see.

Barbara Rivas knows exactly what she wants her legacy to be, and it’s not about chart positions or streaming numbers. Instead, she measures it by how people feel when they’re with her.

“I want artists to feel like they were seen fully—not just for what they could produce, but for who they are,” she said. “That they were supported in building something sustainable, not just something momentary.”

Her vision is even clearer for the women who will follow her.

“I hope it feels a little less isolating,” she said. “That there are more examples, more access, and more pathways than there were before.”

She keeps her promise by joining mentorship programs with The Recording Academy and GRAMMY U, connecting women with leaders and helping them find new opportunities. She becomes the person she once needed—someone with power who opens doors for others.

When she immigrated at thirteen, she barely spoke English. Her quietness could have meant many things: homesickness, fear, or just being tired from translating everything. When she started at The Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem and joined the L.O.V.E. Mentoring Program as a freshman, she had no idea what to expect. She only knew she felt overwhelmed.

Years later, she stood at the podium during L.O.V.E.’s 10th Anniversary Gala and shared what it meant to see herself in her mentors. These were women who had also immigrated and understood what it was like to move between home and school. They had gone to college and showed her it was possible. She spoke about feeling comfortable, supported, and understood, words that might sound like a cliché unless you remember what it’s like to be thirteen, far from home, and unsure if you belong.

All of this was possible because of Claudia Espinosa.

In 2009, Espinosa worked as an intake counselor at a suicide prevention program. The job was tough. She met young Latinas, brilliant, capable, and full of potential, who struggled with depression and thoughts of suicide. But underneath these struggles, she noticed something else: a gap. It wasn’t a lack of intelligence or ambition, but a lack of role models. There weren’t enough people who looked like them, who had lived similar lives, and who could say, “I made it. You can too.”

So she got to work. She started L.O.V.E. as a pilot project at New York University in spring 2012. By fall, the program found a home at The Young Women’s Leadership School of East Harlem, where it could truly reach young women and offer them mentorship.

As Claudia shared, she recognized the importance of building strong support and empowerment systems, particularly through meaningful relationships with relatable role models.

Fourteen years later, L.O.V.E. has brought in over 300 volunteer mentors, many of whom are Latina and first-generation college students from New York City. The program has reached over 100 schools across Queens, Brooklyn, the Bronx, and Manhattan. It has helped more than 4,000 young women, including that once-shy 13-year-old who left the program confident and believing her future had no limits.

What sets L.O.V.E. apart and makes it effective is that it is built on shared lived experiences.

“Shared experiences foster relatability, helping build connection, belonging, and mutual support,” Claudia explains.

The program creates an inclusive environment where young women form meaningful relationships with mentors who understand their lived experiences. Many mentors share similar backgrounds, including being first-generation college students from New York City, which allows for deeper connections and ensures that guidance is both relevant and impactful.

“For young women who may lack role models in higher education or professional spaces, these relationships can be transformative,” Claudia notes. “Seeing mentors who reflect their identities, experiences, and aspirations empowers mentees to believe in their own potential and envision a path forward.”

This is the quiet revolution behind the work. It’s not just telling young women they can succeed. It’s showing them women who already have.

The mentee who immigrated at thirteen went on to study Business Administration at Baruch College. She returned to share her story. For a girl in the audience, this example might’ve spoken volumes.

At L.O.V.E., every week counts. Students take part in social-emotional learning, health education, and mentorship. They discuss college access and financial aid, learn about healthy relationships and personal safety, and visit colleges. Through all of this, something changes for them.

“We know this work is effective when students begin to shift how they see themselves,” Claudia says. “They move from uncertainty to clarity, from hesitation to active participation, and from limited expectations to a stronger belief in their ability to succeed.”

Alumni say it themselves: they started college knowing how to set goals. They found a sense of community. They realized their futures weren’t just about luck—they were possible, achievable, and truly theirs.

But the reality for organizations doing important work is that they need more support.

The young women L.O.V.E. supports face many challenges. And what they need is real, ongoing, and culturally responsive care.

Schools are asking L.O.V.E. to expand. It has become clear that more girls and more communities need this support. But growing the program requires funding.

“To deepen our impact in New York City and beyond, L.O.V.E. requires sustained investment, increased visibility, and strategic partnerships,” Claudia says. They need funding to grow, but they also need people to understand their work so that new opportunities—like partnerships, funders, and communities—can help bring this model to more places.

Because the girl who immigrated at thirteen, the one who became a keynote speaker, is not just a statistic. She is someone who was seen and believed in. Someone who was told by a mentor who shared her background that her future was worth investing in.

That’s what L.O.V.E. does. And New York City, and honestly, the whole world, needs more programs like this.

By Nicole Young.

If you’ve ever scrolled through social media and been drawn to someone who is truly themselves, you might have come across Chiquis. The Latin Grammy-winning singer is not only a force in music, but she’s also making waves in media with her honest podcast, Chiquis and Chill, where she talks openly and values vulnerability.

For Chiquis, speaking her truth is more than just part of her job—it’s her purpose. “I knew from a very young age that if I spoke up sooner rather than later, even if it was scary, I would not only start healing myself, but I could also give voice to those who perhaps stay silent out of fear of being judged,” she told FIERCE. “I believe there is power in vulnerability, so I decided to lead by example.” She leads by sharing her story on air, on stage, and in the lives of women who admire her.

How Chiquis is Breaking Through the Noise

Growing up in the spotlight isn’t easy. Chiquis faced fame early on, along with the kind of attention that can make anyone doubt themselves. But these challenges made her stronger. “Growing up in the public eye definitely wasn’t easy, but I’m grateful because it gave me thick skin,” she shares. “It molded me into the woman I am today. It gave me the opportunity to see the world for what it is, but also what it could be if I turned those painful moments into power. Power to make the world a better place, even if it is one heart at a time.”

Being watched all the time isn’t easy. One of Chiquis’ biggest challenges was finding her own identity while growing up as the daughter of the famous Jenni Rivera. “For a long time, I didn’t mind being in her shadow, but then came a time when I realized I was doing myself a disservice,” Chiquis admits. “I had to show up for myself and ignite my own light. I had to show myself that I was enough, that I was worthy of my own success, even if the world said I wasn’t.” Now, she stands confidently in her own spotlight.

Owning Your Power

Chiquis didn’t become confident overnight. Her journey took heartbreak, reflection, and time. “I learned about self-love in a very painful way,” she explains. “I had to go through a lot of heartbreak before realizing that I had to love myself first, and feel worthy of love, before expecting to be loved the way I needed and deserved.” She now shares this lesson with her listeners and fans, especially women of color who often face outside expectations.

And it’s not just about surviving the industry. For Chiquis, it’s not just about surviving in the industry—it’s about thriving while staying true to herself. She uses meditation, breathwork, prayer, and even time in the sun to keep her peace. “I learned a while back that what helps me is revolving all I do around my God, not the other way around. God is my center, and the only thing that gives me true peace,” she says. “At the end of the day, true peace comes from truly trusting and surrendering to the higher power. It reminds me, and gives me the strength to show up and show off as my authentic self.”

She began taking creative control of her music, and she truly began to feel the kind of confidence that can’t be shaken. “This newfound confidence of being unapologetically myself didn’t come to me until I learned to love and accept myself. To own it! To step into my power,” she says, referencing her empowering track Porque Soy Abeja Reina, a turning point in her career and self-perception. “Since then, it’s only gotten better.”

Chiquis has also changed how she sees her body and self-image. She no longer chases perfection and now accepts herself fully. “Each scar, every stretch mark, the dimples on my thighs make me, me. They tell a story. My story. I don’t need to be perfect to be loved and accepted,” she says. In a culture that pressures women to fit one ideal, her message is both rebellious and freeing.

Challenging Latina Norms

Chiquis’s podcast stands out for its challenge to cultural expectations. As a Latina, she knows the saying, “calladita te miras más bonita.” She chooses to turn that idea around. “Now that we’re aware of this, and the power behind using our voices—not only for our healing but for the healing of all women—we’re craving these types of conversations, even if they may be uncomfortable,” she explains. “Women were never meant to be under anyone’s shoe. We were always meant to rise, to uplift one another, to make some people uncomfortable because we’re so comfortable with who we are. The time has come, and it will only get better.”

Her words encourage Latinas to take up space in their lives and careers. Chiquis also shares practical advice for working in tough industries. “Read your contracts. Find yourself a good attorney who will explain the ins and outs of the industry. Protect your art! Find a good team and be sure to be in the driver’s seat of your career,” she advises. Most importantly: “Don’t waste your time comparing yourself, your music, your physique, your progress, or process with anyone else’s. Focus on yourself and bettering your craft as much as possible.”

The Myth of Strong Women

Chiquis also wants to challenge the idea that strong women end up alone. “People always say strong, independent, outspoken women will end up alone, but that couldn’t be further from the truth,” she says. “A true, strong woman knows when to be soft and with whom. We just need to feel safe, and when we do, life is more colorful in every aspect of our lives.” Strength and love can go together—they are about balance and choice.

Community, Healing, and Growth: Chiquis’s Journey

Even confident women need a community, and Chiquis is no different. “Community is everything! If I didn’t have community, I would feel alone,” she says. Having other women who are open, share their stories, and are real has helped her heal. That’s a big reason why Chiquis and Chill connects with so many. The podcast is about creating a space where women feel seen, heard, and understood.

When life feels tough, Chiquis has her own way to reset. She might dance under the sun or moon, play her favorite songs, or work up a sweat with green tea nearby. These routines help her reconnect with her power, confidence, and joy. “I feel so good and sexy after a nice sweat, but of course music is always involved!” she laughs.

Honoring Legacy While Carving Your Own Path

It hasn’t been easy for Chiquis to balance her mother Jenni Rivera’s legacy with her own path. She admits that trying to meet everyone’s expectations was overwhelming. Her turning point came when she let go and trusted her instincts. “Once I did things from the right place, everything started falling into place, slowly but surely. Soon enough, little by little, I started coming into my own. It takes time to unlearn certain things,” she reflects.

Chiquis offers advice to young women of color starting out: “Protect your art, read your contracts, ask questions, and never feel you’re too good to learn something new. Focus on yourself and your craft.” Her guidance comes from her own experiences, both the hard times and the victories, and from her willingness to speak up.

Defining Success on Her Own Terms

One thing that stands out about Chiquis is her redefinition of success. She no longer sees it as just material achievements or constant hustle. “Now I know the true meaning of success. In my opinion, success is having peace of mind. Success is not only about discovering the true meaning of life, but living it,” she says. “Sleeping with a light heart at night. Trusting that no matter what, all will work out the way it’s meant to.”

For Chiquis, real success means helping others, giving her loved ones new chances and experiences, and always being true to herself.

A Message to the Next Generation

With her podcast, music, and public presence, Chiquis is creating a guide for Latina women who want to lead with confidence. “More than anything, if Chiquis got through it, so can I,” she says with her usual mix of sass and honesty. “Keep God first, and you will always find a solution, because when you’re rooted in light, darkness could never win. You got this! We got this! We got each other.”

Chiquis wants every woman, especially women of color, to embrace their power without apology. “There is nothing more beautiful than women celebrating each other. I love it so much,” she says. Her life and work show that when women support each other, they break barriers, challenge old ideas, and create new legacies.

Unapologetic, Unfiltered, Unstoppable

Chiquis is more than a singer, daughter, or media figure—she’s a force. She’s learned that being open is a strength, that confidence takes work, and that real success is about peace, purpose, and love. By sharing her story and owning her power, she shows others how to thrive, not just survive. For the next generation of Latina women, her example is the guide they’ve been waiting for. If Chiquis can rise and shine on her own terms, so can we all.

The year 2026 is a pivotal moment for the media industry as a whole. All eyes are on us to figure out, adapt, and be part of the disruption affecting each facet of our industry. Now, when our community needs representation more than ever, NALIP’s Diverse Women in Media Forum delivered and showed up for Latinos.

Held on Friday at the W Hollywood, the National Association of Latino Independent Producers featured an urgent theme: Women as Architects: The Future of Media. The event spotlighted Eva Longoria, the team behind The House of the Spirits, Peacock’s M.I.A., and wider discussions on how women are shaping storytelling, access, and power across the industry. Including two of our very own mitú jefas.

NALIP’s Diverse Women in Media Forum brought fundamental conversations about authorship, leadership, ownership, and the more urgent question of who gets to build culture in the first place.

