Episode 39: How Patriarchy Hurts Our Hermanas
with advocate Amy Hinojosa
Amy is joined by President and CEO of MANA, Amy Hinojosa, for a phenomenal conversation about Latina Americans, immigration, abortion, advocacy, and the issues of humanity that unite us all.
Our Guest
Amy Hinojosa
Amy Hinojosa is the president and CEO of MANA, a national Latina organization, the oldest and largest Latina membership organization in the United States, and its sister organization, MANA Action Fund. MANA focuses on strengthening Latina women and girls through mentoring, education and advocacy. Amy has extensive experience working on local and national grassroots campaigns targeted at mobilizing voices and actions in Hispanic communities across the country. Community education and engagement have been central to Amy's work with a particular emphasis on youth.
Amy Allebest: In 1974, a group of women in Washington, DC decided it was time to give a voice to Mexican American women, women who were being excluded from important conversations, from conversations about their own communities. Together, over a series of weekend brunches, these four brilliant women, Blandina Cárdenas Ramírez, Gloria Hernandez, Bettie Baca, and Sharleen Maldonado, envisioned a new organization addressing misogyny and gender bias. They called it the Mexican American Women's National Association, which today has evolved into MANA, a national Latina organization, and the largest Latina organization in the United States. For decades now, MANA has been adapting and organizing to meet the challenges of new generations of Latinas nationwide. And now, 51 years later, challenges facing Latina Americans continue to loom, while MANA continues to rise to these challenges through advocacy, leadership, education, and more. I am so excited to dig into this work, and I'm honored to be joined today by the National President and CEO of MANA, Amy Hinojosa. Welcome, Amy!
Amy Hinojosa: Amy, it's so great to be with you. Thank you for having me.
AA: Amy Hinojosa is the president and CEO of MANA, a national Latina organization, the oldest and largest Latina membership organization in the United States, and its sister organization, MANA Action Fund. MANA focuses on strengthening Latina women and girls through mentoring, education and advocacy. Amy has extensive experience working on local and national grassroots campaigns targeted at mobilizing voices and actions in Hispanic communities across the country. Community education and engagement have been central to Amy's work with a particular emphasis on youth.
Amy, I would love to hear a little bit about where you come from and what brought you to do the work that you do today. And when I say where you come from, what I mean is your family background, your educational background, the things that were factors in the way you grew up that brought you to be who you are.
AH: Well, everyone's got an origin story, and mine started in Baytown, Texas. It's a small town just east of Houston. It's a small oil town. And I think that living in kind of a rural community, you know, it's got its own set of challenges, but we were close enough to Houston to still have those influences, and eventually that's where I went to college, at the University of St. Thomas. But service and being in community were always part of our family activities. Everyone was always talking about politics. That's what we talked about around the dinner table. Everyone was always talking about what was going on in the community and what was happening to different people. And what eventually drew me to MANA, and who even knew that being able to be an advocate for Hispanic women was a job that anyone could hold, right? I probably worked at MANA for many years before my family even realized that that was my actual job and not my volunteer work. So I think that having community in mind always, and I always volunteered even as I was starting my career when I came to Washington, DC after I did it in a very non-traditional way. I came in the same way that young starlets pack a suitcase and go to Hollywood. I packed a suitcase and went east to Washington, DC.
AA: I love it.
AH: And as a kid from Texas, I didn't know anyone. I didn't have a job, I didn't have a place to live, but I knew I wanted to be here. So I started to work. I temped, I stayed in a youth hostel and I made friends along the way, and I found a place to live along the way. And that's now been 26 years, and almost 15 years to the day that I was asked to become the president and CEO of MANA. I've been working here for the last 18 years, and I've now led it for almost 11, so it was a place where I was able to find what I was interested in, in terms of serving community, doing good work, looking at how policies impact community, and then also working directly with people. Because that's the piece I feel like is always missing in these conversations. There are lots of high-level, 30,000-foot conversations that happen here in Washington. I sort of look back at my own personal experience and I'm like, “Have you ever even met anyone in that community? Because you're missing the point completely.” And I feel like that's where we have this opportunity with MANA to say, “Hey, look, we represent real women in community who are facing real issues, working as hard as they absolutely can, and also finding extra time to serve in community.” Because other than my office here in Washington and one or two other chapter offices, most of our network across the country are women who volunteer. Out of the kindness of their hearts and love for community, they volunteer to mentor other people and do community education. And when you have women who are doing it out of love, that's an unstoppable force. I feel like that's what gives us strength in being able to continue through the trials and tribulations of the last 51 years. And I've had the great opportunity to be part of it for almost two decades, and for me, that intensity continues to grow because the challenges get bigger over the years.
