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.”

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.

Sofía Paloma Juárez did not launch a luxury spirit to secure another seat at the table. She launched it because she wanted her missing half back.

For more than 20 years, Juárez lived with a gap she could name but could not fill. She grew up with her mother, who is Italian American, surrounded by “this Italian cultural hospitality, food, beverage, wine, and this beautiful connectivity through family and community,” as she told FIERCE in our interview. But her “other 50%,” her Mexican heritage and Spanish language, stayed out of reach after her father left when she was “about two, three years old.”

Then, when she was 27, her father reached out after nearly two decades of separation and asked her to visit him in Jalisco. She said yoga and meditation helped her show up “more open-minded and open-hearted.” She hopped on a plane and decided to keep things light, to start with a clean slate. And somewhere between the meals, the stories, and the tasting glasses, she found the emotional spark that would later become CASA J.

“On a quest to discover my heritage, I bottled the spirit of Jalisco,” she says when introducing her brand.

Tequila became the language her father-and-daughter relationship could finally speak

When Juárez landed in Mexico and saw her father for the first time in 20 years, she did not romanticise it. She described a human, nervous kind of relief.

“The first thing was a visual recognition,” she told FIERCE. “He looked good and healthy. I was just happy that he looked healthy.”

She also chose not to dive into heavy conversations right away. “I kept a light vibe,” she said. “I wasn’t diving deep into any massive conversations.”

Instead, she let the reconnection unfold through the everyday. Her father wanted to show her the town and introduced her to friends. They moved from place to place and explored. She said she felt “very included,” and she noticed his pride. “He was very proud to introduce his daughter to all of his community there,” she said. “He was very, very proud.”

Her father is a chef, and Juárez said he connected by cooking meals inspired by his grandmother’s recipes and pairing them with tequila authentic to Mexico. Through his passion, she said, he passed down “the history, the culture, the heritage, the significance” of tequila.

“He was sharing and passing down to me the significance of tequila in the way that it’s normally passed down from grandfathers to grandsons and fathers to sons,” she said.

In the press release, she reflects on that same tradition and names her own place inside it: “The Mexican art of tequila production is a tradition that’s culturally passed down from father to son, from grandfather to grandson. I have a different story.”

Before the brand, Sofía Paloma Juárez built other people’s brands for a living

Juárez did not walk into spirits without a toolkit. She told FIERCE her background is “360 brand marketing,” and she learned early how to shape identity, narrative, and visuals.

Right after college, she worked in editorial, “writing and editing and sourcing feature stories.” She moved through fashion and culture, then stepped into agency life, where she built strategy and content for clients including champagne brands, Coca-Cola brands, and names like Bloomingdale’s and David Yurman. She described hands-on work that spanned concept ideation through directing shoots, casting, delivering assets, and building a full strategy across platforms.

At the time her father reached out, she said she worked “exclusively for the Veuve Clicquot Champagne brand,” and she drew inspiration from “a female-founded Heritage Champagne House.” She also said she felt inspired by “the work of Madame Clicquot,” describing a woman leading a champagne house in the 1800s as “magnificent.”

Later, she ran her own digital marketing and brand strategy business for eight years, helping clients build brand identity, websites, and social platforms. Years later, when she started CASA J, she approached it the same way she had approached campaigns for other brands.

“I began doing what I did at the agencies,” she said. “Finding the illustrator, finding the artist, finding a designer, finding the ceramicists.”

Tequila, for her, is about region, process, and dignity

Juárez’s origin story sits in a very specific place. Her father is from Jalisco, Guadalajara, which she called “the land of the blue agave, tequila.” In the interview, she compared tequila’s protected regional identity to products like champagne and Parmigiano Reggiano, saying it is specific to “the culture and the land where it’s crafted.”

That sense of place runs through the brand’s positioning. CASA J is “a refined expression of region, process and heritage,” and Juárez says the brand debuts “as the first ever Tequila Blanco Ensemble.”

She also outlines how the product aims to bridge past and present through its methods: “Handcrafted by harmonizing old world and new world processes including hand mashing, earthen pit roasting, copper pot still distillation, wooden barrel and stainless steel fermentation.”

Juárez told FIERCE her first non-negotiable was quality. She wanted to create a blanco as “the purest expression of the spirit.” Then she went straight for the bigger question she kept asking herself:

Why does the world assign automatic value to European craft and hesitate when the craft comes from Mexico?

“I really wanted to raise the bar of the world view of Mexican artisanal crafts in the way that we look at European artisanal crafts,” she said. She pointed to champagne and Italian ceramics as examples of categories where consumers do not blink at high price points. “Well, why aren’t we willing to pay a price for a Mexican artisanal craft?”