What stood out most was the event’s refusal to separate creative work from structural power.

Again and again, the panels returned to the same underlying truth: representation is no longer only about being seen. It is about who gets to create, to greenlight, to craft the narrative before it ever reaches an audience, and who gets to stay in the room long enough to make those decisions matter.

The forum brought together women working across film, television, digital media, talent ecosystems, and executive leadership, but the feeling in the room was not careerism for its own sake. It revolved around infrastructure and, more importantly, sustainability. Around what it actually takes to build a media sphere in which diversity is central to how stories are developed, produced, financed, and scaled.

In that sense, the title Women as Architects did real work.

One of the clearest examples came during the conversation around The House of the Spirits, where Eva Longoria joined showrunners Francisca Alegría and Fernanda Urrejola to discuss adaptation, memory, gender violence, and the female lens.

When mitú asked how they were thinking about reinterpreting Isabel Allende’s novel for viewers today, the answers were immediate and strikingly grounded. Alegría pointed to the book’s painful relevance, noting that the violence and patterns Allende wrote about in the 1980s are still happening today. At the same time, she pointed out the importance of remembrance and the need to understand what came before if we want any hope of not repeating it.

Longoria, for her part, was blunt about the industry’s state. When we asked what feels different about this moment in Hollywood for diverse women leaders compared to when she started, her answer was devastating in its clarity: “Oh my God. Nothing, unfortunately.” She pointed to the drop in the percentage of female film directors and made clear that Latinas continue to face even steeper barriers. Then she pivoted to what made The House of the Spirits meaningful in this landscape: that it exists at all, that it was made in Spanish by multinational Latino creatives on a major platform, and that audiences now have the power to prove this kind of work deserves to keep getting made.

After all, one of the most consistent currents running through the day was the understanding that access is never enough on its own.

A project can be historic, overdue, or exquisitely made. But if audiences do not show up, the industry still tends to treat it as exotic rather than as a way forward.

Alegría and Urrejola also spoke movingly about how their Chilean background molded their approach to the story. For both of them, The House of the Spirits was never simply a canonical text meant to be adapted with respectful distance. It was part of the emotional and political context they came from. Urrejola spoke about hearing those histories growing up, about the dictatorship, about families hiding people whose names they did not even know, about the subtle world of spirits and memory that, in the good tradition of magical realism, goes beyond the metaphor and becomes lived inheritance.

The key conversation around the mechanics of the creator economy and how we build culture.

The panel Reimagining Representation: Creators, Culture & the Future of Media was another moment for the books.

The conversation made clear that the old boundaries between talent, media companies, and brands no longer hold the same weight as they once did. What is emerging instead is a much more fluid ecosystem in which creators are not only performers or promoters of culture, but builders of IP, audiences, businesses, and distribution models. That shift carries enormous ramifications for Latinos and, in particular, women of color, because it changes the terms of authorship itself.

Vanessa Vigil, president of mitú, brought exactly the kind of clarity the moment demands. As one of the few Latina presidents in digital media and the leader of one of the country’s most influential Latino media companies, she spoke from inside the business reality of what it means to shape culture for a new generation of U.S. Latinos and how it’s not something exclusively for our community but for all diverse communities.

“We’re very much leaning into culture as the unifying thing that drives mitú,” Vigil said. “But I think what we have found is that there’s so much about our culture and our experience as Latinos specifically [that’s universal to] the black community [and] the Asian community can really relate. And so that is something that we love to see.”

“And it extends beyond,” she explained. “It goes beyond just Latinos doing things a certain way. It’s not specific just to us, but calling something out like the nostalgia of the era that we grew up in, I think it’s a moment of levity, and like the time that we live in, that I think a lot of people really appreciate. And that is, again, you’re tapping into culture, but it’s not exclusionary.”

Similarly, the panel around Peacock’s M.I.A., The Character Architects, offered another version of that same idea from the creative side.

Moderated by mitú’s Daniela Salazar, the conversation explored how a character like Etta Tiger Jonze gets built across casting, writing, performance, and showrunning.

This was a pioneering conversation about collaboration as authorship, which is key right now because so much of the industry still isolates women’s contributions. However, Friday’s panels continued to resist that reduction. They made clear how often women, especially women of color, wear many hats while building projects from the inside out, while also carrying the strain of financial inequality and lack of representation along the way.

What NALIP’s forum captured so well is that women of color in media are no longer waiting for the industry to catch up to their ambitions.

NALIP has spent 27 years building a space for Latino excellence across creative media. Friday’s forum made explicitly clear what the new battleground looks like. And amongst the front lines are powerful and diverse women with a serious claim to the industry’s future.

And in this political and cultural moment, that is no small thing.

Because there is something especially clarifying about seeing a room full of women discuss media with this level of rigor at a time when so much of the wider culture still clings to rusted paradigms.

Kica Matos is the kind of woman who knows that work—especially work that comes from the heart and from absolute conviction—doesn’t need to be seen to be effective.

Having lived in Puerto Rico, Trinidad, Fiji, and New Zealand, and with decades of work for social justice and hundreds of miles spent on the streets doing community work, the only thing that has truly felt surreal to her has been being recognized by TIME magazine as one of the most influential people in the world.

“I admit I feel a slight sense of discomfort because I’m not someone who seeks attention,” she told me. “When I seek attention, it’s to fight for a cause and for justice.”

That should tell you everything you need to know about this amazing woman. However, I want to tell you a little more.

From Puerto Rico to Fiji to New Zealand, she learned the world early.

Kica Matos was born in Puerto Rico. Her father was the island's founding cabinet secretary for the environment. Because of her father’s work, the Matos family moved to Trinidad when Kica was nine years old. Four years later, they moved to the Fiji Islands, where Kica completed her schooling.

“When it came time to go to college, my dad gave me three options. He said, ‘You could go to Australia and New Zealand,’ because they were close to Fiji, or the United States.’ And I thought, since I have an American passport, I could always come to the US. AU.S I had a bunch of friends from New Zealand, so I thought, ah, let me go to New Zealand [and] check it out.”

She earned her B.A. from Victoria University of Wellington in New Zealand, an M.A. from The New School, and a J.D. from Cornell Law School.

The death penalty is where she found her life’s work.

She began organizing with the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, focusing on death penalty cases.

“There was a team of lawyers who represented people on death row whose cases were rife with racial discrimination,” she explained. “And my job was when the inmate was nearing execution […] My job was to go to those states to organize, so I was mostly organizing in the Deep South, which is where most of those cases came from.”

In her own words, that’s when she knew what she was going to dedicate her life to: fighting for the abolition of the death penalty and organizing.

She went back to law school because she wanted to represent people on death row, and she began working in Pennsylvania.

And then, well, life intervened.

“Life has a way of taking the reins when you think you’ve got it all figured out, and you know exactly what you’re going to do,” she said with a laugh. “And I ended up falling in love.”

She married her now-husband and had to negotiate the next move.

“I wanted him to move to Philadelphia. He wanted me to move to New Haven, and I said I would move to New Haven as long as the next move was mine,” she said. “And that was in 2002. I lost the battle, but won the war, and we still haven’t moved from New Haven.”

But it was in New Haven where she became aware of the real challenges that undocumented immigrants face in the United States.

While Kica Matos had some familiarity with immigration issues, New Haven revealed a new layer of social injustice to her.

Kica grew up in Puerto Rico, a country she describes as a colony through and through. “When I was young, what I felt most was racism,” she told me. “Puerto Ricans like to talk about our ancestry—the Taíno, Africans, and Spaniards—and I’ve heard Puerto Ricans say sometimes that Puerto Rico is ‘a race-blind country.’ Most of the people who say that are white people. And what I felt growing up in Puerto Rico was just a lot of discrimination.”

She then recalls how, as “the one with the darkest skin” in her family, people at social gatherings would immediately refer to her as “la negrita.” And while her father used the expression as a term of endearment, she knew what it meant from a very young age.

“Children aren’t deaf,” she said. “I remember the racism, and I would watch TV and the soap operas, and anything associated with high society in Puerto Rico was always associated with whiteness. The people who were elevated, the people who were exalted, the people who were celebrated—the culture that Puerto Ricans chose to truly elevate was mostly white.”

It wasn’t until she graduated from college that Kica really began to analyze and understand the status and the plight of Puerto Ricans. “And I am an unapologetic independentista,” she said without hesitation. “It’s way past time for Puerto Rico to liberate itself.”

Her résumé is long. The meaning behind it matters more.”

Kica Matos’s work led her to become deputy mayor of New Haven, where she oversaw community programs and launched new initiatives, including prisoner re-entry and youth and immigrant integration. Kica previously served as executive director of JUNTA, New Haven’s oldest Latino advocacy organization. She was vice president of initiatives at the Vera Institute of Justice. She also served as director of immigrant rights and racial justice at the Center for Community Change. She has extensive experience as an advocate, community organizer, and lawyer. Kica has also led the U.S. U.S.nciliation and Human Rights Program at Atlantic Philanthropies. Her work led her to join NILC and IJF as executive vice president of programs and strategy in January 2023, and she is now the president of the National Immigration Law Center (NILC) and the Immigrant Justice Fund (IJF).

But in our conversation, we didn’t focus so much on her resume as on the meaning behind the work. Just as we discussed colonialism or the casual use of terminology, my central question for Kica was: “What is social justice?”

“If you were to ask people on the street, even activists themselves, what social justice means, you’re likely to get a different response,” she said, arguing that she doesn’t think “there is one definition for what social justice means.”

“What does it mean to me? It means that it is a fight for equity for people. It is a fight for justice. It is a fight for freedom,” she said. “That, to me, really encapsulates social justice.”

Throughout her career, Kica has focused on and fought tirelessly for the most marginalized people.

She has fought tooth and nail for the disenfranchised in the United States, and for people on death row, where she first witnessed the country’s inequalities.

“None of them are rich,” she emphasized. “You never find a rich person on death row. These are people who have grown up in the most horrific circumstances. Predominantly, people of color were rejected by society from an early age, often have upbringings that are truly terrible, neglected by society, and then inevitably they commit a terrible crime.”

However, as Kica points out, “That very same society [is the one] that chose not to invest in them at an early age. They had the opportunity to offer a productive way of life. All of a sudden, we’re pouring hundreds of thousands and millions of dollars into executing them.”

Looking back, Kica believes her dedication to social justice “wasn’t something I decided one day that I was going to do. It was really an evolution of the way I lived my life and my own lived experiences.”

And working with undocumented immigrants was the natural evolution of her career.

“Undocumented immigrants in this country today are among the most vulnerable people who, despite the many contributions they make to this country and the tremendous sacrifices they make, this administration has chosen to demonize and vilify them and subject them to the most terrible treatment,” she said.

In this way, for Kica Matos, the fight for social justice involves a commitment to ensuring that the barriers erected against the most marginalized are addressed, so that “people can then live the lives we all want to live.”

At a time when the struggle seems uphill, and when many of us think daily of giving up the fight against the tide, Kica Matos remains steadfast in her calling. And although she doesn’t know exactly how, the only way she can describe it is: “the fire in my belly, caffeine, and dark chocolate,” she says with a sense of humor that is uniquely hers and deeply contagious.

However, she also adds that she is aware of her privilege in being able to work with “people who are badasses, and that fills me with great joy.”

“I will say, particularly in this moment, one of the things we are all reminding ourselves of is the need to find joy despite the darkness surrounding us,” she says. “Because if they take away our joy, they’ve taken just about everything away.”

For Kica Matos, this is the moment when our strength and conviction must not fail us.

For a couple of years now, alongside the NILC and the IJF, Kica and her team have been preparing for every possible scenario. Recognizing the Biden administration’s failure to address immigration, in 2024, her organization spent 10 months doing “scenario planning.”

“And quite frankly, we spent most of our time looking at what Trump and his colleagues were threatening to do. We looked at Project 2025, we looked at Stephen Miller’s ‘America First,’ and we paid close attention to everything Trump said.” In October, Kica and her team concluded that if Trump won, he would advance authoritarianism at the expense of immigrants.

“And as an organization, we thought that we needed to begin to prepare and to do work at the intersection of democracy and immigration because our stance was that if he advanced authoritarianism, the rest of our work would fall apart.”

That is why, today, the fight for social justice goes hand in hand with the fight to save democracy.

