You walked into the room. You looked around. Nobody looked like you. And for a while, maybe you changed the way you spoke, the way you dressed, the way you carried yourself — not because you wanted to, but because you understood the unspoken rules of survival in spaces that weren’t built with you in mind. Sound familiar?
Lucia Mercado knows that room. Born and raised in Riverside, California, she became one of the first — if not the only — person in her family to earn a college degree. She navigated financial aid alone, weathered a CPA internship that ended without warning, and eventually found her footing not in a corporate office but at a Chico pop-up market with five handmade necklaces and a borrowed booth space. Today she runs Mercado Productions, producing 15+ events a year including the Lunar Market, Divine Sundays, and the Día de los Muertos festival that grew from 500 attendees to over 3,000 in three years.
n this episode, Lucia gets real about code-switching, having your ideas stolen, learning to negotiate your worth, and why staying in a small city was the most powerful career move she ever made. This one is for every amiga who ever built something from scratch because nothing was there for her.
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Code-switching is the practice of adjusting your speech, tone, or behavior to match the dominant culture of a professional space. For Latinas entering white-majority workplaces or universities, the pressure is specific: speak differently, lose the slang, perform neutrality. Lucia Mercado experienced this firsthand in her accounting program at Chico State, where she noticed that colleagues who spoke in slang were written off and not listened to. The cost is identity — and over time, belonging.
Lucia Mercado pitched event concepts to local venues in Chico and repeatedly found that after being turned down, the same events were later offered to white organizers. Her response was to set explicit boundaries — stating out loud where she would not allow overlap — and to claim her work publicly. The practice of saying it out loud, she explains, surprises people because so few organizers do it. Protecting your ideas starts with the willingness to name what is yours.
Latina professionals are socialized to accept what they’re given and work hard in hopes of recognition — a pattern Lucia Mercado describes as “you get what you get and you don’t throw a fit.” Her current supervisor, a woman, assigned her a specific negotiation task: put a meeting on the calendar when her year is up and come prepared to advocate for her raise. The lesson: nobody will hand you more. You have to name what you want, and you have to do it before you feel fully ready.
A third space is a community gathering place that is neither home nor work — somewhere people belong without having to spend money to stay. Lucia Mercado designed her markets around this concept after growing up with a single mother for whom even stopping at Starbucks was a luxury. Her goal was to build events that families could attend and feel part of something without breaking budget. The result: festivals where the most visible sign of success is seeing the most diverse crowd in Chico.
Lucia Mercado spent time watching friends in Sacramento — a much larger market — grow their events faster than hers in Chico. The comparison hurt and, she admits, slowed her down. The shift came when she stopped treating their timeline as the benchmark and started trusting that her groundwork was building something different. For nearly three years, she broke even on every event. She kept going. Her Día de los Muertos festival now draws over 3,000 people. Entrepreneurship, she says, is not linear. Your market is not their market.
Andrea Diaz: Hi, and welcome back. I’m here with a very special guest. Please introduce yourself.
Lucia Mercado: Hi. Very happy to be here. My name is Lucia Mercado. I am born and raised in Riverside, California and now am residing and building community in Chico, California. I run Mercado Productions, which is an up-and-coming production company where we do large-scale events like pop-up markets and festivals.
Andrea Diaz: I love that. When you sent us your request to be part of the podcast, you mentioned that you moved to Chico in 2017 for school and that you’re now building community there. What was that transition like and how did you start to find your footing? I can imagine that’s a big transition.
Lucia Mercado: Yeah, totally. I mean, till this day I’m one of few — if not probably the only person on both sides of my family — to go to college and graduate with a bachelor’s degree. So when I came to Chico, it was really hard in the beginning to even know, first of all, where to go. I had to navigate financial aid and a lot of those logistics by myself.
One of the biggest deciding factors was, can I afford this on my own? Chico State was one of two schools — it was either here or Sonoma State — that I knew, with some loans and working full time, I could pay for by myself. And I’m really glad I did.
