The Power Of Our Collective Story | Latina Leadership Podcast with Andrea Diaz

Andrea Diaz: Hola Amiga. Welcome to the Latina Leadership Podcast, a podcast by Latinas for all women. Get ready, because today’s conversation is really special.

Andrea Diaz: Hola Amigas, welcome back to the Latina Leadership Podcast. I’m your host. Andrea Diaz, okay, so I have to be honest with you. Sitting down for this episode, I did something I don’t normally do. I went back and listened to every single episode of this season from start to finish and one sitting, and amigas. I was not prepared for how that would feel. Hearing all of your voices, your stories, your “vidas” one after another. It was like looking at a quilt I don’t know, we were sewing each piece so different. Some bright, some heavy, some filled with laughter, some with tears. But together, together they make something none of us could have made alone.

Andrea Diaz: This season we set out to do something different. We opened the mic to you. We asked you to share your stories, not the polished versions, not the ones where everything makes sense, but the real ones. The messy ones. The ones that keep you up at night and the ones that get you out of bed in the morning and you showed up. Dios mio. Did you show up. So today, for our season finale, I’m going to take you on a journey through season 12 through the themes, themes that emerged, the lessons we learned, and the voices that made this season unforgettable. Think of this as our collective family album, a chance to see what we built together. So let’s begin at the beginning.

Andrea Diaz: So episode one leading with purpose and the power of our voices. I remember recording that episode in my little nook at home, and I’m still recording my little nook at home, feeling both excited and terrified. I was asking you to trust me with your stories, to send in pieces of yourselves. And that’s a big ask Amigas. And I knew that I started the season by sharing something vulnerable to about my mom sitting at the kitchen table telling me. Mija, no tienes que ser perfecta, tienes que ser tu. Show them who you are. And that phrase became our North Star this season, not perfection. Authenticity. And I also shared some hard truths in that first episode. The statistics, we don’t like to talk about the only that only 1% of Latinas hold C-suite positions in corporate America. That broken rank where for every 100 men promoted, only 74 Latinas get the same opportunity. But here’s what I didn’t know yet. Back all the way in episode one, I was about to meet dozens of women who were redefining what those numbers even mean, who were building success on their own terms. Not waiting for anyone’s permission or promotion.

Andrea Diaz: And that’s exactly what we saw in episode two. So episode two was called Owning the Room confidence and a New ERA. And amigas, the stories we received, they completely rebuilt what I thought I knew about confidence. We heard about Rebecca Melendez, who survived a car accident where she flipped 12 times off the highway, 12 times! She survived that. Left a toxic relationship start over from nothing, and now helps people rebuild their credit in their lives. Her confidence isn’t loud. It’s deep. It’s rooted in knowing exactly what she’s made of because she’s been tested and she’s still standing. Rebecca taught us what I’ve come to call Phoenix confidence, the kind that rises from the ashes that knows I survived, that I can handle this conversation.

Andrea Diaz: Then there was Rocio Regas, who works with Spanish speaking, a woman with limited formal education. But in her words, unlimited vision. She reminds women that they are worthy, capable and deserving of spaces that once fell out of reach. Her confidence is different. It’s bridge builder confidence. She owns the room by making sure it’s full of her sisters and AK, who’s been in radio and media for 19 years. Motherhood through pandemic, through every industry shift. And she built her own space. The Cuarto de Mi Sueña podcast on her own terms. Authentic creator confidence. The belief that your story told your way is your power. You know what I learned from episode two is that confidence is that one size fits all. It’s not about being the loudest person in the room. It’s about being the most you, the most rooted, the most connected to what you survived and who you’re becoming.

Andrea Diaz: Then came episode three Latinas and the Future of Work. And I’ll be real with you. I was in a total research vortex for this one. AI, automation algorithmic bias. My search history for that was terrifying. I was anxious. It all felt so sterile, so disconnected from our lives. And then I read Jackie Ragel’s story. Jackie’s family has been in Texas since before Texas was Texas. Her great uncle died defending the country in World War Two, and yet her parents were hit with rulers in school for speaking Spanish. For that reason, Jackie wasn’t taught Spanish as a child. But here’s where her story takes a turn. She studied abroad in Spain. Learnt Spanish. Taught it for 26 years. Got her Ph.D. in urban leadership in 2024. And now she’s connecting the dots of her indigenous roots to research on food sovereignty. She’s on the board of an urban farm. She’s co-creating a symposium called Bridging the Gap. Learn the Latina to indigenous. Indigenous indigeneity. Oh, and and she climbed Mount Kilimanjaro after running 14 marathons. Jackie, story taught me something I’ll never forget. In an age of AI and automation, the most future proof skills are the deeply human ones resilience, cultural fluency, the ability to build community. The willingness to keep learning. Keep growing. Keep connecting dots that no algorithm could ever see. She showed us that our heritage isn’t a liability in the future work. It’s our competitive advantage. The key is learning to be what Jackie is. A bridge between worlds.