AA: Yeah. Well, that's one thing I definitely wanted to ask you about, is those challenges and how those challenges are getting bigger. But maybe we'll put a pin in that for a second and have you tell us just a little bit more about the organizational history. Even though I mentioned at the beginning that it was started in 1974, if you could tell us a little bit more about the origins and then your involvement in it.
AH: Sure. The group of women that you mentioned were here working in Washington, DC, and they said that they had the innate ability to find any other Latina in the ‘70s who was also working in Washington, DC because they wanted to make sure that those individuals knew that they had a network. And they were also making sure that they had a voice in conversations, because what they realized was that conversations were happening here in Washington that didn't include, at that time, Mexican American women's voices, so they felt like they were being left out. There were other national Hispanic organizations who were getting invited to very high-level conversations, but there were no women around the table, and they felt like that was a gap that they needed to fill. And they literally made it their business to pull up a chair, get invited to those meetings, and make sure they were part of the conversation. And what they wanted to expand that into was women across the country who felt like they had that same network and support system of women who cared about what was happening in their community and happening to them individually, and wanted to give them power to say, “This is where we need to step up and step in.” That's where our chapters and affiliates started to form across the nation.
There were other organizations doing local organizing work, and we wanted to make sure that we were associating with them without having them lose the identity of the organizations they were building, too. So we're affiliates in that there's a reciprocity to share information, share networks, and share support systems. And then our chapters who actually have the MANA name are community organizing groups who really focus on what their individual community needs. Some focus specifically on mentoring for girls in middle and high school. That's our Hermanitas program, and we consider that to be the jewel of our programming, because it really is the foundational piece of laying the boards in place for leadership moving into the future. Because there's no sense in having power and a leadership structure if there's no continuity to it. And what MANA knew is that in order to be successful, there had to be structures for continuity, and that's why they wanted to make sure they were educating the community. Everything from financial literacy to health to leadership development, anything where these women and communities see need, they want to meet it. A great example of this is during the pandemic. We weren't specifically direct service in nature, but we realized that there was a lot of direct need when the pandemic hit. So all of our chapters and affiliates had students in our Hermanitas program, our mentoring program, they knew they couldn't meet in person, and they also knew that if they wanted to meet virtually, girls had to have access to the internet and they had to have computers. They made sure that they were working with their partners locally to make sure that those families had what they needed, not just so that they could participate in Hermanitas programming, but so that they could go to school, because that's all part of it.
And trying to tend to the immediate need, right? So a lot of them turned to raising money and giving help to local shelters who were seeing an influx in need at the start of the pandemic and then continuing through. Who needed masks? We had one chapter who took a mobile library across their county with books so that girls, you know, if you couldn't go to the library to check out a book, that you still had something stimulating at home to read. So, looking at where the need is and how they can meet it, that's exactly at the heart of what MANA does. And then out of my office here in Washington, we work on those federal policies and really try to influence what's happening on Capitol Hill and the administration that's in power. And administrations come and go, challenges change over time, and as an organization, we need to be adaptable to what's happening, who's receptive to what we're talking about, and then finding ways to make inroads. And that's a challenge in and of itself. What I always say is that my job here in Washington really is to give voice to what's going on in our communities, but our incredible volunteers and communities are really the power and the strength of the organization because they're doing that work each and every day to serve community.