Once I got to Chico, I fell in love with the campus. The architecture is really beautiful, so that’s why I chose it initially. And then as time went on, I got involved with wonderful organizations. When I first started at Chico State, I stayed in the dorms. They had a program where the whole floor I was living on was all business majors, and that was so helpful.
I’ve always been a social butterfly, but it takes me a little bit of time to warm up. When I first moved, I was really new to the area. I still talk about it with my stepmom — when they moved me into the dorms, I was one of the very last people to arrive, because my moms both needed to be off work to drive me up. It’s a nine-hour drive from our part of California. So when I arrived, I was in leggings and a poncho, walking in with all my stuff, and all the other girls were in short shorts and crop tops and Vans.
I remember my mom making a joke: “Oh, there’s obviously a uniform and you didn’t get the memo.” And I felt like I stuck out like a sore thumb. Looking back now I think that was actually pretty telling — it showed very early on that I was going to add a ripple effect to what things could look like going forward. But when I moved to Chico, I stuck out a lot. And it became very quickly obvious to me that I was going to be one of the few Hispanic people in those spaces.
Andrea Diaz: Yeah. And I wonder — because I’m reminiscing on my own college experience, which was very diverse — did you ever feel a need to conform? Or were you like, no, I’m going to be myself regardless of the expectations?
Lucia Mercado: I think especially when I meet people from SoCal, we have a certain lingo — a way that we speak. A lot of times growing up, they call it “Hot Cheeto girl” speech or chunky speech, but that’s just how we talk. That’s exactly how we speak to each other. There are certain ways people in Southern California communicate versus Northern California.
And then in my bachelor’s program — accounting specifically, and business admin more broadly — you see a lot of white males as the dominant group in those spaces. So being a Latina, being brown, I definitely stood out. And I do recall for a certain period having to change the way I spoke. Especially since I grew up professionally in Chico, a lot of it was sitting in rooms, listening to how people communicated, and trying to conform to that way of speaking.
Because I noticed — when I meet other people in similar situations — that if they speak in slang, they don’t get listened to as often. People just kind of write them off.
Andrea Diaz: And it can be a jarring experience, having to adapt to what others are used to. Now, you mentioned you graduated with a degree in accounting, and that was during the pandemic. You started a jewelry business that eventually led you to event hosting and community building. What was that transition like?
Lucia Mercado: It kind of happened — it wasn’t intentional. Towards the end of getting my degree, I was interning at a CPA firm in San Francisco, and I was excited. Right before everything shut down for COVID, the plan was to take up an internship over the summer there. I was looking for temporary housing, and then the shutdown happened and they had me work from home for a few months. They offered me a full-time job pending graduation.
Then I did a second round of internship after that, and unfortunately, during that round, they let me go. When they did, they said they wanted to give me enough time to find a new position at another CPA firm — the work I was doing was good, but it wasn’t fast enough.
That was one of my first real signals that maybe this wasn’t what I should be doing. I’ve always been a slower learner. I’m dyslexic, so I tend to mix numbers and letters around when I’m doing certain kinds of work. And I was feeling really lonely — not only because it was pandemic time, but because a lot of accounting work means doing a portion of a project by yourself as quickly as possible before moving to the next step. You’re working alone. And on top of that, the corporate world is very competitive. You have peers, but you’re trying to be the best of those peers so you move up first. There’s not a lot of teamwork in that structure. It made me realize just how unhappy I’d be there long term. So it really was a blessing in disguise.
I ended up working a local bookkeeping position, and at the time I was still feeling very lonely. I started going to little pop-up markets — COVID time, so stores and restaurants were closed, but these indie pop-up markets were starting to emerge in Chico. I was obsessed with buying jewelry at the time. I told a friend I wanted to learn wire wrapping at home just for fun. He had just started his own business and was doing these pop-up markets. He said, “If you can make five necklaces by next month, I’ll save you a space in my booth and you can put them out and see what happens.”
And yeah — it just snowballed. Within a year I was thinking, maybe I could host a market. Maybe I could get into that space. 2022 was technically when I hosted my first market, and since then it’s grown into hosting about 15 events a year.