Andrea Diaz: Episode 4, culture, fam culture, family and the hustle. This one, this one lives in my heart. So four. Nine. Five. Six. Representing the Rio Grande Valley. The 956 area code. She became a mom at 15. By 17, she had two children. She and her husband, childhood best friends, have five kids together with family support, babysitting, social backing, financial help. They bought their first home at 21 and 24. Five years later, they bought their dream home. She earned her bachelor’s in social work in 2017, her master’s in 2020. And then get this she started a chamoy business because she didn’t want her teenage daughter to work a traditional job. They started selling to family friends. The daughter eventually moved on, but the orders kept coming, so she kept going. Now seven, nine, five, six has employees. Do pop up markets call themselves silent servers. Working behind the scenes to make a difference, Amigas. The story broke me open in the best way because it shows us something so important. Our families aren’t obstacles to our success. They’re the foundation. The launch pad, the first investors, the focus group, the babysitting, the virtual support relief. That’s not a distraction from the hustle. That is the hustle. Just in a different language. So 4956 taught me that the best businesses aren’t built in isolation. They’re grown in community, rooted in love and sustained by showing up. Week after week market after market for people who become regulars, become friends and become family.

Andrea Diaz: Episode five was called Resilience in Real Time, and this episode taught me that resilience isn’t what we think it is. We met Angela, who grew up in a high crime, high dropout area of Phoenix, got kicked out of high school, got her GED through mentors. Spent 20 years, 20 years at a mostly white institution navigating daily awkwardness and racism, she started building community with other Latinas at work. Just having lunch and that and that grew into employee resources. Eventually, she became a director at YWCA metropolitan Phoenix, doing racial justice work. 20 years of showing up, 20 years of that quite exhausting labor being the only 1 or 1 of a few. That’s not the resilience you see on motivational posters. That’s the resilience of getting up and doing it again. Day after day without anyone clapping.

Andrea Diaz: And then there was Desiree, a content creator, actress, dancer, model, writer, student and group leader at The Boys and Girls Club. She’s a former foster youth, has learning disabilities, and she’s building a life that holds all of those pieces. She doesn’t pick one lane. She builds a mosaic. What I learned from Angela and Desiree is that resilience isn’t about how you’re struggling. It’s about what you do with the struggle. Angela found her people Desiree uses her art to process and then turns around and mentors youth with what she’s learned. They built what researchers call protective factors, the connections, the meaning making the small daily practices that buffer against stress. Resilience isn’t a personality trait you are born with. It’s a muscle you built community over time, often invisibly.

Andrea Diaz: Episode six The Business of Us. This one hit close to home. Vanessa Clavijo, Peruvian came to the US as a child. She knew something I felt but never had words for when she stepped into entrepreneurship. Her parents saw it as unknown territory and she realized something profound. Their fear was about doubting her ability. It was about security. They sacrificed everything to come here. Experience job instability and language barriers. All so she could have a safe life. Watching her leave a corporate role felt to them like risking everything they work for. Vanessa said something that stopped me. Cold. Feeling, didn’t just feel personal. It would feel like letting my family down. That’s a different economic calculus. Mainstream entrepreneurship is fail fast. But so many of us, the social and emotional costs of failure is amplified. It’s not just our own dreams on the line. It’s the weight of generations. And yet, Vanessa built anyway. She owns a pet photography studio. She started Girls Do The Work, a volunteer group of women who meet monthly for service projects. She said something beautiful. I see community itself as part of the service. And that’s the Latina entrepreneur blueprint. We don’t just build businesses. We build ecosystems. We build networks, support that look like volunteer groups, but function like family. We build things for it. The relationships matter as much as the revenue.