And although the current administration seems to be engaging in more “window dressing,” Kica asserts that the process of mass deportation is not going away.

For Kica Matos, there’s only one thing we have to do: “the very simple exercise of highlighting what’s happening in this country and analyzing what this means, so people understand the need to care and the need to get involved,” she said. “That, in itself, is a step in the right direction.”

“And then the final thing I’ll say is, since I’ve lived in the United States, [I’ve felt] that we have all taken American democracy for granted. I don’t think any of us thought that we would ever be on the brink of losing our democracy. And this is the first time that I have felt that sense of urgency. And I truly understand the fragility of our democracy. And democracy is not a spectator sport. Everyone has to get involved because you could lose it. And we’re seeing it happen here. You could lose it so fast.”

And whether you see her on the TIMES list of most influential people or not at all, Kica Matos is walking the talk, every day, fighting for what matters most: justice and freedom, for all.

By Nicole Fernandez

Three Colombian founders are proving that the most powerful brands don’t start in boardrooms. They start in real life: in a garage salon, in a sisterhood, in a story you decide to tell out loud. Here’s how Daniela Salcedo and The Hair Generation turned craft, community, and conviction into businesses that are going far beyond Colombia.

Both brands have built a community among their customers. One community embraces self-expression through unique pieces of jewelry, while the other has noticed an improvement in their quality of life thanks to the hair growth achieved with “The Hair Boomer” scalp oil. These two brands are making their mark on local and national communities, as well as on the international scene, with a Colombian touch.

Daniela Salcedo, and a jewelry universe built on feeling

Daniela Salcedo founded her eponymous handmade jewelry brand in 2014, and more than a decade later, her unique pieces and brand style continue to gain popularity.

“I heart everything that I see, and I see everything that I heart,” is how Daniela describes her way of seeing things, and it’s how she has created her jewelry universe full of vibrant colors, shapes, and styles.

You can also see Daniela’s personality and fashion style on her personal Instagram, which shows the creativity she brings as a person, entrepreneur, and jewelry artist. In this way, her art takes many forms, and each ring, earring, necklace, charm, or bracelet she creates reflects her personality and unique style. Daniela defines her pieces as “Jewelry that doesn’t go unnoticed. Designed to express yourself.”

Each Daniela Salcedo collection has a story behind it, one that connects with followers, clients, and those who have just discovered her craft. Her jewelry thus becomes handmade statement pieces that symbolize love, dedication, and meaning.

The Hair Generation turned hair loss into a movement

For their part, Laura and Marcela Garcia Caballero have connected with their Gangers through their slogan, “Every hair has a story.” In their case, The Hair Generation emerged from a personal hair-loss journey. A year after launching, their brand has blossomed beyond Colombia.

The sisters have an ambitious vision for The Hair Generation, but they have two main things clear: “we don’t want to grow quickly. We want to grow well,” and “we want when someone thinks of ‘haircare with soul,’ they think of The Hair Generation.”

Born in Barranquilla, Colombia, the García sisters joined forces to bring their brand to life. The Hair Generation is today a fusion of vulnerability and storytelling.

“From the beginning, we built ‘The Hair Generation’ as a brand of stories, where each product is born from a real experience and a constant conversation with our community,” they told FIERCE. “We don’t go from a laboratory to the consumer, but from the consumer to the product. But there’s also something very important: while each experience is unique, the product was developed to work.”

Three women, three definitions of fierce

Daniela, Laura, and Marcela are true examples of what it means to be a fierce woman.

They represent the real Latina, the one who has fire in her soul, love and passion for her beliefs, and is unapologetically herself. They represent the Colombian woman who isn’t bothered by whether people like her or not, because she bets on herself, no matter how many times she is told “no” or “you shouldn’t.”

These three women exemplify how resilience, vulnerability, creativity, and passion lead to successful businesses. They also reflect the importance of daring to be different, which leads to connecting and creating communities with their clients.

What building with family teaches you

Another thing these women have in common is the structure behind their brands. Daniela Salcedo, for example, works alongside her husband, Mateo Jaramillo. She admits there’s a deep appreciation for the work dynamic with her significant other, despite being opposites. While he is rational and unafraid, Daniela is more cautious.

“My husband comes in to rein me in. I’m very emotional, and he keeps me grounded. So when you combine these two extremes, you achieve a very powerful balance: vision and execution, intuition and structure.”

For their part, Laura and Marcela recognize the value of having each other’s backs and company during the adventure of building The Hair Generation. They also understand each other’s strengths and weaknesses across different aspects of running a company together.

“We are very different, and that is also a very positive thing, since we complement each other where the other has a blind spot.”

The advice they all agree on

Finally, starting a business in any city, in any country, is hard and comes with many obstacles. However, these Latina founders agree on one thing: if your heart is in it, then it’s worth it. Similarly, all three founders aligned on the importance of starting even when you’re not 100% ready and letting go of the perfection mindset.

Daniela Salcedo shared: “Never wait for everything to be perfect before starting a business. That perfection is a trap. It doesn’t exist! It’s better to take the plunge, be daring, start with what you have, and refine it along the way.”

Laura and Marcela share the sentiment: “Start before you feel ready. Perfect preparation doesn’t exist; perfection is the enemy of good, and waiting until you have it is the most elegant way to never start. Know what you’re good at and what you’re not, and surround yourself with the right people for the things you’re not good at. Your story isn’t a weakness; it’s your most powerful asset. Don’t be afraid to tell it.”

At 16, Mandys Peña worked in a small garage salon in Mexico, doing hair. At 20, she moved to the United States with a cosmetology license and a plan to build something bigger. Two decades later, after years behind the chair and a business setback that wiped her out, she rebuilt again. This time, she rebuilt in public.

Today, Peña is the founder and CEO of Simply Mandys, a beauty brand she launched with $20,000 of her own money and a TikTok account. She became the first creator in TikTok Shop history to generate $1 million in sales in a single live session, and she has broken that record multiple times. Similarly, Simply Mandys generated $9.5 million in revenue through TikTok Live in 2025 alone. In fact, the platform recognized her with a “Live Rising Star” award for the highest live GMV growth of 2024. She did it without outside investors.

But the most impactful part of Peña’s story sits underneath the numbers: she speaks like someone who learned early on that survival builds a different kind of discipline. And she has never stopped treating that discipline as the foundation.

Mandys Peña learned hustle as a form of survival, not branding

When Peña looks back at her teenage self working in that garage salon, she does so with objectivity.

“I’ve always been a dreamer,” she told us. “I knew from a young age that I wanted more, and quitting was never an option.”

At 16, she said, she was not thinking about “titles or success.” She was thinking about survival. “When you come from nothing, you learn to work to provide for yourself, and that builds a different kind of discipline,” she said. “You show up when you’re tired, when things aren’t perfect, when no one is watching.”

And this is the part many founder myths often bypass. People rave about ambition as it exemplifies confidence. However, endurance is another ballgame.

The perks of failure

More often than not, founders avoid talking about collapse. Peña did not.

Before Simply Mandys, she lost everything in a failed salon investment. However, when we asked what that kind of failure does to your sense of self, her answer refused shame.

“I learned from my past mistakes, and I chose to take another bet on myself,” she said. “I came to understand that those failures were never a reflection of my skills, my experience, or my drive. It was life guiding me away from what wasn’t meant for me.”

Peña insists on a sort of mantra: effort, faith, self-trust.

“After everything I had been through, knowing how hard I had worked to get where I was, I decided that this time, I was going to focus on myself, on my growth, and my faith,” she said. Then she delivered the line that explains the entire pivot: “Once you truly understand that you can rebuild from nothing, you stop being afraid of losing everything.”

She believes Simply Mandys emerged from that moment. “I really believe that Simply Mandys was born out of that resilience.”

The real labor behind live commerce

Peña built Simply Mandys through TikTok Live, a space traditional business culture still considers a sideshow, even as it generates real revenue. And Peña has little patience for the idea that this is luck.

“One of the biggest misconceptions about live commerce is that this is luck, and it’s not,” she said. “What people don’t see are the hours, the consistency, and the discipline it takes to show up every single day.”

She describes going live as constant multitasking. “Going live isn’t easy,” she said. “You’re thinking on your feet, educating, selling, and connecting in real time.”

Then she names the real barrier, the one that has nothing to do with algorithms and everything to do with fear. “I think a lot of people are scared to be criticized,” she said. “Scared of the camera, of other people’s opinions, of failing. But you have to be brave and do it anyway.”

Her argument is simple: live commerce lowers the gate. The work ethic decides who walks through it.

“Social media, especially live commerce, removes barriers,” she said. “You don’t need a storefront or millions of dollars. What you do need is consistency, knowledge, and the ability to connect.”

And she understands why women, immigrants, and beauty workers have an edge here.

“For women, immigrants, and beauty professionals, this is our strength,” she said. “We’ve been building trust and relationships for years, but now we’re just doing it on a larger scale.”

Twenty years behind the chair is a business education you cannot find elsewhere

Peña’s brand sells products, but her authority comes from a place older than the internet: the chair.

“I spent over 20 years behind the chair,” she said. “Every product I create comes from actual conversations with my clients.”

She talks about hair as someone who lives and breathes her vocation: as daily life, as insecurity, as repair, as transformation. “I’ve seen the frustration, the damage, the insecurity, and then the confidence that comes when their hair finally feels right,” she said. “That experience teaches you what people actually need, not just what’s trending.”

Her approach to her audience follows the same logic. She refuses to treat them as faceless consumers.

“I always say I don’t speak to them like customers,” she said. “I speak to them the way I spoke to my clients in the chair. I educate and show them exactly how to use the products and why.”

Then she draws the line between her and the founders who chase whatever is viral this quarter. “What a hairstylist builds that a trend-driven founder can’t is credibility,” she said. “It’s earned and built over time, and comes from experience.”

“When you combine that with social media,” she added, “you’re building a relationship at scale.”

For Mandys Peña, success still means the people

The pitch around Simply Mandys includes big numbers and big milestones. Peña’s own definition of success stays closer to the ground.

“Success to me is the love and passion for hair and for my clients,” she said. “When you love something, it’s so easy to create.”

She described TikTok as the tool that let her do what she had always done, just publicly. “Through TikTok, I was able to express myself, share my passion, and talk to people directly about their needs,” she said.

Then she was adamant on what she wants the brand to represent.

“Simply Mandys is about the people who believe in me,” she said. “My years of listening to women, understanding what they need, that’s what made this dream come true.”

Jennifer Muñoz talks about soccer as if she were describing a life that has never existed solely within one language, whether in terms of words or structure.

The field, in her telling, has never been only a field. It has been a place where questions of belonging, femininity, labor, and visibility have all come together. A place where being Mexican-American was never a demographic box but a negotiation. A place where being a woman athlete did not simply require talent, but a kind of stamina that extended far beyond the ninety minutes. And now, as a former professional player, former Mexico international, and founder of Sporty Spice Collective, Muñoz is looking at the sport from the other side of the line, still inside it, but with a wider lens.

Jennifer Muñoz learned early what it means to live in the in-between

Muñoz was born in Montebello, California, and grew up in the United States. Still, she chose to represent Mexico internationally. For Muñoz, the choice carried the kind of friction that many children of immigrants know in their bones long before they have words for it.

“I grew up in the U.S., so there were moments where I felt like I had to constantly explain myself,” she told FIERCE. “Like I was too American in one room and not Mexican enough in another.”

That sentence is a full social lesson. She adds that she knew and took part in the culture, and her grandparents spoke only Spanish. The question was never if Mexico was part of her, but if others would let that fact stand without question.

That kind of pressure leaves a mark, but it can also produce clarity. “What did it give me? A level of pride and identity I don’t think I would’ve found anywhere else,” she said of representing Mexico. “Representing Mexico wasn’t just about soccer, it was about honoring my family, my roots, and every little girl who’s ever felt in between cultures and wondered where she fits.”

This way, Muñoz is not asking permission to occupy both worlds. She is naming the false choice for what it was. “Now, I don’t feel like I have to choose between two worlds; I get to represent both. And that’s my superpower.”

@jenmunoz8this is just the warmup guys

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Club América gave her a platform, but the system gave her a lesson

Muñoz played for Club América in Liga MX Femenil. The league is a clear sign of how fast women’s soccer has grown in Mexico. It has grown quickly, gained attention quickly, and become part of a bigger talk about the future of the women’s game in Latin America. But, like many quickly praised groups, growth is not the same as value.