Andrea Diaz: Honestly, I’m hearing all of this and I’m really proud of you. Even though that CPA path didn’t work out, I feel like every experience helped you slowly figure out what you wanted. You can’t be scared that one pathway doesn’t work — everything is a learning experience.
Lucia Mercado: Yeah. And a big part of it was just being able to — I was shocked, of course. I vividly remember the day they let me go. That was my whole world. I was so sure I would be the first millionaire in my family. I had a one-track mind. I wanted to be rich.
And it’s so funny now because I’m doing the complete opposite of what I thought I’d be doing at this point in my life. I remember when they called me, I was in the middle of getting my hair done. I ran to the car to take the call. I had bleach in my hair and it was a hot summer day, so I was like — I know this is processing even faster right now. I cried for literally a minute and then went back inside and told myself: okay, move on with life, you’re going to figure it out.
And yeah — every time I’ve opened my mind to not being so focused on one path, and just allowed whatever path to lead me, doors open.
Andrea Diaz: And I love that your friend was like, hey, make five necklaces and I’ll give you a little space in my booth. That kind of nudge made you believe maybe you could do this.
Lucia Mercado: Totally. I would never have expected to do something like that if he hadn’t mentioned it. I literally — to this day — give him full credit for having the foresight to see that in me and support me in that way.
Andrea Diaz: Now you do 15 markets a year. What is it like handling all of that? I imagine it can get pretty chaotic.
Lucia Mercado: Yeah. When I was still doing bookkeeping locally and running my markets on the side, the markets were still very small — maybe 20 to 30 vendors, maybe 200 people coming through. And then someone took a chance on me again.
A guy who used to come to the market was like, “Hey, I work for Downtown Chico and I do events for them. I need an assistant. What do you think?” I was still working full time in bookkeeping — not making as much as a CPA, but comfortable. And I thought about it for a while, and I said, yeah, I’m going to do it. I’m going to make this work. I’m young, I can at least make rent, and that’s enough for me.
Within six months of that job, I was promoted to Events Manager for Downtown. That really opened my eyes. A lot of my life has been other people seeing the potential in me that I hadn’t yet seen in myself. I think that comes from not having a lot of people in my family who had shown me what it looks like to run your own business or make leaps of faith. I was always too scared to dream that big.
So I went from being someone’s assistant to running the Thursday Night Market, which is huge for the Butte County area. It runs for 25 consecutive weeks in the summer — April through the end of September — every Thursday night. They shut down the street and there are more than 100 vendors: farmers, artisanal goods, food trucks. I was having to work with so many different departments all at once, by myself. Permits, county health compliance, food truck certification, budget, vendor communications. The first year was so hard. I wouldn’t really sleep. I was working 12-hour days most days.
At the time I was lucky because I brought on someone who wasn’t quite my friend yet but grew into my best friend. She’s now my right-hand woman at Mercado Productions — another Latina who actually used to host markets here in town too. My very first market ever was at her market. Very full circle.
So now I host 15 a year — three big festivals and maybe 15 travel markets outside of that on my own. But it doesn’t feel as heavy because I have the experience of having done over 50 events in a year through Downtown Chico.
Andrea Diaz: Were you involved in selecting vendors?
Lucia Mercado: Yeah, to a certain extent. Downtown Chico is a nonprofit working for the businesses in the area, so there was a committee behind it. I would make the first selection — knowing things like, we already have three Mexican restaurants in Downtown Chico, so we can’t bring any more taco trucks in because it directly competes with the businesses paying our organization’s bills. But for vendor decisions that were less clear, it went to a committee of board members.
It opened me up to a whole different avenue. I had been so gung-ho about the CPA route, about being corporate. Now I was working in nonprofit and having to understand not just events — which was its own education — but also nonprofit politics. When you work for a district, you’re working with city council and communicating with city officials. I grew a lot through that in terms of professional development and being able to communicate confidently with people in those positions.
Andrea Diaz: Communications is really the key, especially in nonprofit work. There are so many layers. And in your submission, you mentioned something I really loved: you have to claim what’s yours or deny your energy to those who won’t value your work ethic. Can you tell us more about what that looks like in practice?