Andrea Diaz: And episode seven our permission slip. This was the episode where we gave ourselves a break. By this point in the season, I was feeling the weight. Stories. Beautiful. They were all so heavy. So much resilience. So much survival. And I thought, what if we don’t need another to do list? What what if what if we need is permission to just be and to Urmi for 2025 wasn’t about radical transformation. It was about small adventures, networking events, latte art workshops, taking classes, boxing workouts. She traveled. She said yes to things she wasn’t ready for. She started using a word romanticizing. She said to make daily rituals more special, I started to implement a few habits. When I journal, I light a candle. When I want my house to smell certain way I put the diffuser on with peppermint oil. When I want to be more present, I peak during the weekend. And then she said, the line that I think about weekly our lives don’t need to be Instagrammable. They just need to be romanticized for Urmi gave us permission to find pleasure in the mundane. To light a candle for no one but ourselves. To be imperfectly perfect. She reminded us that the good life isn’t somewhere out there, it’s own future where people achieve our goals. It’s available now, in a quiet moment, but candle and a journal.

Andrea Diaz: Episode eight was different. We didn’t just talk. We watched three video submissions that I will never forget. Rosanna, a survivor of domestic violence and a seven year old court battle to see her daughter, Destiny. She shared a moment in a supervised visitation room. White walls, no windows social worker, watching when Destiny walked in with a violin case and said, mommy, you didn’t come to my first violin recital. So I’m going to give you a concert. Do you play twinkle, Twinkle Little Star? You know, I can imagine that talent, that tiny, perfect song and that horrible white room. It wasn’t just a song. It was her daughter saying, you’re still my mom. The system doesn’t get to take our music. Mari Tere shared her work with Mija Books and her book to the book. Tio Ricky Doesn’t Speak English, about a little boy translates for her visiting uncle for his visiting uncle. You’re well? She called the translation not a chore, but an act of kindness and love and a superpower. And I was that kid. I never thought of it as super powered then. But she’s right. And Paola, a survivor of domestic abuse, who said for a long time I felt that I was the girl who was too anxious, too sensitive. That’s something bad was in me. But there was nothing wrong with who I was, only with who I was relating to, and how I was relating to that shift from something wrong with something’s wrong with me to something’s wrong with the situation is everything. Paola now helps other woman make that same shift. What I what I learned from episode eight is that the voices we carry, even the heavy ones, are our weakness. There are material. They. They’re what allows us to connect, to translate experience and to hope. To say to someone else, I see you. I know.

Andrea Diaz: Episode Nine. Episode nine, the passport you already have. This one expanded my world. Michelle grew up in Colombia in the 90s, when traveling, the world felt impossible, but she had books. Gabriel Garcia Marquez 100 Years of Solitude was her first passport, a mirror and a map to convince her anything was possible. At 18, she moved to the US with one dream Meet Gabo. She searched email, asked around nothing but in 2001, with a paper map and zero travel experience, she boarded a flight to Mexico City, her first solo trip, and something clicked. She’s now been to 100 countries, 65 of them solo, and she said something that reframed everything for me. Travel was not teaching me to discover the world, travel teaching me to unlearn it. She realized she had been carrying inherited stories from textbooks, headlines, fear. And one by one, the world shattered them. In Bosnia, she felt warmth, where she explained the tension in Rwanda, healing where she expected the grief, and the Middle East generosity so vast it broke every false narrative. Michelle’s greatest lesson unlearning became my true passport. We all carry inherited maps about what’s past for us, but who’s dangerous about where we belong? Michelle’s journey reminds us that we can check those maps against reality. We can see counter-narratives. We can unlearn. Tea by tea. Conversation by conversation. Border by border. And we don’t need a plane ticket to start. We can start with our next conversation, our next question, our next curious choice.

Andrea Diaz: Episode ten Si Se Puede Mija, the language of our legacies Yurisa Garcia founded scholarship for first generation students. She closed her video with a simple phrase, y como decia mi papá, si se puede! That phrase. Yes we can. Isn’t just words is a compact package of history, struggle, and faith passed from one generation to the next. Yurisa took her father’s belief and translated it into tangible action scholarship money for students who need it most. She received financial support through scholarships. She received emotional and cultural support to her father’s belief. Her leadership lies in weaving those routines together into a single, stronger rope, throwing back to help the next person climb. Yurisa taught me about stewardship, caring for and responsibly, passing on resources, value, knowledge. She’s answering that, Si Se Puede doesn’t fade as a memory. She’s making it thrive as living funding principle. The question her story leaves us with what phrase? What value? A piece of hardwood knowledge. Will you begin to translate?