Muñoz is careful here. She does not speak about her time at América with bitterness. Quite the opposite. “I think my experience was actually really fortunate and I don’t take that lightly,” she said. “Being one of the first American-Mexican players at Club América, I was welcomed with open arms. They saw me, they trusted me, and they gave me a platform I genuinely don’t think I would’ve had anywhere else. I wouldn’t be in this space today without them.”

That gratitude is real, yet so is her willingness to widen the frame beyond her own luck.

“But at the same time, being inside the league opened my eyes to the bigger picture,” she continued. “It taught me that institutions don’t always invest in women athletes the way they celebrate them.”

There lies the reality that people in sports still find a way to act surprised by, even though women athletes have been saying it in various forms for years. Women’s sports are increasingly used as proof of progress, proof of modernity, proof that a club or federation understands the future. But when the cameras move, the structural gap remains. “There’s still a gap between the passion you see on the field and the resources behind it.”

What Muñoz wants fans to understand is that the game they watch is built on labor they rarely see. “The game doesn’t start at kickoff,” she said. “There’s a whole layer of unseen labor—early mornings, recovery, second jobs for some players, fighting for visibility and respect. That’s what makes those 90 minutes possible.”

Fans often treat performance as if it just happens when the game starts. But in women’s sports, unseen work is needed to make top performance look normal.

@jenmunoz8⚽️🧚

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The pressure on Latina athletes starts early, and it is never only about sport

There is a certain script Latina athletes often face. They hear: “Be grateful. Work hard. Be strong. Represent well. Don’t be too loud. Don’t be too feminine unless that femininity seems harmless.”

Muñoz felt that pressure early, especially from media and online reaction. “There’s this expectation that Latina athletes have to look one way: always grinding, always ‘on,’” she said. Yet, in her words, Muñoz has always been “a girly girl.” That in itself brought challenges. “When I’d post in a dress on an off day, actually enjoying what I worked for, people were confused. They acted like I couldn’t be both.”

That confusion tells you a lot about what people still want from women in sports. They want discipline without visible pleasure. Strength without softness. They want women athletes to be inspiring, but only within the aesthetic limits that keep them intelligible. Muñoz understood what was happening quickly. “That’s when I realized the pressure wasn’t about me, it was about their idea of me.”

That realization seems to have shaped how she moves in public now.

“I protect my sense of self by not shrinking it,” she said. It is one of the strongest lines in the conversation because it rejects a survival tactic women are often taught to mistake for maturity. Shrinking is presented as professionalism. As humility. As a strategic restraint. Muñoz refuses that framing. “I can show up polished, feminine, and still be taken seriously in sport and in business.”

She is not dismissing the burden of representation; she is working around it. “Being grateful and representing something bigger than me is part of who I am. But I’ve reframed the pressure. Pressure is a privilege. If I’m feeling it, it means I’ve earned my place on the field, or now in rooms with some of the biggest brands in the world.”

“And I’m not toning myself down to fit in. I’m expanding what an athlete and a woman in this space gets to look like.”

@jenmunoz8shhh my show is on🙂‍↕️ ig: @sportyspice.collective #soccer #futbol #soccergirls

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Sporty Spice Collective is not only about soccer

Muñoz’s nonprofit, Sporty Spice Collective, is easy to summarize in the language people often use for youth sports initiatives: access, training, opportunity, underserved girls, and early support. All of that is true. But if you listen carefully to how she talks about it, you’ll see the project is aimed at something else.

“Sporty Spice Collective isn’t about creating better athletes first,” she said. “It’s about creating more whole women.”

Too often, support for girls in sport is framed solely in terms of performance outcomes: more scholarships, more elite players, more professional prospects. Muñoz is naming a more intimate problem. “A lot of girls grow up feeling like they have to pick, be the athlete or be feminine, be serious or be expressive, be disciplined or actually enjoy their life. And that’s where girls start to lose themselves.”

In this way, sport can risk becoming a place where many young women learn to divide themselves. Recognizing this, Muñoz wants to interrupt that process early.

“So what we’re building is a space where they don’t have to choose,” she said. “They can show up confident on the field, and just as confident off it. It’s a community. It’s confidence. Its identity. Because if you get that part right early, everything else, including the soccer, levels up naturally.”

Watching the World Cup now, she sees both the game and the machinery around it

Muñoz is attending the World Cup this year, having already lived the sport from the inside and now building around it from the outside. This double perspective gives her a different way of seeing the tournament.

“When you watch this tournament, I won’t just be watching the game. I’m watching everything around it,” she said. Casual viewers, she argues, see the goals and the highlights. She sees “the details, the movement off the ball, the decisions under pressure. She also notices the branding, the storytelling, and the moments being built in real time.”

“Because the World Cup isn’t just about what happens on the field anymore,” she said. “It’s about the stories behind the players that make the game feel human. The content, the viral moments, the way fans connect to personalities—those carry the game beyond 90 minutes. That’s what people miss. The game is only part of it. The story makes it last.”

That is one of the clearest articulations of where women’s sports are right now.

People still talk about women’s sports as if exposure is a secondary benefit that follows the “real” competition. In reality, the visibility economy is already part of the industry. Storytelling is not fluff around the sport. It is one of the mechanisms through which the sport becomes durable, bankable, and emotionally legible to wider audiences. Muñoz sees that. She has already had to live the gap between being an athlete and being narrativized as one.

When we asked what it would take for women’s soccer to stop being treated as a moment and start being treated as an industry in its own right, her answer was strikingly blunt: “Just open your eyes.”

“The shift happens when people stop treating it like a trend and start treating it like a business. Consistent investment, real infrastructure, and long-term commitment are what’s needed. The audience is already there. The talent has always been there. Now, it’s about who’s ready to catch up and who’s still trying to play catch-up.”

Jennifer Muñoz is no longer asking where she fits

What makes Muñoz’s history so unique is not only that she can speak fluently about identity, sport, business, and representation, but also that she can do so in a way that is both personal and political. It is that she has clearly done the harder work of deciding she will not be reduced by any one of them.

The Mexican-American girl who once had to explain herself across rooms has become a woman who sees doubleness as power. The former pro who knows what institutional recognition can offer also knows exactly where it falls short. The “girly girl” athlete people could not reconcile now treats that unreconciled self as a method rather than a contradiction. And the founder she has become is trying to make sure the next generation of girls encounters sport as a place to expand, not split.

Some accomplishments end with fireworks. Artemis II ended with water.

After 10 days around lunar orbit, after the spacecraft looped past the far side of the Moon, after the world watched the spectacle of “humans returning,” the mission still had to do the hardest thing: come home safely. And the person leading that final act was Liliana Villarreal, an aerospace engineer born in Cartagena who now holds one of NASA’s most demanding jobs: Landing and Recovery director for Artemis II.

Liliana Villarreal held the job where “success” becomes a matter of life or death

Liliana Villarreal directed the landing and recovery of NASA’s Artemis II mission, which successfully splashed down on April 10, 2026, carrying four astronauts who had traveled around the Moon after passing the far side. The Artemis program’s stated goal was to return humans to the Moon after more than half a century.

Villarreal, then, was the official who “detailed the rigorous protocol” designed to guarantee the crew’s safety during the return and recovery in the Pacific Ocean.

The Artemis II return was built around terrifying numbers

The return of Artemis II was scheduled for April 10 at 8:07 p.m. EDT. Per information shared by NASA through its official channels, the spacecraft would enter the atmosphere at speeds of up to 25,000 miles per hour, and the vehicle’s job was to protect the crew while it drastically reduced speed.

NASA used a complex system of 11 parachutes—decelerators that slow down falling objects—activated one after another, to reduce the capsule’s speed to about 20 mph at splashdown, when the spacecraft lands in the ocean. The splashdown would take place roughly 60 miles off the U.S. coast, marking the end of Artemis II’s spaceflight.

Liliana Villarreal was coordinating every second of that return. She called it the “segment of greatest critical risk,” noting that an error during reentry or ocean contact could compromise the crew.

Liliana Villarreal described the hardest part with unflinching clarity

El Tiempo quoted Villarreal describing the wait for splashdown as the most demanding moment for her recovery team: “The moment that could be the most challenging of the mission for us is waiting for the splashdown after the vehicle enters the atmosphere.”

For that crucial moment, Villarreal and her team relied on decades of preparation, developing ground support equipment, operational frameworks, and procedures to ensure success.

The ocean rescue plan had to work like a clock

Once Orion hit the water and conditions were confirmed to be safe, Navy divers and NASA open-water experts began a coordinated recovery.

Villarreal explained the next step: “When the four crew members are out of the capsule, the front porch [is] repositioned to allow the astronauts to be lifted individually into a helicopter.”

After that, the recovery has two parallel goals: care for the people and secure the spacecraft. Once on the ship, astronauts go to a medical care compartment for a post-mission evaluation before being flown by helicopter either back to the coast or to Johnson Space Center.

After the crew exited, Villarreal’s team prepared Orion for towing to the ship’s well deck, ending when the capsule was secured for transport and analysis under her supervision.

Liliana Villarreal’s NASA story is one for the books

When Liliana Villarreal was 7 years old, her family took her to the Kennedy Space Center Visitor Complex in Florida. There, she first heard the story of Apollo and the astronauts who reached the Moon. According to Pluralidad Z, this visit led her toward science, technology, engineering, and math.

Villarreal grew up in Miami after moving there with her family at age 10, attended public school, and earned a bachelor’s (1996) and a master’s (1997) in aerospace engineering from the Georgia Institute of Technology. She later earned a master’s in technology management (2002) from the University of Miami’s engineering school.

A painful rejection leads to the right pivot

After dreaming of flying to the stars, Liliana Villarreal was not selected among more than 100,000 applicants who tried to become an astronaut. However, that did not stop her.

Instead, she worked at Boeing, linked to Kennedy Space Center, participated in the construction of the International Space Station and Space Shuttle, and later joined the assembly of Orion, the capsule that would carry astronauts back to the Moon.

Liliana Villarreal’s work sits inside Exploration Ground Systems

Liliana Villarreal’s role within NASA’s Exploration Ground Systems program is arguably more crucial than traveling around the dark side of the Moon. She is responsible for managing, planning, coordinating, and carrying out the operational activities both on the ground and during flight that are needed to support missions with astronauts aboard NASA’s Space Launch System (SLS)—a rocket designed to send spacecraft beyond Earth’s orbit—and the Orion spacecraft, which carries the crew.

“The fact that this is the foundation to return to the Moon and eventually go deeper into space is an enormous inspiration for me,” she said.

“Sí, we belong here” is a workforce reality inside NASA

As a Latina in an industry that still has work to do regarding representation, Villarreal has spoken about what she considers relevant inside the agency: the presence of Hispanic workers.

She said, “We are very fortunate at NASA to have a healthy and strong Hispanic workforce,” and she added that many of that group actively mentor younger generations and do outreach with elementary and high school students.

In fact, Villarreal is part of a group of Colombians holding key roles in Artemis II across flight direction, capsule recovery, propulsion analysis, and innovation.

For her, showing Hispanics and other minorities working in complex programs is not just messaging. It is a practical demonstration that a diverse team is a successful team.

What she said right after splashdown says everything about leadership

Villarreal’s reaction after Orion made contact with the ocean was an overwhelming combination of relief, pride, and realism all at once.

She said, “I feel euphoric and relieved. We still have to bring the capsule to the crew dock and to the infirmary, but our team has been preparing and working very hard; I’m very proud of all of them.”

Furthermore, she highlighted coordination with Mission Control in Houston, calling communication during the process a determining factor for the landing’s success.

Then she gave people the details they always want after a mission: what did the astronauts look like?

“We had video of them from inside the Orion vehicle,” she said. “From the beginning, when we opened the hatch, they were already out of their seats, having a good time. In the medical evaluation, they were all very well; they were even using their phones, probably talking about what they saw. There were smiles everywhere.”

Liliana Villarreal keeps her timeline tied to another woman

Villarreal is married to retired physician Timothy O’Hare and has two children, Sabrina and Miguel, both of whom are professionals. When asked about her future at NASA, she gave a concrete answer: she plans to retire when the first woman reaches the Moon, which will happen with Artemis III. Until then, she remains part of the team, making that possible.