AA: That's amazing. I have another question about the founding of MANA and also some applications to right now. I understand that Bettie Baca, who was a founding member and the first chairwoman of MANA once said, and I'm going to read a quote from her: “While we share with all women the universal victimization of sexism, the Mexican American woman situation is complicated by a struggle within a society that has historically failed to honor, to understand, and even to acknowledge her culture among women.” And obviously a lot has changed since she said that in the ‘70s, but I'm imagining that that's still true, so I wondered if you could speak to that situation of Latinas still being excluded, even among other women.
AH: Yes, absolutely. That's such a wonderful point, and it truly speaks to the vision and incredible breadth of knowledge that our founders had, and what they could see as impacting our community and would impact moving forward. In terms of where women of Hispanic or Latin American descent sit, I think that, first off, you can have the binational component of it. And there are lots of different vantage points, right? You've got your first-gen folks who are just coming to the United States, who are trying to transition to a new culture, a new life, a new language, all of those things. You also have the generations that come after. And in my particular case, I'm third-generation, born in the United States. My dad is Mexican American, so my great-grandparents were actually born in Mexico. So my challenge was a little bit different, because while I speak Spanish and I speak English, one of the things that we say is “Ni de aquí, ni de allá.” “Not from here, but also not from there.” When I am in Mexico, for example, I feel very American. But when I'm in the United States, there is just a little bit of difference to me because I do speak Spanish, because I am culturally a little bit different. And regardless of where you are in that lifecycle, from the immigrant experience on, there's always just a little bit of discomfort in your positioning.
And then you add onto that, you know, I don't think I'm stepping out of bounds to say that Latin American culture historically had been very machista. I mean, I think we see some changes in leadership in Latin America where women are getting into higher positions, Mexico being the biggest example of that. We do see evolutions and changes, but that doesn't change the historical context of it all. And again, we say that everything is personal. When you think about policy, when you think about how issues impact communities, your personal experience really does give context to it. And from my personal experience, I had a family that was very traditional, in the Mexican tradition, where men went to work and women were in the kitchen and cooked and cleaned. Men ate first, and women ate second and then cleaned up. Just as a basic example. And that didn't have anything to do with how we were viewed within the family structure, because I think that that also contributes to how someone comes into being. But when you think about some of those traditional households, when you think about the historical context, and then when you think about the situation in the United States, Latinas still only make about 52 cents on the dollar for what a white male earns. We still don't see Latinas in very high positions. There have only ever been a handful of Latina Fortune 500 CEOs. Less than a handful. We don't see a great number rising in federal, congressional offices or federal positions. We've seen a handful of cabinet secretaries who are Latinas or Hispanic descent. So we still don't see those folks in leadership.
Now, is that changing? Are there movements that are pushing? I think we see a lot more folks in local and state representation. And I think that in our communities we can start seeing more, in our individual communities, but we're still not hitting those levels nationally. And then when you think about what our population is, one in five women in the United States today is of Hispanic or Latin American descent. And I use those just to indicate– so, “Hispanic” is the term that the federal government uses, that was sort of the blanket term, but that has a Spanish-speaking connotation, right? And there are quite a few people in Latin America who are not Spanish speaking, for example, in Brazil. They don't speak Spanish. We talk about this a lot at MANA. We use all the terms interchangeably: Latin American, Latina, Hispanic, Latine, Latinx. We try to use as many as we can, but what we do fully understand, because we try to include everyone under that banner, right? However, we know that there's not one word that can fully encapsulate the depth and the breadth of who our community represents. But there are still threads that kind of bind us all together and pull us together, like language, food, culture, music, all of those things help us find community with one another.
“in the United States, Latinas still only make about 52 cents on the dollar for what a white male earns...”
It's difficult to explain to the outside world who we are, but one in five women in the United States today is of Hispanic or Latin American descent. By 2060, that number is going to be one in three. The population growth is the average Hispanic in the United States is about 31-32 years old, so we're talking about a young population that's still growing, that represents a large percentage of the growth in the United States at a time when we think about birth rates declining and we think about folks not being married, like traditional structures not being what they are. The Hispanic/Latin American community is still growing by leaps and bounds. And so if you flash forward there and we think about who the workforce of the future is going to be, it is going to be Hispanic and Latin American descent.