Andrea Diaz: Episode 11 got real about something we don’t talk about enough, money. Evie Prete is a Latina salary negotiation coach went from feeling like she had to shrink in corporate rooms, to helping women negotiate over three quarters of $1 million in raises. She’s a mechanical engineer turned program manager who grew up low income, graduated with overwhelming debt, and spent years feeling invisible. She said something that stopped me. She helps clients negotiate raises not by hustling harder, but by healing their relationship with self-worth. And that’s the key. You know, we’re told to work harder, get more degrees, prove we deserve more. But Eve pushed us inward to the belief so many of us carry have to work harder to deserve more. She says hard work alone does not get you paid. In fact, it often keeps women underpaid. The most powerful mind shift mindset shift, she teaches. Separating self-worth for outcomes. My worth is not being decided in this conversation, only my compensation is. And then she left us with this. When a Latina gets paid what she’s worth, it changes more than her life. It changes her lineage. The money you negotiate today, it’s this ability that might fund your niece’s education. The down payment that starts generational wealth. The emergency fund that save us or parents from stress. You’re not just asking for a number. You’re renegotiating. Renegotiating a legacy.

Andrea Diaz: Which brings us to Episode 12, Healing Our Minds. Accessing Mental Health Care. This was the hardest episode of the season. And no, not because of the topic, but because of how close it hits for so many of us, therapy feels complicated, a luxury we can’t afford. A betrayal of “lo que pasa en casa, en casa se queda”, a confession of weakness in a world that expects us to fail. Lucia Fernandez, a licensed therapist named what so many of us feel when survival is the organizing principle of life. Emotional exploration can look like a luxury. Pain gets normalized. Strength is equated with endurance. Silence becomes a form of respect. Therapy can feel like betrayal rather than care. But Lucia asks a question that haunts me in the best way. Who pays the costs of not breaking these cycles? The answer is never just us. It’s our children. It’s a way we show up in our relationships. It’s the celling we hit in our careers because we don’t know how to ask for more without feeling like we’re asking for too much. It’s exhaustion we mistake for normal. Lucia gave us practical resources open path collective sliding skills, single case insurance agreements, super bills. The threes are up. She gave us language to ask for help. She gave us proof that there are therapists, Latina therapists waiting for us, holding space. But mostly she gave us permission. Healing isn’t a race. It’s a direction that every tiny step counts.

Andrea Diaz: So here we are. Episode 13 The End of season 12. And as I sit here looking back at everything you’ve shared, I see the quilts, all these pieces, all these voices, all these vidas, Together, They tell a story that none of us could tell alone. A story about what it means to be a woman in this moment. Navigating systems not built for us, sharing histories of heavy, beautiful building features on our own terms. And here’s what I know now that I didn’t know when we started, but I still kind of knew. Your voices matter. Not because it’s perfect, but because it’s yours. Your story matters, not because it’s dramatic or inspirational by some outside standard, but because it’s true. And together, together, we’re something unstoppable. Not because we’re all the same. We’re not, but because our differences or varied experiences or unique ways of navigating this world. They weave together into something stronger than any single thread. The broken rung I mentioned in episode one. We’re not waiting for someone to fix it. We’re building our own ladders. We’re lifting each other as we climb. We’re redefining what leadership looks like, not as a title or position, but as a quite daily path of showing up for ourselves and each other.

Andrea Diaz: So what’s next? Season 13 is coming. And yes, we’ll keep sharing stories. But here’s what I want you to do before then. First. Reflect. Look back at the episodes that resonated most. Which story stayed with you? What did they teach you about yourself? Second. Share. Send an episode to a friend a sister. Mentor. Student. Start a conversation. This podcast is a starting point, not an ending. And third, and this is important. Keep telling your story to yourself, to your people, to us if you’re ready. Your voice is always welcome here. Because here’s the truth. Season 12th May be the ending, but the conversation isn’t. The quilt is still being sewn, and you’re still holding a needle and thread to every person who shared the story. The season. Rebecca Rossio AK, Jackie Sabo 956 Angela, Desiree, Vanessa, Urmi, Rosanna, Mari Tere, Paola, Michelle, Yurissa, Eve, Lucia. Gracias, gracias. Yes, you trusted us with your vidas. We will never take that lightly. To everyone who listened, who shared you are why we do this. You are the community this podcast is built for. Remember your voice, your story. Our Comunidad, that that’s not just a tagline, it’s a truth. Our stories are our power. And when we share them, we don’t just inspire. Connect. We heal. We build something bigger than ourselves. I’m Andrea Diaz. This has been season 12 of the Latina Leadership Podcast, cuidense mucho hermosas. Nos vemos en la proxima temporada, hasta la proxima amigas, bye!