Verónica Rodríguez did not enter sports journalism through a polished “dream job” door. She entered through the most Latino doorway imaginable: family, fútbol, and a stadium ritual that felt like a second home.

“I was studying journalism because I loved soccer,” she told FIERCE. In her house, the sport was not a hobby. It was “part of our identity, of our family, the noise in the house, the reason for the family gathering, why you go to grandma’s house.” Her bond with her father ran through those Sundays. “My strongest relationship with my dad was through sports,” she said. “Sitting at the table with him, going to the stadium every two weeks.” She would go with her dad, her grandfather, and her sister to watch Pumas, then return home for the family meal and the post-game analysis. “We’d analyze the match, whether they deserved the win,” she remembered. Today, she gets to live that feeling “every day” through her work. “It feels like a blessing.”

She built a career on a paradox: shy, but fearless on camera

Rodríguez describes herself as shy, even as her career has been built in front of millions. “I didn’t plan to be on camera because I’m a bit shy,” she said. “I can pretend perfectly that I’m not shy, but I’m very shy.”

Her first on-camera interviews were then different from what people used to see in sports coverage. They were a human exchange. And she got a season’s worth of tickets for the team she loved. “They offered me on-camera interviews in exchange for tickets for the entire season for the team of my dreams, which were Pumas,” she said. “So I said yes.”

She did them, nerves and all. “With all the embarrassment, I did them, and it went well,” she told us. Then the doors started opening. And once she realized she could do it, she leaned in. “They can take the embarrassment away from me because I’m starting to really like it,” she said. “It excites me to be the link, to tell the stories.”

@tntagencyReady for the #worldcupdraw ✨ Veronica Rodríguez glam by #tntagency #MundialTelemundo #Somos26 #SorteoMundial

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The question every woman in sports media gets, and the work it takes to answer it

For years, women in sports media have had to clear a credibility checkpoint that men never face. Rodríguez knows it first-hand.

“The typical question for a woman in sports journalism is: ‘But do you actually like soccer, or are you there because you want to be on TV?’” she said. She heard versions of that for a decade, sometimes longer. The “prove it” test followed. “If you wear a Metallica shirt, people say, ‘Name three songs.’ It’s the same with sports journalism: ‘What is offside?’ ‘What does VAR mean?’”

However, Rodríguez did not bite. She decided to let her work speak for itself. Sports journalism, she argues, demands a kind of immersion that you cannot fake for long. “You need to be completely passionate about sports because it’s a career where you won’t have weekends,” she said. “You won’t go to your cousin’s wedding.” You will invest “hours and hours and hours.”

“You show up to an interview with a background of having watched the 30 matches of the player you’re interviewing,” she said. If the passion is not there, she believes the audience can tell. “Studying it from a text is noticeable,” she said. “It’s not the same.”

How she earned a seat at the debate table

Rodríguez’s story is also about the determination the kind women develop because the system rarely hands them an open chair.

Early in her career, she wanted what often stays guarded: the debate table. “How do I get into the debate and have credibility?” she recalled thinking. She also remembers the insecurity of entering a space built by men who had dominated it for decades.

So she created an entry point. “I told the producer, ‘What if I do an editorial, and we debate off that as the first debate?’” she said. That became her way in: show up with an argument, then stay because you can hold it. “That’s how I earned my place at the debate table,” she told us, not as a token, but as an educated voice.

@telemundodeportes😎 ¿Qué prefiere Cruz del Toro? 😜 Vero Rodríguez se dio a la tarea de descubrir si al luchador mexicano le gustan los tacos o la salsa verde previo a #WrestleMania. ✨ ¿Tú cuál prefieres? #wwe #cruzdeltoro #wrestlemania39 #luchalibre

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Fox Sports opened the door. Telemundo propelled her

Her early work in Mexico led to a major leap. “I was at a small channel called MVS,” she said. “Fox Sports called me, and that’s when my big career really exploded.” She spent 10 years there, and at the time, the network reached across Latin America. That era widened her range of sports, too, from fútbol to motorsports and wrestling.

But when Rodríguez talks about Telemundo, she talks about something else: institutional belief. Not just a new job, but a door opened without her having to beg for it.

She moved to the United States after marriage, with anxiety about what would happen to her career. Then, in one of those life moments that feels scripted, she got the call from Telemundo the same day she received her work authorization. “I got my Social Security, and I could work,” she said. “Like the best day in the world.”

Telemundo, she explained, required a different kind of sports storytelling. It is not a niche sports channel. It is a broad network where sports have to meet the whole household. “In a sports channel, it’s more analysis,” she said. “On a channel like Telemundo, you find all kinds of audiences, and you have to do your content so everyone can enjoy it.”

That means speaking to the superfan and the abuelita who stayed after the telenovela. It means making sports feel like a community, not a gated club.

Why Spanish sports coverage is not a “nice-to-have”

When Rodríguez explains the power of Spanish-language sports coverage in the United States, she talks about identity, not translation.

“The Spanish-speaking audience is one of the most passionate about sports,” she said. And if we are talking about fútbol, she insisted, it is not “something Latinos like.” It is “the identity we have.” It is “the excuse to talk to your grandma.” It is the reason you gather.

So when you deliver those stories “in the language you hear at home,” she said, it means everything. The references have context, and the jokes actually make sense. Even the emotional register shifts. She offered a simple example that made the point fast: “It’s not the same to curse someone out in English as in Spanish,” she said, laughing. “It doesn’t feel the same.”

In other words, it’s a way of cultivating a sense of belonging.

@telemundoniLas mujeres detrás del fútbol: Cómo Vero Rodríguez de Telemundo Deportes desafía los roles de género en los medios deportivos Vero Rodríguez, una de las muchas mujeres detrás del fútbol, comparte cómo combate la discriminación de género en el periodismo deportivo.

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The women’s sports audience was never the problem. The industry was

Rodríguez rejects the idea that women are a niche audience for sports. What needed changing was not women’s interests, but the industry’s willingness to recognize them.

“I’ve seen how we’ve torn down those taboos,” she said. The numbers tell a story, too: women’s sports and women’s sports audiences keep breaking records. “The fans are there,” she said. “The knowledge and credibility on the other side are there. The success and the skills and the conditions as athletes, we’re there.”

What’s missing is access. “We need those spaces to open and for them to give us those seats,” Rodríguez said.

“Sí se puede” behind her career strategy

Toward the end of our conversation, we asked Rodríguez what she wanted included in the piece, what she wanted to be said clearly about her trajectory. Her answer was as simple as genuine.

“There’s something that has always accompanied me,” she said. A cheer that follows Mexican sports culture: “Sí se puede. Sí se puede.”

For her, it has run parallel to her career, especially in rooms where she felt like the first, the only, the test case. “I remember the first time I sat at the debate table, and I was shaking,” she told me. “I kept thinking, ‘Sí se puede.’’ A woman at the table.”

She remembers the surprise on the faces of people who had spent decades in sports media and had never had a woman sitting beside them in debate. And she remembers the grind behind every moment of competence: the extra reading, the extra research, the hours required to walk into a room of veterans and contribute something real.

Then Telemundo did something that crystallized her argument about what access can unlock. Rodríguez became the first woman to commentate on an NBA game on Spanish-language broadcast television in the United States, she said, after the network later confirmed it through research.

It was all the proof she needed.

“I was nervous,” she said. “I’d fall asleep watching basketball every night, because it’s one thing to know the topic and another to talk through it on a broadcast.” When the message came confirming she was the first, she cried on the plane. “I don’t know why I cry on flights about everything,” she confessed. But the emotion made sense.

The point of her story is bigger than one career

Sports media still tries to sell the idea that women are guests in a men’s world. Rodríguez’s career argues the opposite. Women have always been in the stands, in the living rooms, in the group chats, building sports culture in real time. The industry simply took too long to treat that truth as normal.

Rodríguez’s story also shows how Latina visibility changes the ecosystem. It changes who feels invited, the language, and even the reference points. It changes the future talent pool because younger women see a life that looks possible.

Or, as she would put it, the only way it ever moves: “Sí se puede.”

By Nicole Young.

Retirement? In this economy? For a lot of us, the idea of chilling on a beach at 65 with a margarita in hand feels about as realistic as owning a home with a walk-in closet and a pantry that isn’t also your laundry room.

Especially if you’re a first-gen Latina balancing your own bills while also helping out mamá, your siblings, or that one tío who somehow always needs “just a little help this month.”

But here’s the thing no one told us growing up: retirement isn’t just for rich people or corporate execs, it’s for us too. And the sooner we understand how these systems work, the sooner we stop leaving money on the table.

So we tapped five Latina financial experts who actually get it.

They broke down everything from what a 401(k) actually is to how to make peace with investing while still showing up for your family. Think of this as your no-BS, slightly chismosa guide to finally understanding retirement accounts.

So… What is a 401(k), Actually?

At its core, a 401(k) is a retirement account offered through your employer in which you contribute a portion of your paycheck for your future. However, most of us were never taught this in plain language.

Kim Duran, an HR and benefits specialist, explains, “A 401(k) is a retirement account through your job where you save money from your paycheck and invest it for the future.”

Maria Melchor, author and first-gen money advocate, adds an important detail that often gets overlooked. She says a 401(k) isn’t just something tied to one job forever: “It’s an investment account your employer helps you manage while you’re with them, and you take with you when you leave.”

So yes, it’s workplace-based, but it’s still yours. And it’s not just a place to park your money. It’s an investment account, which means your money should grow over time rather than just sit there.

Investing, But Make It Make Sense

Inside your 401(k), investing simply means choosing where your money goes so it can grow. That might be index funds, target-date funds, or other options your employer provides.

“If you’re not actually investing the money inside your 401(k), you’re missing the point,” Duran says. “It means the money you contribute doesn’t just sit there.” Instead, it’s invested in things like funds that spread your money across many companies, helping it grow over time.

Jannese Torres, a Latina money expert, puts it even more plainly: “If you don’t choose investments, your 401(k) is basically acting like a savings account, which is not what it’s designed to do.”

The takeaway here isn’t to become an investing expert overnight. It’s to make sure your money is doing something. Even choosing a simple target-date fund is enough to get started.

The Employer Match Is Literally Free Dinero

If there’s one universal message from every expert, it’s this: Do not ignore the employer match.

“The biggest mistake is not contributing enough to get the full employer match,” says Brittney Castro, certified financial planner. Across the board, our experts described the match the same way: it’s free money, an instant bonus, and extra income that’s part of your benefits package.

So how does it work?

You contribute a percentage of your paycheck, and your employer matches some or all of it, up to a limit. Torres explains why this matters so much. When your employer matches your contributions, “you are doubling your contribution, but only paying for half of it.”

Genesis Hinkley, founder of Money Mami Bootcamp, brings it down to real numbers. “If I contribute $50 and my employer matches at 50%, they will contribute $25. Eyy! Now imagine that over time.” It adds up quickly, and yet, people still skip it. “They don’t even sign up,” Torres says.

And honestly, it’s one of the easiest ways to lose out on money you’ve already earned.

If your job offers a match, contributing at least enough to get the full amount isn’t just a good idea; it’s the baseline.

401(k) vs. IRA, The Non-Confusing Version

Once you’ve got your 401(k) somewhat figured out, the next question is: What else should I be doing? This is where IRAs come in. These are retirement accounts you open on your own, outside of your job.

There are two main types, and the difference comes down to taxes. A Traditional IRA gives you a tax break now. “It can help reduce your taxable income today,” Castro explains, which can be helpful depending on your financial situation.

A Roth IRA flips that benefit to the future. You pay taxes on your money now, but when you withdraw it later, it’s tax-free. Torres emphasizes why that’s powerful: “It means the money you see in that account in retirement is actually yours to use, without taxes taking a cut.”

So which one should you choose? Instead of overcomplicating it, our experts are aligned here. If you can, do both. Hinkley sums it up best, “A little bit here, a little bit there.” The goal isn’t perfection. It’s building multiple streams for your future. And if your job doesn’t offer a 401(k), IRAs become even more important. As Melchor points out, “they’re a way to take control of your retirement savings on your own terms.”

But What If You’re Helping Your Family Right Now?

Here’s where this conversation becomes culturally relevant: for many Latinas, money isn’t just personal; it’s collective. Castro notes that more Latinas are thinking about retirement, but they’re also balancing the responsibility of supporting family members. That can make it feel like you have to choose between helping now and preparing for later. “Our culture taught us to be humble and grateful,” Hinkley says, “but to build wealth, you need to be a little selfish.”