Because we also are living in this time where there's a lot of conversation around immigrants and undocumented immigrants and all the names that are being ascribed to folks who are here trying to make a better living for themselves. More than 80% of Hispanics in the United States are documented and have legal status in some form or fashion, or are American citizens by birth. So we're talking about the vast majority of the population here being demonized for a problem that needs to be solved at the federal level. We're seeing these clashes and what we're truly seeing, as you and I are having this conversation, we just came off of a weekend and a week where people have taken to the streets to really speak out against what's happening against immigrants in this country. Society has a way of emerging in really desperate times to make their voices known when they think that we're going off the rails. And I think when you see millions of people taking to the streets, many of whom were there in defense of the way immigrants were being treated, how they're being denied due process, how they're being rounded up in their schools and churches and places of work and homes without the appropriate documentation. Isn't this crazy that we're in this space where documentation is the reason why people are being rounded up, however, we're seeing instances where they don't even have the appropriate documentation from the courts to actually make the arrests?
AA: Yep.
AH: I think that communities all across the country are revolting against this notion that rules are different for different people, and if you look different or you don't speak English, or that all of these pieces somehow make you not fit to be here. As a nation of immigrants, we reject that, regardless of political party. I think that's where we find ourselves, and I believe we found ourselves, as MANA, for a very long time able to have conversations on both sides of the aisle because what we're talking about transcends politics. When we go to Capitol Hill or we go to an administration with an issue, it's about humanity, it's about ethics, it's about the human cost of something. So if you can appeal to someone's better angels and have those conversations on that level, politics don't matter. We have found that to be the case on many issues. That's going to be our challenge to continue to find those inroads when we vehemently disagree with some of the decisions that are being made, for example.
AA: What does that look like? I'm curious, especially with this administration right now. If you were to advocate and you wanted to make a case to the federal government about ICE, for example, about deportations, what does that look like? What do you do?
AH: Sure. In this case, what we keep going back to is the economic case for immigrants and the economic case for Hispanics and Latin Americans in the United States. If you look at, for example, the GDP of the G7, if you look at just Hispanics in the United States and the GDP that's created by our community, it's nearly $4 trillion. We'd be a G5 country on our own. And then when you think about, for example, during the pandemic, who were the folks who had to go to work? Who were the folks who didn't have the privilege to sit at home behind a computer and do our work while the pandemic raged outdoors? They were folks who were working in the fields, picking and packing our fruits and vegetables. They were folks who were cleaning, doing all the cleaning and sanitizing and all of those different jobs. The folks who were cooking and folks who were doing deliveries. These were immigrants, many of whom were Hispanic or Latin American. So we can reliably say that the economy was held together on the backbones of these immigrants who were doing that work because they had no other choice.
So the conversation is still about the economics of it all. How does the economy of the United States work without the labor of a young, abled workforce who's willing to come and do these really difficult jobs in the hot sun with little pay or pay under the table in the most difficult of circumstances, but still willing to hold our economy together? These are the questions that we have to answer when we talk about immigration. And then, because I think that we've learned that seeing a crying child and seeing a mother being pulled apart from their child so that they can get rounded up by ICE, these are images that move us to tears, but some of these policymakers are not moved by that. So if we have to make a different argument and we feel like we win the argument on multiple fronts, one, the humanity of it, we feel, is on our side. But at the same time, the economic argument is on our side. The fastest growing demographic of business owners in the United States are Latinas. The small businesses in the United States are the folks who provide jobs. They are the job creators of our economy. So if you start rounding people up who are the backbone of your economy, you are not just hurting that person, you're hurting our economy writ large. You're hurting all of us. So, finding the way to have that conversation, right? Because if economics is what you're going to hold onto and that's the hill you're ready to die on, we're ready to have that conversation. That's what I'm talking about when I'm like, “Where do you want to have this conversation? We can meet you in that conversation.”