Then she grounded the argument in time: “Before one bottle of Tequila Blanco is created, that plant is growing in the earth for seven years,” she said. “It’s already a seven-year-old product that we’ve been working on before we even bottle it.”

The bottle had to carry the same weight as what’s inside it

Juárez wanted the outer experience to match the inner craft. So she built a physical object meant to live past the pour.

In our interview, she said she worked with artisans in Hidalgo at an artisanal ceramic factory, describing pieces that are handmade and take months to create. She described the ceramic vessel as something she hopes people reuse and regift.

“You could reuse it in various ways,” she said, listing ideas like flowers, olive oil, a batch cocktail, even a “batch of coquito.”

The brand’s press release also frames artisan collaboration as a core commitment, saying CASA J “actively supports the artisans of Mexico through their commitment to bespoke, commissioned collaboration.”

And it positions the brand as “female, Mexican, and LGBTQ+ owned.”

Tequila is still male-dominated, but Latinas keep pushing the door wider

Juárez’s story falls within a broader shift that has begun to show up in reported numbers.

In 2023, Bloomberg Businessweek reported that “only 11 of the 174 registered tequila distilleries were headed by women,” highlighting how limited women’s representation has been even amid tequila’s growth. Bloomberg also reported that Mexico exported $4.1 billion in tequila in 2022.

And yet, the women who have carved out a space in the industry have changed the narrative anyway. The Asociación Mujeres del Tequila, for example, has aimed to increase visibility and leadership.

Juárez fits into this moment in her own way. She told FIERCE she wanted to bring “this beautiful feminine perspective,” with “one foot in Mexico, one foot in New York.”

That vision did not happen overnight. Juárez said she spent seven or eight years travelling to Jalisco whenever she could get time off, meeting artisans, building community, and then building the brand step by step. “This is why it took me eight years from the start of the company,” she said. “Now, finally, we just launched in January of 2026.”

The press release confirms the January 2026 launch and says CASA J debuts in New York and online, with distribution in over 40 states.

What she wants people to taste when they taste it

Juárez said consumers often fall for the visual identity first, then the liquid seals it.

“The number one consumer feedback that I get is how incredibly smooth it is,” she said. She described CASA J as “a sipping tequila first,” meant to be enjoyed slowly, “in a glass,” the way she says people drink it in Mexico.

“This isn’t a shot cocktail or a drink,” she said. “This is to sip and savor and enjoy.”

However, if you try to talk about sexuality or pleasure with Latinas, the silence and discomfort can feel deafening. Latinas have been raised under the “Madonna Whore” complex, which Freud described as men being unable to see women as anything other than one of those two. Latinas are either saints or whores, but we are always “for” someone else. Never for ourselves.

In fact, this thinking runs so deep in our culture that exploring pleasure as a health issue can feel unheard of. OBGYNs are for pregnancies. Little else. But no one has told us that orgasms can help with pain relief, better sleep, enhanced immune function, heart health, reduced stress, and even improved pelvic floor health, supporting bladder control and overall reproductive and sexual health.

That’s why, when I bring up the subject as the good lesbian tía that I am, the scandal of indecency makes everyone look the other way, without even thinking about the importance of pleasure for health. And when I ask them if they know there are more than ten types of female orgasms, they look at me with a mixture of amazement, embarrassment, and curiosity that confirms my hypothesis.

So maybe it’s best to start there and explain the types of orgasms women can have. After all, Valentine’s Day is this weekend. Maybe curiosity will pique enough that some people will want to explore a little more.

First, a quick reality check about “types”

The science makes one thing clear: researchers still debate how to classify orgasms, and women’s experiences don’t always fit into neat boxes. In a University of Zurich mixed-methods study, some participants could clearly differentiate orgasmic experiences, while many could not. And some felt unsure whether what they experienced “counted” as an orgasm. Still, women described a wide range of orgasmic experiences beyond the usual clitoral versus vaginal framing, which is exactly why that binary falls short.

Other platforms echo that uncertainty from a research perspective, noting disagreement among sex researchers about classification and cautioning that evidence is limited for the claim that different stimuli reliably produce distinct “types” under experimental conditions.

With that in mind, here’s a consolidated list of orgasm types I think everyone should know.

The types of female orgasms

1) Clitoral orgasm

Clitoral stimulation is “probably the easiest way for most people to experience an orgasm.” Many women report needing clitoral stimulation for orgasm during heterosexual sex, or that it improves orgasms.

Researchers describe clitoral orgasms as “localized, sharp, bursting, and short-lasting.”