Torres frames it in a way that’s hard to ignore: “You have to put your oxygen mask on first.” Because if you don’t build your own financial stability, you risk continuing the same cycle you’re trying to break. But Melchor offers a practical solution that feels doable: “Separate your personal financial goals from your family support.” That way, one doesn’t completely derail the other. You can still show up for your people, but you also have to protect your future.

No 401(k)? No Problem

Not everyone has access to a 401(k), and that’s okay. Whether you’re freelancing, self-employed, or working somewhere without benefits, you can still invest for retirement. Castro says, “A traditional IRA makes sense for those who don’t have a 401(k).” Melchor adds, “A Roth IRA is another strong option, especially if you want tax-free income later.” And if you’re feeling like you don’t have enough money to start, this is your reminder that you don’t need to go big right away. “Start with just $25 a month,” Hinkley says. The goal is to build the habit, not to be perfect.

The Mindset Shift We Actually Need

At a certain point, this stops being about accounts and becomes about mindset, because many of us were raised in survival mode and told to save what you can, help where you can, and don’t take risks. But that mindset can make it harder to invest, even when it’s exactly what we need.

“You can invest for your future and still enjoy your life today,” Castro says. It doesn’t have to be all-or-nothing. And Duran reminds us that this isn’t out of reach. “Investing and building generational wealth is attainable for us, too.” That shift — from thinking it’s not for us to realizing it is — is everything.

So, Where Do You Start?

If you’re ready to actually do something after reading this, start with the basics. Hinkley suggests, “Calculate your net worth,” so you understand where you’re starting from. Then open your accounts, whether that’s a 401(k) through your job or an IRA on your own. Automate your contributions so you don’t have to think about it every month. Melchor adds, “If your employer offers a match, sign up. If not, open an IRA and start contributing what you can.” And Torres says what we all need to hear, “The best time to start was yesterday. The second-best time is today.”

The 401(k) Truth

This isn’t just about retirement accounts; it’s about giving yourself options. Even small steps, like contributing to a 401(k) or opening an IRA, can start to shift your future in a real way.

As Melchor says, it’s about “taking control of your retirement savings on your own terms.” Not perfection, not doing everything at once, just deciding your future deserves a place in your priorities, too.

By: Ashley K. Stoyanov Ojeda

I used to think I wasn’t a history person. Turns out, I just didn’t see myself represented in the history that the teachers taught me. I went through my entire education in New York City public schools without a single Latine teacher or learning the name of a single Latina who changed history. The textbooks, I realized, didn’t include us. The timelines skipped over us. And when you’re a kid, you don’t question what’s missing. You just assume there’s nothing to find.

Then, in college, I took a class called Latina Women. It analyzed how Latinas are portrayed in the media, how we’ve been reduced, flattened, and made invisible. And something clicked. I got an A. One of my only As in school. (The others were music business, PR, and publishing, go figure.) It wasn’t that I couldn’t do the work; it’s just that no one had ever given me material that had anything to do with me.

When I finally saw myself reflected in what I was learning, I showed up differently.

As I was co-writing The Book of Awesome Latinas with Mirtle Peña-Calderón, the memory of growing up in the United States school system kept coming back to me, over and over again. Profile after profile, I kept finding women whose stories I’d never heard, women who changed the course of history in their countries and were then deliberately written out of it. Not forgotten by accident but erased on purpose.

This made me so angry. As a Latina who understands how powerful we women can be, I wanted to yell.

But as I was researching, one story stopped me in my tracks: Margarita Mbywangi’s. She is an Indigenous Aché woman from Paraguay who was taken from her community as a child during a period when her people were being systematically hunted and enslaved.

She was separated from her family, stripped of her language, raised in a world that tried to erase her people. By the time she returned to the Aché community as a young woman, she no longer spoke her own language. She felt like a stranger among her own people.

But she didn’t let that stop her. She trained as a nurse and went on to become a leader. She was elected cacique of her community, guiding forty families. She fought illegal logging and defended Indigenous land. And in 2008, she became Paraguay’s first Indigenous cabinet minister.

Latina stories are brimming with fire, spirit, redemption, and a serious amount of grit

When I read her story, I had to sit with it. I thought about what it means to have your identity taken from you and still find a way to lead. I thought about how many women like her I’d never heard of, and how that silence was never an accident. When you look at the pattern, it’s undeniable.

Across centuries and countries, Latina and Indigenous women have built, fought for, and created things, and then watched as their own nations tried to make them disappear.

In the 1880s, Peruvian writer Clorinda Matto de Turner founded her own press staffed entirely by women and wrote a novel so powerful in its defense of Indigenous communities that the Catholic Church excommunicated her and mobs burned her books. Peru exiled her.

In the 1930s, Argentina’s Victoria Ocampo founded Sur, one of the most influential literary magazines in Latin American history, and became the first woman admitted to the Argentine Academy of Letters.

In the 1970s, Cristina Peri Rossi fled Uruguay after a military regime banned her name from the media. She kept writing from exile. Teresa Martínez de Varela became the first Afro-Colombian woman to publish literary works in her country, yet when she passed, her decades of literary work were all but deleted.

These women published, created, and led. Their countries punished them for it, silenced them, or refused to remember them on their own terms. That pattern, unfortunately, didn’t end with them.

Dolores Huerta co-founded the United Farm Workers and coined the slogan “Sí se puede.” At 95, she is still using her voice, most recently to tell a truth she carried in silence for sixty years. Her courage is a reminder that our stories don’t expire, and neither does our right to tell them.

What we’re seeing here is a vicious cycle, and right now, it’s accelerating

Book bans are rising across the country, disproportionately targeting stories by and about communities of color. DEI programs are being dismantled. Latino history remains barely a footnote in most U.S. classrooms. And in the rooms where publishing decisions get made, only 4.6% of staff identify as Hispanic or Latino.

We’re not just underrepresented in the stories being told. We’re underrepresented among the people deciding which stories get told at all. Here’s what I want to push back on: the idea that advocacy has to look one way. That fighting erasure means you have to be on the front lines of a march or leading a protest.

Some of us will do that, and we need them. But we also need writers and educators who refuse to skip over our history. We need artists who keep documenting what happened so the next generation doesn’t have to start from zero. We need the person who isn’t afraid to pick up the phone and call a government official. We need the tía who tells stories at the dinner table so her nieces know where they come from.

Every woman I just named resisted in her own way. Some picked up pens. Some picked up megaphones. Some built entire institutions from nothing. The through line wasn’t the method. It was the refusal to be silent.

The prolonging of our history depends on all of us preserving our stories

So what can you do right now? You can start writing your own story. I don’t mean that in the abstract, inspirational poster sense. I mean literally. Write it down. Your family’s story. Your abuela’s story. The things that happened that nobody ever recorded because nobody thought they were important enough.

They are. They always were. And then share someone else’s. Talk about these women at dinner. Bring them up in a classroom. Post about them. Recommend a book. Refuse to let the silence win.

Because erasure only works when we cooperate with it. It wins when we accept that the stories aren’t there and move on. It wins when we don’t ask why we were never taught this. It wins when we let the silence feel normal.

It’s not normal. It was designed. And the moment we stop telling our stories is the moment someone else decides whether they matter.

They matter. They always have.

Ashley K. Stoyanov Ojeda is a first-generation Latina author, business strategist, and community builder. She is the author of Jefa in Training and co-author of the recently released The Book of Awesome Latinas with Mirtle Peña-Calderón. She writes about identity, entrepreneurship, and what it means to build something from scratch — for yourself and for your community.

When people talk about bilingual Latino households in the United States, the conversation usually starts from the same assumption: English is the center of gravity, and Spanish, if it survives, should feel grateful for the leftovers.

That assumption has shaped parenting advice, school policy, children’s products, and the broader culture for years. It also helps explain why so many Latino parents say they want their children to speak Spanish, yet still find themselves navigating an ecosystem built around the expectation that English will take over eventually.

That is the real shift underneath the growing Spanish-first conversation. Some Latino families are no longer treating Spanish as enrichment, nostalgia, or a soft cultural add-on. They are treating it as the foundation of their children’s identity, and a way to preserve the roots. However, they do so in a country that has not yet built enough infrastructure to support them.

Spanish-first families are pushing past the old bilingual script

Lucía, the founder of Pato Pato, describes her work as helping families raise “Spanish-first, bicultural kids.” In her words, the goal is to help parents “prioritize Spanish in their homes so it doesn’t get replaced by English, which happens by default if we aren’t heavily intentional.”

For years, many Latino parents got fed the same fear-based message that if they centered Spanish too much, their children would fall behind in English, struggle in school, or miss out socially. Lucía says that fear still drives the conversation. Parents worry “that if they prioritized Spanish (short or long term) their children would be ‘behind’…that they wouldn’t speak English, wouldn’t succeed academically, and a lot of fear-based messaging that still exists in this space to this day.”

But what she is seeing now is a move from vague desire to deliberate action. “Before, a lot of parents would say, ‘I want my child to speak Spanish,’ but there wasn’t always a clear plan behind it,” she said. “Now, families are becoming much more intentional.”

That means the questions have changed. Families are no longer stopping at whether Spanish matters. Instead, they are asking, “How do I teach my child to read in Spanish? Can their education be in Spanish? How do I build a life where Spanish is actually the main language?”

The Spanish-first movement starts at home, then runs into a system gap

In practice, Lucía says, Spanish-first begins with “one clear decision: Spanish is the primary language in our family.” From there, the model expands. Parents commit to speaking Spanish consistently. They protect the Spanish-only stage instead of panicking about English. They teach reading in Spanish first. Some homeschool in Spanish. Others build Spanish literacy around English-dominant schools. They look for peer groups, co-ops, and community spaces where their children can hear the language used socially, not just inside the house.

That progression, however, reveals the actual problem. Once families decide to center Spanish, they quickly discover how few resources exist for children who are already being raised in Spanish and need to deepen it.

Lucía explains it from her own experience: “There are plenty of tools for learning Spanish as a second language. There are ‘bilingual’ toys and games, but they lack depth for families like ours.” What is missing, she says, are tools “designed for children who are being raised in Spanish and need to develop it further…reading, math, social-emotional learning, and critical thinking.”

Research on Spanish-first education keeps pointing in the same direction

The politics around language may swing back and forth, but the research stays far steadier than the public discourse.

According to the Ohio State University Crane Center for Early Childhood Research and Policy, emergent bilingual students who spoke Spanish at home and received instruction in both Spanish and English in dual language immersion programs showed stronger outcomes in English vocabulary and reading. The Crane Center highlighted these findings, adding bilingual education “enhanced EB students’ English reading skills” rather than hindering them.

That cuts against one of the most persistent myths driving parental anxiety: English is not the fragile language in this equation. Spanish is.

Lucía says families are starting to recognize exactly that. “English is not at risk. Their children will learn it. It’s everywhere. Spanish is the language that requires intention and protection.”

The Century Foundation’s latest abbreviated report reaches a similar conclusion from a policy angle. It argues that current pushes toward English-only schooling under the Trump administration run directly against decades of evidence showing bilingual settings serve English learners better. The report notes that in 2023, nearly 22 percent of U.S. children spoke a non-English language at home, over 15 percent spoke Spanish, and 5.2 million students were formally classified as English learners.

The broader perspective makes clear that this is not a niche question affecting a tiny corner of the country. It is a structural issue touching millions of children.

Spanish-first parents are also reclaiming culture, not just language

That is why Lucía keeps pushing the conversation beyond vocabulary lists and pronunciation drills. In her framing, the stakes are not limited to fluency. Parents want their children to access “their own stories, history, humor, and traditions in the language they belong in.”

She sees many families approaching this work through grief as much as aspiration. Some parents, she says, feel they “lost something along the way, or that it was never fully passed down to them,” and now want something different for their children.

The Century Foundation’s research helps explain why that desire keeps surfacing so strongly. In its 2024 poll, nearly 70 percent of Latino respondents said they would choose bilingual education if it were available, compared to 15 percent who preferred English-only education. In a newer California-based study, respondents’ interest in bilingual education averaged 7.9 out of 10, while interest in dual-language immersion averaged 7.8. Fully 94 percent of respondents with multilingual children said it was “extremely” or “very” important that their children maintain their primary language as they reach English proficiency.