Lucia Mercado: Yeah. Especially when I first started hosting events, there were a lot of spaces where I would go pitch an idea to a venue and they would either never get back to me or say, “I don’t have capacity right now, let me get back to you in a few months.” And then weeks later I’d hear from people in the community that they had been approached to do that exact event — the event I pitched, the concept I came up with — and a white person would typically be approached to host it in that space.
Unfortunately, that kind of thing has repeated itself for me and around me. So a lot of it has been setting boundaries — being in those positions long enough to learn how to say, “If you’re going to host an event that’s similar, these are the lines where we’re not going to cross over.” And a lot of it is also just saying it out loud. People get surprised when I do try to protect what’s mine, because most people don’t expect you to. We can all eat at this table, but we also can’t be grabbing from each other’s plates.
Andrea Diaz: Exactly — standing your ground. And as a young Latina working in these spaces, have you ever felt overlooked? How do you handle it?
Lucia Mercado: A lot. I’ll be at a position for years and never be promoted into roles I felt qualified for and did all the work for, and then within a year of leaving, someone new gets promoted into that role. That’s happened to me.
I just take it as: that wasn’t my door to open. It is what it is. Move forward — but learn every time to speak up for myself. I’m very lucky now because I work for Brevard County Tourism, and my boss is a woman. She’s not only encouraging but pushes me into things I’m still uncomfortable with. She recently told me — and I haven’t even been there a year, but my anniversary is in May — “When your year comes up, you have to ask me for a raise. You have to come in and negotiate. Women aren’t taught enough how to negotiate and speak up for themselves. So I fully expect you to put a meeting on my calendar.”
That is nerve-wracking. I think especially as a Hispanic woman, we’re taught to take what we can. You get what you get. You work as hard as you can just to keep the job. But what I’ve learned as an adult is: if you accept whatever you accept, people are going to keep giving you that. Unless you speak up, you’re never going to get better than the person next to you. And you’ll meet people who are less qualified who will get further in life simply because they speak up for themselves.
Andrea Diaz: Yes. And it’s such a hard conversation to even see your own worth, let alone put a price on it.
Lucia Mercado: The hardest part. Actually charging what you deserve — what you’re qualified for.
Andrea Diaz: We as Latinas have to ask for the raise. Put ourselves out there. Speak up. I’m really glad she’s there to push you. Now, I also want to talk about Mercado Productions and the Lunar Market and Divine Sundays. What inspired you to create these markets and what do you hope people feel when they show up?
Lucia Mercado: They’ve kind of taken on lives of their own. I see my job as just doing the work to allow them to become what they’re meant to. I genuinely believe it is a community first and an event second. And the community is not my doing — it’s the doing of our vendors and attendees and all the wonderful people that support and show up. We’re collectively the reason they’re successful and why people fall in love with these spaces.
Growing up, I had a single mom for most of my life. My dad is four years sober, but when I was younger he wasn’t in our lives for a long time because of addiction. We grew up with the mentality that we can’t afford to go to events, can’t afford most outings. Even stopping at Starbucks would have been a luxury growing up. Now I buy a coffee or a drink most days, and that’s something I think about.
One of the biggest things when I started these events was: how do I build spaces where it doesn’t cost people to attend? Yes, I want our small businesses to make money and at least cover their booth fees. But how do we make it so that families can come out and not feel like they’re breaking the bank to be part of community?
Making these into third spaces has been one of the most fulfilling parts of this. When I first started, it was just: okay, we’re in COVID, there’s nothing else going on. Divine Sundays was meant to be holistic — kind of witchy but not really, more spiritually leaning. After doing a few themed monthly markets — we did a circus theme, we did one where people brought pets and someone brought a lizard and a snake — I started thinking: I’m overworking myself doing this monthly, I need to go quarterly. And the themes that really stood out were the Spring Festival, the Happy Hippie Summer Festival, and then our big one: the Día de los Muertos Festival.