AA: Amazing.
I'd love to know more about MANA’s advocacy work. It sounds like that's one of the big, pressing issues that's impacting Latina women and girls today, is immigration issues. What are some other areas that are areas of focus for you?
AH: I think we still have healthcare. Healthcare in its largest sense. Access to insurance, access to healthcare facilities, access to information. All of these things are lacking for the Hispanic community. And remember, MANA was founded in 1974, the year after Roe v Wade became the law of the land. And so reproductive health and thinking about how controlling your reproductive health and managing it in a way that fits your life is tantamount to how successful you're able to become in terms of the choices you can make, the jobs you can take, the education you can get. All of those pieces fall in a row. And so we always have to keep our eye on what's happening there. And the states that have had the most draconian anti-abortion laws have high percentages of Latinas, so immediately we can see impact for Hispanic women when we talk about reproductive rights. And again, in the conversation of how we frame it so that we can talk about it with anyone on either side of the aisle, if we're talking about access to care, when we're talking about freedom to make your own decisions, when we talk about privacy, all of those things are what we're talking about ultimately when we say “abortion”, but when you say the word, people go to their corners.
AA: Yeah.
AH: And what we want is to say, “Look, fundamentally, this is what we're talking about. You believe in freedom to make your own decisions. I believe in freedom to make my own decisions.” And we say at MANA we no more advocate for or against liposuction or a gallbladder surgery because we're not doctors. We don't know what access you have to care or insurance. We don't know what your religious beliefs are. We don't know what your doctor's saying. We don't know if you have time to take off from work. So we could no more make that decision for you than we could about abortion. But what we want is for you to be able to go to a doctor and a healthcare facility and get the care and support that you need for whatever ails you. That you have a right to, and you have a right to your privacy. I shouldn't be in the middle of it. You have a right to make those decisions based on all of those factors that I have no context for.
So as we're looking at how to advocate effectively for these things, it's a code switch. If I'm having a conversation with one set of lawmakers, I'm speaking in one language about the issues that move them, but if I'm speaking to another we code switch, right? And we have the conversation that they want to have around the issue. But what we know is that we can find common ground with everyone, and it's not a matter of you're against me or I'm against you. As advocates, we have to be the ones to have cooler heads and find that middle ground, because the lawmakers in the public sphere aren't going to do that. But we can do that in smaller conversations in their offices. We can do that in smaller conversations when we do briefings on Capitol Hill. We can do that in smaller conversations when we write a letter to their offices or we write a letter to the committee, or we go directly to the Department of Health and Human Services. I'm not saying that these are easy and that we have the way to get forward and make them change their minds immediately, advocacy is a slow process, but you have to keep working at it and you have to keep chipping away, and part of that is relationship building. That doesn't happen overnight. It certainly doesn't happen overnight with a new administration. So we are still in that relationship-building phase to find who are the friendly faces, who is going to listen to what we're talking about, who are the people who can be reasoned with, who can see our point of view, or let us come in and at least try to convince them? We're in the building stage here. My hope is that we can find space– we found spaces before in the first Trump administration. I think that we can find spaces again.
“You believe in freedom to make your own decisions. I believe in freedom to make my own decisions.”
AA: That's really inspiring. It's very interesting. I'd love to stay on health for just another minute, because I understand that you helped launch the Health Equity Collaborative, right?
AH: Yes.
AA: Can you tell us about that organization, what it does, how it got started, and why it was necessary?
AH: Absolutely. Pre-pandemic, maybe a couple of years before the pandemic, we started working with a group of national organizations to talk about health equity. And advocates have been talking about health equity, and how where you live and where you work determines if you have access to adequate healthy food or access to healthcare or all of those predeterminants of health. We've been talking about this for decades, you know, five decades for MANA. But when the pandemic hit, this really was an opportunity for us to go to all the organizations we knew that were working on health equity in some shape or form. Not just Hispanic organizations, but LGBTQ organizations, African American, health professionals, consumer advocate groups, chambers of commerce, anyone who deals with community. So any kind of health professionals groups, we went to them and said, “Look, there are these top line issues of health equity that are being demonstrated in real time and that are showing everyone, top to bottom, that this is what happens when a community doesn't have access, doesn't have information, doesn't have connectivity to adequate information” And in real time, we were able to show, this is why COVID rates were very high for Hispanics. They were the folks who were on the front lines working. Why were vaccination rates low? And we were able to work with the administration at that time to say, “These are the things that are needed. These are the investments that need to be made.”