Put differently, families are not resisting bilingualism. They are asking for a fuller version than the current system typically offers.

And they are not asking for it only in gestures. They want schools, literacy tools, teachers, peer networks, and learning environments that treat Spanish as capable of carrying big ideas. Lucía makes that point directly when she says, “Teaching our children academic Spanish ensures they can think, question, and dream in our language.”

The Spanish-first gap is now forcing families to build what institutions did not

That is where Lucía’s phonics game, Lettería, comes in. She created it, she said, because families trying to teach reading in Spanish often end up “piecing things together, translating resources, or trying to adapt English-based systems that don’t fully align with how Spanish works.” The result, she says, is that many parents give up.

Lettería is her attempt to close that gap. She describes it as “a 2-in-1 phonics-based game to teach children the basics of reading in Spanish,” built to be simple, hands-on, and usable across different ages.

These kinds of products are key for families trying to build a Spanish-first ecosystem in a country that still assumes English-only outcomes are the natural endpoint. Parents are becoming the planners, teachers, translators, community organizers, and curriculum designers because the broader system has not caught up.

The good news is that there will always be an ingenious Latina who will find a solution.

A new report out of California is saying out loud what women of color in health care have been living for years: the state’s workforce shortage is not only about empty positions. It is also about who gets a real shot at training, credentials, and advancement.

The report, Pathways and Priorities in California’s Healthcare Workforce: Insights from Black Women and Latinas, was released by Black Women Organized for Political Action through its Training Institute for Leadership Enrichment (BWOPA TILE) and Hispanas Organized for Political Equality (HOPE), and it draws on the experiences of more than 800 young women across California.

The findings show a sharp contradiction: Black women and Latinas describe health care as meaningful, stable work, yet they also describe a system that keeps putting obstacles in the way.

A health workforce shortage, and a question of who gets access

The report opens with its central premise: “California’s healthcare workforce shortage demands urgent action, and equity must be central to the solution.” It argues that “workforce capacity is not only about filling vacancies; it is about ensuring that education, training, and advancement pathways are clear, affordable, and aligned with the realities of the communities most ready to serve.”

California Black Media situates that urgency inside a broader national crisis. The Association of American Medical Colleges projects the United States could face a shortage of more than 85,000 physicians by 2036. At the same time, advocates and researchers argue that building a stronger pipeline for women of color does double duty: it expands staffing capacity and helps address health disparities.

Women of color are still underrepresented, even in a majority-Latino state

According to the study, Latinos make up about 40% of California’s population but hold only 10% to 16% of key health care roles. Black Californians represent about 5.3% of the population but occupy 3% to 3.9% of physician positions and as little as 2% to 4% of midwifery roles.

“California’s healthcare workforce shortage is not just a staffing issue; it is an equity issue,” the report reads. “Who has access to training, paid pathways, and advancement determines who can serve our communities.”

The vocation is there. The supports are not.

The report makes a point of stating the obvious: “Interest in healthcare careers is strong among Black women and Latinas. What’s missing are the supports that turn interest into credentials, careers, and long-term leadership.”

The study was conducted by EVITARUS and included a statewide survey of Black women and Latinas ages 18 to 29, as well as online focus groups. It is described as the third installment in a multi-year initiative examining healthcare access and workforce equity.

And the women surveyed did not sound uncertain about the value of health care. Around 80% of respondents said health care jobs are highly important to their communities, and 85% described the profession as a stable career pathway.

The barriers equal the cost of living

Participants named concrete pressures that shape every decision in their lives: housing, bills, school costs, and time.

Nearly all participants (98%) cited the rising cost of living and housing affordability as major obstacles. Four in ten respondents said reductions in financial aid or job losses had negatively impacted their ability to pursue healthcare careers.

The report connects those realities to the pipeline itself, arguing that women of color run into barriers “at every stage of the education-to-career pipeline,” including “high training costs,” “seat caps in impacted programs,” “unpaid or inaccessible internships,” and “workplace conditions that make persistence and advancement difficult, especially for women balancing work and caregiving responsibilities.”

“Discouraged” before they even start

Money is one barrier. Direction is another.

According to the study, more than half of respondents said family members, teachers, or counselors discouraged them from pursuing health care careers, and fewer than half said they had received encouragement to enter the field. The report also calls out what participants described as missing from the system: mentorship, guidance, and career navigation that reflects how people actually move through education when they have responsibilities and limited margin for error.

“This research makes clear that Black women and Latinas see health care careers as meaningful pathways to serve their communities and achieve economic mobility, yet the systems designed to support them are not keeping pace,” said LaNiece Jones, State Executive Director of BWOPA TILE. Jones added: “Removing systemic economic barriers, expanding accessible training pathways, and strengthening workplace supports are essential to closing representation gaps. When we invest in their success, we strengthen families, communities, and California’s healthcare system as a whole.”

What women of color said would actually help

The report does not leave the reader with a generic call for “more investment.” It lays out practical fixes. In fact, respondents ranked expanding financial aid and loan forgiveness as the top priority, followed by increasing affordable transfer pathways into health care degree programs and improving workplace conditions. Other recommendations include expanding early STEM and health career exposure and increasing paid healthcare internships.

Inside the report, the language becomes even sharper about what counts as essential: “Paid training, flexible pathways, clear transfer routes, and culturally responsive mentorship are not extras; they are essential to building a stable healthcare workforce.”

The report’s roadmap is simple: build pathways that match real life

During a webinar held on March 11 to discuss the findings, health care professionals echoed every single finding in the report.

“This study is extremely affirming and validating,” said TaNefer L. Camara, a health care professional who participated in the discussion, according to California Black Media. “It mirrored my own experiences entering the healthcare field and navigating my post-undergraduate education while trying to map out a career.”

Myeshia Jefferson, a health equity navigator, also pointed to the gap between funding and access. “There’s funding available. The question is how we ensure it reaches the areas that resonate with communities and creates real opportunities for Black women, Latinas, and other women of color to enter the health care field,” Jefferson stated.

Josephine Appiah of BWOPA TILE summarized the report’s emphasis on lived experience and practical barriers: “The report highlights the lived experiences of Black women and Latinas across the state,” Appiah said during the webinar, according to California Black Media. “When we address the social and economic barriers they face, from scholarships to educational support, we create real opportunities for individuals to pursue the healthcare careers they intend.”

“California stands at a pivotal moment as healthcare workforce shortages intensify and demand for care continues to grow. This research comes at a critical time, elevating the voices and lived experiences of Black women and Latinas who are eager to serve in these essential roles,” said Helen Iris Torres, CEO of HOPE. “By listening to their insights and acting on the solutions they have identified, we have a clear pathway to strengthen the healthcare workforce and improve health outcomes for communities across our state.”

Writing a novel is a test of discipline and patience. Juggling multiple deadlines while also managing a personal life and family is demanding. Yet, in the end, a finished product is something to be so proud of. That is what Karla Montalván is feeling these days. She can now call herself a published author with the release of her debut novel, “The Sun and All the Other Stars.” The book took two years to complete, and the journey there was as exciting as the finished product.

“The Sun and All the Other Stars” by Karla Montalván was inspired by a moment in her life.

“The Sun and All the Other Stars” is a love story, but not a romance. Better yet, it is inspired by reality. In an interview with FIERCE by mitú, Montalván opened up about her debut novel, the inspiration for the story, and the journey in her personal life that led to its completion. It was after her 30th birthday and freshly laid off that Montalván found herself looking for her next chapter in 2024. After a birthday road trip from Madrid to Milan, Montalván started on a novel, an endeavor she has always wanted to pursue. The original manuscript, however, wasn’t “The Sun and all the Other Stars.”

That year, a friend of hers made a goal of finding a boyfriend and roped Montalván into it. The friend convinced her to download Bumble Premium, and she matched with a man in Florence, Italy. The two first connected over going to the same college, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

The conversation then moved to social media, and they made a plan to meet in Florence.

“Actually, when we met, it felt like we had known each other for a really long time. Like, you know, one of those things where you meet somebody and it feels like you’ve known them forever,” Montalván recalls. “We had a really good time. But then the last day, the day that I was meant to leave, when I got to the airport, my flight was cancelled.”

Unfortunately, her date had plans that day, so she was left alone in the city without a companion. Yet being there and experiencing the moments together with her Bumble date inspired her.

“I walked the entire city, but I was feeling this crazy nostalgia, like this really deep sadness,” Montalván remembers. “Then this idea started to come to me of one of the characters whose name is Beatrice. Just this girl in the Renaissance period who was a painter. She was like a hidden painter. I bought a notebook, and I just started writing [in it.] I wrote the first chapter of the book, which is now not the first chapter, but the idea came to me, and then it just kind of flowed, and I remember I couldn’t stop crying.”

For Montalván, the book was a chance to craft a character she’s never seen.

The main character of the book is Marisol, the daughter of Cuban immigrants. However, she didn’t want Marisol to go through the often-told experience for children of immigrants. One that is beholden to the same trials and tribulations of paying back their family’s sacrifices at the expense of her own joy. She also wanted to create more Cuban stories that didn’t center on the revolution and its hardships.

“I myself, as a Cuban, have struggled a lot. But I didn’t want to have a character who was centered on that,” Montalván says. “I wanted to have a character that was a product of immigration that came here, but that now wanted to forge her own path.”

Instead of following the same journey of falling in love within the community and living near home, Marisol spreads her wings and determines her own destiny.

“However, I wanted her to have been born in the States, and then she chose to migrate to Madrid, right? So, she chooses to leave the place that her family has had to establish themselves in and that they have chosen to live in because of need,” Montalván explains. “I have her choose to live in another city because she wants to, because she likes it. So she later immigrates because she wants to see what’s there. I want to explore immigration from a different vantage point and [...] from a vantage point of prosperity.”

Like all art, Karla Montalván created “The Sun and All the Other Stars” while living her own life.

Any novelist will let you know that the process of writing a book takes years. Between the first draft, edits, additional drafts, reframing, digging deeper, and creating a finished product. Some advice Montalván got early in the process that helped was to just write. Get it on paper and edit it later. During that time, life is happening in the background. For the writer, it was no different. It all came into clearer focus when her editor gave her insight into each character’s emotional state.

“When my editor gave it back to me, she said, ‘I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but your characters are all going through the different stages of grief,’” Montalván explains. “I wrote the book in one period of my life, right? Then I edited the book at another point in my life. And in that period, I was grieving because I had just had a miscarriage. I actually got the manuscript back the day that I found out that I was miscarrying.”

Through her own grief, Montalván saw the book’s structure differently because of her life experience. Without meaning to, she created multiple storylines about grief and sadness, set against a backdrop of love and romance. Additionally, the characters, like the author, were grappling with the human experience of life being different from the expectations they each had for themselves.

“I think that is something that we all struggle with; the life that we wanted and the life that we have, or is presented to us. There’s not really one path of way of living,” Montalván says. “That was the story that I needed to tell, and I think that was the message that I needed to tell. When you have to tell a story, that story will push you there, I mean, the book is very esoteric in that sense of energy and like finding your destiny and your path.”

More than love, the book is rooted in art and self-love.

The author wanted to lean into representation and art when it came to the book cover. She also wanted people to get some ideas of the themes and moments within the book. She partnered with Argentine illustrator Sol Cotti to create the cover art.

“The back jacket is kind of like the hair, and it’s sort of like the reflections of the soul and the poppies and all of the pieces that have to do with lots of little Easter eggs about the book,’ Montalván explains. “But, also, the cover, the title of the book, ‘The Sun and All the Other Stars,’ is a play on the last phrase of Dante’s Paradise.”

She adds, “We really wanted it to be very obvious that this book is about the soul and that it’s about love and not just romantic love, but just like love of family, love of yourself, love of your life that you’re living right now in the present.”

“The Sun and All the Other Stars” is out, and you can order your copy here.

Nicole Fernandez has spent more than a decade in sports media, but her work has never been only about the game. She’s a bilingual journalist and creator who cares about what athletes carry with them long after the scoreboard fades: their values, their families, their origin stories, the parts of them that never fit neatly into a highlight reel.

She’s also a first-generation Colombian-American, born and raised in Miami, with family roots in Barranquilla. And like a lot of us who grow up between languages, between cultures, between expectations, she learned early how complicated the identity crisis can feel even when you’re surrounded by people who look like you.