Lunar Market was actually a concept I had before Divine Sundays. I wanted to do a market around the full moon. But someone in town — Natalia — actually launched it first. When she started promoting it, I immediately messaged her. I was like, “Super funny — I was actually thinking of starting this concept too. Can I help? I’ll volunteer my time, I’d love to be a vendor, I’d love to help bring this to life.” She did the first one by herself, and by the second one I came on board to help coordinate. We did it maybe three times before it got too cold — we were doing it at night only on full moons, so it got challenging.
After about a six-month break, I came back to her and said, “I’d really love for this to continue. I’d like to start one that’s similar, but I don’t want to step on your toes. If you’re uncomfortable with it, let me know and I’ll move forward from there.” That was out of respect — you came up with the first one, I’m not going to take credit for something if it makes you uncomfortable. And she was so cool about it. She literally gave me the password to everything and said, “It’s yours.”
Miss Natalie on Instagram — she’s a really talented artist and musician. She just wanted it to be a third space with music and vendors, attached to a coffee shop. Since taking over, it’s really blown up. We try not to host in the rainy months, so we don’t do December, January, June, or July unless we can find indoor venues. But now I’m hosting at least once a month, and sometimes twice. We’re working with Chico State and doing public markets on campus, which has been my biggest dream come true.
Andrea Diaz: I love that — you both had the same vision, and it came together so beautifully. And I also noticed you do graphic design. Tell me about that.
Lucia Mercado: That came out of necessity. Working for Downtown Chico, a nonprofit, there was no real budget for design. I didn’t have any formal training, so I just used Canva. Canva has been a godsend — for a lot of event hosts working on a budget, it really has been. Doing Downtown Chico’s graphics helped me develop that skill, and then it bled into Mercado Productions, where doing the design work myself kept costs low for vendors and kept events free for attendees.
All the admin is still done by me. Now I’m lucky to bring in some sponsorships and have a small budget, so I pay graphic designers. Almost every event now, the posters and signage are designed by a different local artist, which has become my favorite part of the whole process. But for a long time I was doing it on Canva and just making do with what I had. Through that process I’ve gotten okay at it — my style can be either very whimsical or very clean, depending on what’s needed. Totally self-taught. I figured it out as I went.
Andrea Diaz: Is there anything else you want to share with our listeners?
Lucia Mercado: Yeah. The biggest message I would love to share from running my own events is: really try your best not to pay attention to the progression of someone else’s life.
I have wonderful friends in Sacramento — their names are Lalo and Leandra. They’re so talented, younger than me, they host the Sac Town’s Finest Market and just started a coffee shop called Sun House Café. And for a while — not out of jealousy, but — there were days I’d look at them and think, how are they growing so quickly? How are they finding success so fast while I’m working my butt off? There were days when we’d have low attendance and I’d feel like the event was a failure. And looking at someone else’s progression really hurt me and hindered my growth.
Ever since letting go of that and just saying, universe — my time is going to come when my time comes — and as long as I’m honest and I’m doing events in a way where I know I’m not cheating any vendors, doing my best and working hard — my time will come. And it has.
Entrepreneurship is not linear. You could do all the same steps as someone else and it could be one little thing that makes a difference. Sacramento is a much larger market than Chico. That could be a huge part of why they found success quickly. There could be a number of reasons. My biggest lesson through this is trusting myself — knowing I’m doing honest work, giving it my all, and pushing forward through the hard times.
Andrea Diaz: And I think that’s wonderful advice for our listeners. Sometimes we’re so distracted by what other people are doing that we lose sight of our own path. You’re getting there. Focus on you. You’ll be prepared when the time comes.
Lucia Mercado: Yeah, absolutely. I think the universe knew that I needed more time to prep and lay my groundwork. For the first two to almost three years, I really wasn’t making money. Lunar Market, Divine Sundays — under the Mercado Productions umbrella — I was breaking even every single event. Lucky if I made 100 dollars off an event. When you think about all the hours that went into those events and barely breaking even, a lot of people would have been discouraged.
I saw it as an opportunity, because I had a full-time job and was somehow managing both. Even though I was tired and wasn’t being compensated for it, my heart felt happy and my soul was really happy with the impact I was making in my community. And now, almost four years in, seeing people say “this is where I see the most Hispanic people, the most people of color” — that has been my biggest accomplishment. My biggest feel-good moment is realizing that I created the spaces that I needed when I first came to Chico.