For example, Hispanic rates of vaccination were very low initially during COVID. There was a lot of mis- and disinformation, not just in our community. And I always say this, too, I have to speak in what's my lane, right? This is my experience and this is what I know. You wouldn't want me speaking for the African American community, they wouldn't want me to either. But our vaccination rates were very low, but we were able to work and get resources to build educational programs to really reach out to community to really get in there, and then our vaccination rates went up to almost 80%. So the turnaround was immediate and it all came back to advocacy conversations and making sure that we were able to get the resources to get into community to get folks what they needed. So it really was proof of concept in real time in terms of health equity. What we've done is use that as a platform to keep building, drawing more organizations in, and more national organizations to lend their voices to these top line principles of health equity. We need prices to go down. We need more access to healthcare, more access to insurance. We need more people who are in clinical trials so that vaccinations and treatments can be specific to the needs of every community, not just, you know, one of the craziest examples is is that for a very long time, up until recently, the clinical trials for women's birth control were on men. So, thinking about that, how in the world would testing those things on white men help women? And then thinking about that and extrapolating it out to whether it's vaccines, whether it's diabetes treatments, whether it's cancer treatments, and how those things impact different communities, those are things that need to happen in clinical trials.
Thinking about when we talk about how expensive the cost of healthcare is, the cost of medications, and we think about what in the systems are stopping folks from getting what they need and at the cost that they need it to be at. Those are things that we work on. And this is a way for us to create an echo chamber with a lot of organizations who have big megaphones of their own, and we can all work together to create an echo chamber to elevate an issue to say, look, this is a big deal and this impacts communities, not just Hispanic communities, but African American communities, Muslim communities, LGBTQ communities, anyone who is under-resourced, underserved, and who's getting missed in those gaps.
AA: That's really interesting. I also appreciated you bringing up the issue with the medical field in general and only testing on male subjects forever. I was going to ask you about the intersection of how patriarchy plays into some of these issues that you're confronting. Could you speak to that?
AH: Sure. I think that we're more conscious of it in this day and age. Even those who are begrudgingly conscious of it know what's going on. But sometimes it is just so ingrained that it happens without even the person who's doing it and participating in it knows. And the example I'll give here, and tech and telecom policy is also one of our major issues, you can go back to the first-gen wearable devices, like your watch that connects to your phone and monitors your heart rate and it does all the things. The first-gen versions of those technologies wouldn't read skin tones that were darker than mine.
AA: No way. Oh my gosh.
AH: Because they were only created and tested by tech bros. So then they had to go back to the drawing board. It was a blind spot for them, not because they were intentionally dying to exclude women. But if you exclude women, you're excluding like the entire market who's actually going to purchase these devices. And not only purchase it for themselves, but purchase it for their families. Women make the decisions about what is being bought in their households at any given moment. So when you exclude women, women of color, and then when you think about the buying power of the Hispanic community, are you trying to exclude $4 trillion of buying power because it doesn't read their skin tone? I don't think anyone would want to exclude that market. The intent wasn't to exclude a market, it was just a blind spot.
Those things still exist, so that's why we push for increased diversity and pipelines and scholarships for things for folks to go into STEM fields in the same way going into medical fields. The Health Equity Collaborative talks about it on the health side of the spectrum. But even bringing it closer to home, when you think about, again, tech and wearables and apps, and we think about the overlay with reproductive rights, data is the name of the game. Thinking about your data and your personal information, who's collecting it, where it's going, where it's being sold, we think about it in terms of the patriarchy. If your state and local government is using it to track you and maybe prosecute you or accuse you of things, then you're really talking about a state of surveillance that is built to keep women barefoot and pregnant. It's so difficult in this day and age and it's so difficult with the way the internet and our phones are so ubiquitous for everything that we need throughout the day to then think about reeling it back in. I think about it in terms of putting the toothpaste back in the tube, it's not so easy to do.