That tension, between where you come from and how the world sees you, now runs through everything she builds. It shows up in the way she reports, in the way she shows up online, and in the decade-long commitment she has poured into Game Time Foundation, her sports nonprofit that collects baseball and soccer equipment in Miami and delivers it to kids in Colombia and other Latin American countries.

She grew up in Miami, but still wondered where she fit

Fernandez described the cultural tug-of-war that can come with being born in the United States, surrounded by Spanish, but still feeling pressure to perform “American” correctly.

“You go to school, you wanna be American,” she said.

Then she offered a detail we know very well.

“I remember going and reading, like going to the library,” she said. “And I would get books, but I’m like, all these girls are blonde. And I was like, I don’t see anyone like me.”

Even in Miami, where Latinidad often feels like the default setting, she still carried questions. “It was hard to [answer the questions] ‘Am I American? What’s a Latina?’ I didn’t know what Latina was,” she said.

Over time, that confusion evolved into something else. “As I got older and now giving back to Colombia, it’s like, okay, I’m really proud of my roots and where I came from,” she said. “It makes you think back on everything your parents have gone through so we can have a better future.”

Spanish became her edge, even when she didn’t realize it would

Like many first-generation kids, Fernandez once treated bilingualism as something to neutralize. No accent, no extra attention. Just blend in.

Then life did what it does: it flipped the script.

“When I started journalism,” she said, “I saw so many people learning Mandarin or Spanish.” And that’s when she realized she had a skill under her belt that many would pay for.

“All the jobs I’ve gotten in sports are because I know Spanish,” she said.

The thing she once tried to smooth out became the thing that made her stand out. “Now I’m grateful that I have that right and that’s what makes you different,” she said.

That’s also where her storytelling lens deepened. Language is not only about communication. It’s about empathy and understanding what it feels like to navigate a world where you cannot order lunch without translating yourself.

Sports never interested her in the stats. She wanted the human story

Fernandez told FIERCE she always felt drawn to journalism, even as a kid. “I think I [always] did,” she said. “I just didn’t know how to do it.”

She described early curiosity, the instinct to record, to ask why, to capture reality as it is. Later, in college, she said she had to find a niche, and she kept circling back to sports. She felt it was a natural equalizer.

And soon, she knew what she wanted from it.

“I don’t like the stats so much,” she said. “I like more the human side of it, how each athlete has a story.”

That perspective shapes how she moves through sports today. “Even now, I don’t like to follow certain teams,” she said. “I like to follow the athlete.”

Because for her, the point has always been the person behind the performance.

She built a career anyway, even when the industry made her prove herself twice

Fernandez described the grind as constant. The need to stay visible and the pressure to self-promote could take their toll, especially the reality of being a Latina in spaces where you still feel like an exception.

“I’m 36 years old,” she said. “[And it is still] hard to know your worth, and you get tired of proving yourself.”

Then she said something many women will recognize in their bones. No matter the obstacles, “you have to be constant,” she said. “Trying to put your work out there, and you are the only one who believes in yourself. You’re the only one who can celebrate your victories so that you can open more opportunities.”

Her résumé reflects that range. She earned a Bachelor of Communications with a minor in Marketing from Florida International University, and studied abroad in Seville, Spain. She has worked in journalism, production, and social media, including a role with major Spanish-language departments in the sports industry, where she has focused on social media marketing and innovation.

Even in moments that looked glamorous on paper, she described a familiar internal battle

When she spoke about recently attending the Super Bowl as a journalist, she confessed she still felt the imposter syndrome creep in. “I felt like I didn’t deserve it,” she said. “I felt like I was too old.”

Then she looked around and saw what she had seen too many times.

“There was maybe like a hundred different media outlets from all over the world,” she said. “And even being there, I’m like, wow, I’m still one of the few Latinas here.”

Game Time Foundation started as an instinct, then became a decade of work

If Fernandez’s journalism focuses on the human side of sports, her nonprofit makes that belief tangible.

She started Game Time Foundation in 2014. The foundation provides sports equipment for kids who play baseball, softball, and soccer, and it has helped more than 5,000 children across Colombia, Puerto Rico, Honduras, and Venezuela.

Fernandez was only 24 and ready to give back to her community and help others see the opportunities beyond the horizon. However, doing good work does not mean doing easy work.

“Funding is hard,” she said. She described how she learned the unglamorous parts too: the laws, the taxes, the logistics, the shipping, the documentation.

Still, she did what so many mission-driven women do: she learned anyway.

The kids she met pushed her into authorship

Fernandez’s reporting and her nonprofit work eventually led her to a new format: a bilingual children’s book.

She self-published A 9-Inning Dream Un Sueño de 9 Entradas in late December 2022, describing it as a culmination of her professional and philanthropic experiences and a story about the impact of sports, bilingualism, and celebrating your roots.

In our interview, she traced the origin back to childhood, to the library, to representation, and to the books that didn’t have a character who looked like her.

Then the adult version of that childhood question returned: where are the stories that look like us?

So she wrote what she wanted to exist, and she did it in English and Spanish. She self-published and taught herself how to do it, the same way she taught herself so many other things.

And she made an intentional choice about who would visually bring it to life.

“I wanted an illustrator from Colombia,” she said. Then she explained why. “It’s an homage to my family, what I saw growing up when I was little.”

The through line is simple, even when the work isn’t

Fernandez’s story is full of moving parts: sports media, social platforms, major leagues, travel, nonprofit logistics, and book publishing.

Still, the emotional engine stays consistent.

She wants girls to see themselves in stories earlier than she did. She wants athletes treated like humans, not as stat sheets. She wants kids in small towns to have equipment, dignity, and a reason to show up to the field with pride.

And she wants Latinas who feel stuck in the proving cycle to know resilience and identity are our superpowers.

Before Stephanie Vasquez founded one of downtown Phoenix’s longest-standing coffee shops, she was a middle school science teacher who thought she had her life mapped out.

A third-generation Phoenix native, she grew up in a traditional Latino household and became the first person in her family to graduate from college. She was also a young mother, balancing responsibility early. But her dream was clear.

“All I wanted to do was be an educator,” she says. “That was my big dream in life.”

She began teaching in 2004 at Santa Maria, a migrant community, and dove in fully. At the time, she believed she would teach forever.

Which is why her journey into coffee still feels unexpected.

“You start out in life thinking you have goals,” she reflects. “And you pursue those goals, and then life just takes you in a completely different direction.”

That turn happened during a trip to Costa Rica in 2006. On her last day, she joined a tour of a coffee plantation.

“I didn’t even know coffee came from a plant,” she says, laughing. “Entrepreneurs feel this pressure that they need to know everything. And I’m a case in point that you don’t. You just need passion and desire.”

What she learned during that visit stayed with her. Coffee, she discovered, is the second-most-traded commodity in the world after oil, the second-most-consumed beverage after water, and one of the most exploitative industries affecting both people and the planet.

“Once I learned that this thing I was doing every day — drinking coffee— was impacting our people and our planet in a negative way, I thought, there has to be another way,” she says.

That question became the foundation of Fair Trade Café.

Today, the café diverts more than 700 pounds of waste from landfills every week. Composting is embedded into daily operations. Cups and straws are recyclable. Every coffee and tea served is fair-trade certified, shade-grown, and organic.

But for Stephanie, sustainability was never about optics. It was about alignment.

What keeps a mission alive when everything tries to break it.

Fair Trade Café didn’t just survive time — it survived timing.

Stephanie opened the café in 2007, right before the economic downturn. Then came downtown construction that placed the light rail directly on her street. Years later, a global pandemic. And in between all of that, the everyday, invisible challenges that come with running a small business.

What carried her through wasn’t optimism or luck. It was clarity.

“What’s kept me going is my commitment to my mission of creating a positive impact in this world,” she says.

For Stephanie, the café was never just a business; it was an extension of how she wanted to move through life. Her work as a founder, a community builder, and later as the leader of a nonprofit supporting Latina entrepreneurs all stem from the same personal goal: to leave the world better than she found it.

That lens shaped how she learned to see difficulty.

“During all these challenges, the way that I look at them is that this is simply an opportunity for me to learn and to grow,” she explains.

It didn’t come naturally at first. Stephanie describes growth as something that mirrors education itself, where each level is unfamiliar, uncomfortable, and demanding more than the last. But once she accepted that challenges weren’t signs to stop, but signals of progression, something shifted.

“I’m a mission-driven person,” she says. “I’m living in my life’s purpose, and these challenges are getting me to the next level.”

Doing the right thing before it was popular

When Stephanie opened Fair Trade Café in 2007, sustainability wasn’t a buzzword.

Ethical sourcing, compostable materials, and organic ingredients weren’t trends yet. At the time, even finding recyclable cups felt like a challenge. Compostable options were nearly nonexistent locally, forcing her to source from outside the community, which conflicted deeply with her commitment to staying hyper-local. For someone trying to build a values-driven business from the ground up, it meant constant compromise, creativity, and resistance.

“I’m a social entrepreneur by true definition,” she says. “That’s who I am, and that’s how I operate my business.”

In those early days, Stephanie often found herself defending her choices. At business roundtables, other owners questioned why she was willing to pay more for organic ingredients or eco-friendly materials.

One mission, many lanes.

On paper, Fair Trade Café and E.L.L.A. (Empowering Latina Leaders in Arizona) are separate entities. Different structures. Different goals. Different audiences. But when Stephanie talks about them, the separation feels almost technical, not personal.

“Everywhere I go, there I am,” she says.

The same personal mission powers both the café and the nonprofit: creating positive impact.

Stephanie’s work with E.L.L.A. began in 2015, sparked by a statistic that stopped her cold: the gender pay gap. At the time, conversations around pay equity weren’t mainstream, especially not conversations centered on women of color. What she discovered was deeply unsettling: Latina and Indigenous women were among the lowest-paid groups in the country for the same work.

As a woman, a mother, and a business owner, the reality felt unacceptable.

What started as a single community event, a pop-up market highlighting Latina-owned businesses on Latina Equal Pay Day, was never meant to become an organization. It was supposed to be one-and-done. But the community's response said otherwise. People showed up. They asked for more. They needed more.

Nearly a decade later, that “simple act” has grown into a full-fledged nonprofit with three flagship programs serving Latina entrepreneurs across Arizona.

While Fair Trade Café focuses on ethical consumption and community space, E.L.L.A. centers economic empowerment and visibility. Together, they reflect the same belief: systems don’t change unless people build alternatives.

“This is how I’ve curated my life,” she says. “There’s a lot of responsibility in it, but it feels really good to look in the mirror at the end of the day and say, I did good work today.”

Loosening the grip

When the conversation turns to the future, including what’s next for her and for Fair Trade Café, Stephanie pauses. She’s been asked this question many times before.

Earlier in her journey, she was intensely goal-driven. Every milestone had to be reached. Every box had to be checked. And she did it by working relentlessly and pushing through no matter the cost.

But over time, she noticed something unsettling: the work was getting done, but there was a growing disconnect between her mind and her heart.

That realization changed everything.

Today, she still has goals for her businesses, her nonprofit, her family, and her health. But she approaches them differently. Instead of forcing outcomes, she allows things to unfold in their natural order.

“The looser the grip, the tighter the hold,” she says, a reminder she gives herself often.

As a natural doer, letting go doesn’t come easily. But she knows now that control isn’t where her power lives. Alignment is.

And from that place, the future doesn’t need to be forced; it reveals itself.

One step at a time

Stephanie’s advice to young Latinas or anyone looking to carve their own path is to start. “My power is to allow things to flow in the order that they are supposed to flow,” she says. “Yes, I have revenue goals for my business. Yes, I’ve got goals for my nonprofit. However, I don’t know what’s next. And if we are all honest with each other, none of us knows what’s next. None of us does. However, I am fully equipped and capable for whatever is to come next for me.”

That philosophy of trusting yourself and your journey shapes how she lives, leads, and guides others. For anyone overwhelmed by the fear of starting, she has a clear take: take one step at a time.

“A lot of times, what happens is we get caught up in our heads,” she explains. “We tell ourselves, ‘I can’t do this because of that,’ or we get paralyzed by fear, excuses, and overthinking. So we do nothing.”

Her advice? Move. Even if it’s small. Even if it’s imperfect. Looking back years later, you’ll see the results, growth, progress, and perhaps a thriving business, community, or life you never imagined.

For Stephanie, that’s the essence of being a Jefa: starting, stepping forward, and trusting that each step counts.