The Zurich study adds an experiential layer: when women rated clitoral orgasms, they were described as “sharper, easier, and more controllable.”

2) Vaginal orgasm

A vaginally stimulated orgasm is one that occurs through intentional stimulation of only the vagina. This is oftentimes considered one of the hardest ones to achieve. In fact, in the U.S., fewer than 1 in 5 women report orgasming through vaginal stimulation without clitoral stimulation.

The Zurich study’s participants, when rating vaginal orgasms, described them as “wilder, deeper, more pulsating, and extending.”

3) G-spot orgasm

Sexologist and sex counsellor Alice Child describes G-spot orgasms as a type of internal vaginal orgasm linked to stimulation of the upper wall of the vagina, and notes that this stimulation can feel intense for some people. She also notes it may trigger squirting or female ejaculation, which she frames as a “peak pleasure experience” that is not always an orgasm, but it's heaven for those who have experienced it.

Vaginal orgasm is connected to the elusive (for men) G spot, that corrugated region roughly located a few inches inside the vagina on the upper wall.

4) Cervical orgasm

The Zurich qualitative findings list cervical orgasms among the orgasmic experiences women described.

Alice Child includes cervix orgasms, describing them as “very powerful and intense” internal orgasms, while also noting many people associate the cervix with pain due to accidental deep contact. She explicitly reminds readers that sex should never be painful and to listen to the body and slow down.

5) Blended orgasm

Zurich participants described “mixed clitoral and vaginal orgasms” among the range of experiences women reported.

Alice Child defines blended orgasms as orgasmic energy coming from stimulation in two or more erogenous zones, giving examples like penetrative sex with external clitoral stimulation, or penetrative sex with an anal plug.

6) Anal orgasm

The Zurich qualitative findings explicitly include anal orgasms among the experiences women described.

While there is less research on orgasms caused by stimulation of non genital body parts, some studies have found that the anus is among the body parts from which women experience pleasure. And a few of my friends confirm this.

Alice Child also includes anal orgasms, describing the anus as a sensitive erogenous zone both externally and internally, and describes anal orgasms as potentially powerful and full-bodied.

7) Whole body or full-bodied orgasm

The Zurich qualitative findings include “whole body” orgasms among the experiences women described, and notes that uncertainty sometimes appeared in how women interpreted or labeled their experiences.

Alice Child includes “full-bodied orgasms,” framing them as possible when the whole body becomes part of arousal and stimulation, and emphasizes exploring beyond genitals, with attention to breath, movement, sound, and deep breathing.

8) Mental orgasm

The Zurich qualitative findings include “mental orgasms” as part of the range of experiences women described. Some women describe it as "pleasure without being touched," using only your imagination. Talk about mental power.

9) Nipple orgasm

Some research lists nipples and breasts among non genital body parts that some studies suggest can lead to orgasm.

Alice Child includes “nipple gasms,” describing nipple stimulation as potentially orgasmic for some people.

10) Sleep orgasm

Many people experience sexual arousal or orgasm during sleep, which explains that researchers have difficulty pinning down exactly how it happens, since dream reports can be unreliable, and studies have not fully isolated factors like unconscious stimulation during sleep.

Alice Child also includes orgasms in sleep, describing them as common for women and people with vulvas and noting they can happen without touch, sometimes due to dreams or fantasies, sometimes not.

11) Exercise-induced orgasm (coregasm)

For those who love sport, let me inform you that exercise, especially weight training, cardio, and abdominal-focused exercise, can induce orgasms, sometimes called coregasms.

Alice Child includes “core gasms,” describing them as orgasms that happen during exercise, particularly through core and glute exercises.

12) Breathgasm or energetic orgasm

Alice Child includes “breath gasms” or energetic orgasms, describing them as orgasms that some people can build toward without touch, using breath, movement, imagination, fantasy, and mindfulness, and notes this can also be a form of tantric sex. I would say this is also a mental orgasm, but several sources insist on separating them.

13) Multiple orgasms

Alice Child includes multiple orgasms, defining them as having more than one orgasm one after another, and notes that men can achieve these too with practice.

Others call them “blended” and describe the mechanism as simultaneous stimulation.

The part nobody tells us: many women can’t neatly label what they feel

I know. This might sound like homework more than pleasure. And there's an explanation for that.

In the Zurich study, when asked directly, a portion of women said they could not differentiate between orgasmic experiences, and qualitative accounts showed that in many responses, differentiation was not clearly visible. Some women reported uncertainty about whether they experienced different kinds of orgasms, and some expressed uncertainty about whether what they experienced counted as a “proper” orgasm.

However, one can only experiment, right?