AA: Yeah, that's fascinating. I've never thought of that before. Never in the five years that I've been doing this podcast have I thought of patriarchy and data in that way. Honestly, I never have. That's really important and really interesting. I'm so glad you brought that up.
AH: Yeah. We actually did a conversation at South by Southwest with a couple of other tech advocates last year talking about this exact issue.
AA: Wow. Can I access that anywhere? Is there a video of it online that I could watch?
AH: Actually, yeah, I'll find it. It was South by Southwest, which is a huge conference out in Austin every year.
AA: Oh yeah. Humongous. I know what South by Southwest is. That's awesome. Listeners, look that up. That's such an interesting topic.
AH: Privacy is super important to us too, whether it's your health data or your personal information. Because women always have to think of the world in terms of how we protect ourselves. Everyone knows how to hold your keys a certain way when you're walking in a dark parking lot at night or going home at night, or you think about where you are in a dark place. Everything is about mitigating risk when you're a woman. Who you're around, who you associate with, what circumstances you're in, and your data is another place for that. And you have to start thinking of it in the same way of, “How can I protect myself online?” And I think we've all heard the stories of young girls who have had nudes posted online or deep fakes, and now with AI all these things are making the dangers so much bigger. I worry about it in terms of the student in our Hermanitas program. I worry about it in terms of our young adults on our college campuses. And then obviously the adults who are wonderful role models for other kids, and their lives can be ruined if they're not really careful with their data.
AA: Yeah, wow. So important. I'm so glad you brought that up. Okay, shifting gears for one last topic today. I wanted to ask a little bit more about mentoring and I'd love to know about MANA’s goals of providing mentoring and education and advocacy. I’d love to know a little bit more about those, and I'd love it if you could share with us some of your mentors. Who have your mentors been, and why are those mentor/mentee relationships so important?
“women always have to think of the world in terms of how we protect ourselves”
AH: Yeah, so as I said before, the jewel of our programming is our Hermanitas program, and “hermanitas” is Spanish for “little sisters”. This is a program across the country for girls in middle and high school, and it's the only mentoring program for Latinas created by Latinas. Because there are a lot of programs created by different organizations that don't necessarily have Latinas in the development process and don't necessarily create it specifically for a community. So we're really proud of the fact that women volunteer upwards of a hundred hours a year, and specifically in contact and support of the student they're mentoring over the course of a year. They go through anything from college visits to talking about health, they talk about soft skills, like how to have a formal dinner, the etiquette, and anything that maybe a kid couldn't ask their parents about because maybe they don't have college experience. “How do I fill out my college applications? How do I fill out my FAFSA form?” These are things that women in the community who have been through it now want to mentor someone else in the next generation through. And not to usurp or replace family, because we really think of MANA in our organization as a family, so parents and families and little brothers and sisters, and everyone's always welcome in the sessions and the events.
But it's this idea of making sure that young women know that there are other women in the community who are invested in their success and are really looking to help them move to that next level in their lives, whatever that may be. And we've been really lucky. In the early 2000s, we actually had a study, we had three Latina PhDs evaluate the efficacy of the program. We had girls on the east and west coast, northern and southern borders, rural and urban communities, to see how the Hermanitas program was impacting them. And at that time, there were very high teen pregnancy rates, high dropout rates, there was high drug use, there was very low self-esteem and mental health outcomes were really poor for Latinas in particular. And what they found after this three-year longitudinal study was that not one young lady became pregnant, not one dropped out of school, more than 90% were accepted to college, and they all had decreasing attitudes toward drugs and alcohol, and then also had better mental health outcomes.
AA: Amazing.