Andrea Diaz: That just warmed my heart so much. Like, from when you first got there to where it is now — and being such a big part of that. We don’t imagine ourselves making a big impact when we get there.
Lucia Mercado: You really don’t. And a big part of it has also been deciding to bloom where I was planted rather than trying to go somewhere else. I have friends in Sacramento who have said, “Move to Sacramento — you could be doing so much more.” And don’t get me wrong, I’ve visited and sometimes I do get that feeling: wow, life could look very different here.
But for me, it was recognizing that I would make a bigger impact in Chico than I would in Sacramento. There’s already a lot of diversity in Sacramento, a lot of people doing the work. I could easily have been in Chico and said, “Chico has nothing for me. No cultural events, no community for me.” But instead I did the work to create that community. I went through the hardships of being uncomfortable in spaces where there weren’t people that looked like me. And now I’m in those spaces — and there are people that look like me, and more people like me feel comfortable being here.
We just hosted our third annual Día de los Muertos Festival in 2025. The first year we had maybe 500 attendees. The second year, 1,000. This last one, over 3,000 people attended. It was amazing to see people from all different backgrounds coming together — our Latino families, people of Hispanic descent, Caucasian people, people from every background. To me, that was the most beautiful part: knowing that we’re not just congregating. We’re also learning and being educated on something that is very near and dear to my heart.
Andrea Diaz: And seeing people from all backgrounds appreciate and learn about our culture — that matters so much.
Lucia Mercado: What I’ve learned is that people don’t always mean to be rude or disrespectful — they just don’t understand. And I think that’s been a big part of this: recognizing that I can still be offended sometimes, and I can still get emotional, because right now in the climate we’re in, it’s hard to see so much hate on the internet. But when you’re actually speaking with someone face to face, they’re usually not filled with hate. More than anything, they’re filled with confusion. They’re just uneducated on that specific topic. They don’t know yet why you are so moved by what’s happening around you.
So slowing down and having conversations with people, seeing them as people first — that has been really healing for me. And I think it’s a big part of why this community keeps growing.
Andrea Diaz: And I love that. We have one final question — it’s our founder Anjelica Cazares’s favorite: do you consider yourself a leader? Why or why not?
Lucia Mercado: Yeah. For a long time that was hard for me. Even though I’m a social butterfly and I love meeting people — that’s genuinely one of my favorite things — I was nervous to call myself a leader because I thought, what qualifications do I have? But I think what it really comes down to is not necessarily influencing people, but being willing to put yourself in a position that others wouldn’t.
A lot of us are looking around asking, who do we follow? Who can we trust in these spaces? And I think a big part of leadership is just being one of those people willing to be a pillar. To hold down communities. To hold down these environments. That’s where I’ve leaned in, and I’ve proudly started to consider myself a leader within my community — for sure.
Andrea Diaz: It’s so hard for us sometimes to recognize that we are leaders. And I love that you’re like — wait, actually I’ve been doing a lot.
Lucia Mercado: Sometimes I need it to be officially put on me. With Downtown Chico, I was there long enough that they eventually sent me to a leadership conference — and I was like, oh, I guess this is confirmation.
Andrea Diaz: One more quick thing — is there anything exciting coming up for Mercado Productions that you want to tell our listeners?
Lucia Mercado: I have events all year round. What I’m most excited for right now is my second market at Chico State. Not only did I get to graduate from Chico State, but now I get to give back to that community — and maybe connect with students who are in the same place I was once. That’s what I’m most excited for in April.
Andrea Diaz: That’s amazing. And where can our listeners find you?
Lucia Mercado: Social media, mostly — I love social media. My main page is @byluciamercado on Instagram. From there you can find my other accounts linked in my bio, and I have my Linktree up too. So again: @byluciamercado.
Andrea Diaz: Thank you so much for this conversation. I really appreciate it, and I know our listeners are going to love it.
Lucia Mercado: Thank you. I appreciate you too.