AH: So, in short, what it meant was that for Latinas having a Latina mentor– and for us, it went from just being a program that we had anecdotal support for, and we have all these wonderful feel good stories, this was then empirical proof that the concept worked. And those results were published in the Harvard Journal of Hispanic Policy in the 2006 or 2007 edition. And for us, that really was this juggernaut to be like, this is an evaluated program that works. It's not just feel good and do some crafts. It's a feel good, but it's with a purpose, and now this program has been going for more than 40 years, almost from the beginning of the organization. This has been something that we really focus on. Some of our chapters focus on it specifically, and I think that for my personal soapbox on the issue of mentoring, I always say that I give someone the side eye if they say they're self-made, because I just don't believe that. It denies the person who is home with you after school and your parents and your grandparents and aunts and uncles, or anyone in community who took an interest in you. A teacher who gave you a little extra help after class, someone who helped you get a scholarship, someone who gave you a scholarship. All of these folks along the way helped you become the person that you're meant to be.
Thinking about really looking at it from a community perspective, this is what we want to build as a community around someone to help them be as successful as they can be or want to be. And for me, mentors have been incredibly important, and I've had the great privilege of meeting some really incredible women along the way. But it all starts with my mom and my grandmas. You don't find the sense of self-worth that you can have, or the confidence, without those women in your life who are there through the good, the bad, the thick and the thin, and who are on your side no matter what. Family, first of all, for me, has been– and my family to this day, I can say to a person, “My family supports me a hundred percent.” And to give you an example, when I first moved to DC I told my parents, “Hey, I'm moving from Texas. I'm taking a suitcase. I don't have a place to live. I don't have a job. I don't have any friends.” And to their credit, my parents were like, “You know what? Go and see what you can find there. What's the worst that can happen? You come home where everyone loves you?”
AA: Aw, that’s lovely.
AH: When you have support like that, you can be fearless. I feel like that support that I have from my family allows me to be fearless. But I've also had wonderful women, like my predecessor, Alma Morales Riojas, who was the president and CEO of MANA before me. She was a wonderful mentor and I got to watch her work up close and navigate these systems here in Washington and our coalitions and the relationships and the fundraising. I also have a wonderful mentor, she's the former Secretary of State of New Mexico, Clara Padilla Andrews. And she has always been both a wonderful friend and supporter, but also someone who is willing to push me over the edge just to get me out of my comfort zone, and who I'm like, “You know what, Amy? You've got this. Get into it.” And I think that having women like that in your life who can see you in a way that you don't quite see yourself yet or can't quite believe, that makes all the difference in the world because it stretches what you think is possible. And that's what we do with mentoring at MANA. This summer we're taking our students to Chicago, we're going to go visit the Pilsen neighborhood and the Mexican American Museum of Art there and look at art as a form of resistance and look at the murals in the area, and really look at different places where community takes form with our Hispanic and Latin American identity in mind. And to see that there are opportunities outside of what you know and see every single day in your community, and that there's a bigger life out there for you if you choose that.
AA: Ah, that's so beautiful and so inspiring. What an awesome way to wrap up the episode today. Amy Hinojosa, this has just been such a joy and really, truly, so inspiring. I want to direct listeners again to the Mexican American Women's National Association, or MANA. Amy, can you share where people can find the organization, where they can find your work? And if there's one last takeaway that you want to share with listeners, that would be wonderful.
AH: If you want to get in touch with us, our website is hermana.org, like sister, and you can also find us on social media, on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn @mana_national. And we would love to have you join our community, and think about having a chapter in your local community if you don't already have one. What I would leave all the listeners with is that we are in difficult times, but that doesn't mean that it's time to get discouraged. Stars shine the brightest in the dark, and so we're in this moment of darkness, but this can really be your time to be a shining light, whether it's for your community, for your family, or even for yourself. You can find it within yourself to shine brightly, even in the darkest of times.
AA: Beautiful. Thank you so much for sharing that, and again, thank you so much for being here, Amy. I so enjoyed this conversation.
AH: Thanks, Amy. It was fun.
