Q. What is your favorite part about being Latina?
A. The food, of course. You can never go wrong with Mexican food. But also just being able to play our music and have a good time wherever you are. I love that part of our culture, that internal rhythm we carry is like a free, naturally occurring and immediately accessible mental health promoting tool that I want everybody to make more use of.
Q. What is your superpower?
A. My ability to sit with hard emotions, including difficult feedback. This has allowed me to jump into this journey of self-liberation, awareness, and reflection.
Q. Do you remember a time when you were underestimated?
A. I think as a mother and a woman in general, our voices are silenced and questioned very easily and frequently in our everyday lives, and we often don’t even realize that it’s happening. My own husband, who is an incredible human being and loves me, has to put in the work to not silence me, ignore me, or undervalue my voice as a mother (and as a child psychiatrist!) when it comes to parenting, child development and family mental health. I think if we are not mindful of how these dynamics show up, they can negatively impact our lives.
Q. Tell us a little bit about your background.
A. I was born in Monterrey, Nuevo León in Mexico, and am the youngest of three. My mother and my father grew up in Monterrey, but my grandparents come from small towns and villages in Mexico. I moved to Texas when I was 12, and even though my family had a path to documented citizenship, it was a long, complicated, emotionally stressful process. That is one of the experiences that fuels my work in the immigrant and refugee community- I know the complexity of this system and process can lead to a tremendous loss of opportunity and have a lot of compassion for the immigrant, refugee and asylum-seeking communities navigating this journey.
Q. Tell us about Teku, the platform you recently started!
A. Teku is a virtual platform promoting child and family health and well-being focusing on mental health. We promote caregiver education, healing, and empowerment through the understanding of the eight pillars of health. These pillars include our nutrition, how we move our bodies, how we communicate with each other, how we treat ourselves, etc. We are also bringing an additional layer, which is climate justice. We are in a continuous relationship with our natural environment, so we can’t focus only on our own health while disregarding our future. We actually need nature to be present and available for us to feel well.
Q. Why did you start Teku?
A. As a young woman, I received a scholarship that put me on a fast track to medicine. Given the lack of role models who looked like me in the field, I always knew that I would have to create ways to practice a different kind of medicine, one that is more holistic, more community-engaging, and more culturally nourishing. Then, when I became a mother and went through the childbirth experience, I realized that the medical establishment has taken away our power as women. As a physician, I can acknowledge both ends of the spectrum- on the one hand, I know that medical innovation and interventions are essential to treat illnesses. And on the other hand, I can acknowledge that there are natural events in our life that can benefit from medical care but don’t require the level of involvement that we sometimes see in our current model. So, the idea was born for a platform that acknowledges this and empowers caregivers. I wanted to touch people’s lives in a way that clinical medicine does not allow me to.
Q. What’s been the impact of Teku so far?
A. We are early, but I’m starting to see caregivers- including parents, foster parents, grandparents, etc. who tell me the skills we teach are foundational skills they never received either as a human being or through formal education. People return and tell us they put them into practice and saw immediate benefits. The other benefit we’ve seen is empowering and inspiring others, especially Latinas and women in general.
Q. What advice would you give Latinas who are starting to question the systems they have trained and existed in?
A. If you are one of those questioning people, start by nourishing that superpower in you by accepting that it’s there and slowly letting it come out in safe places. Before you know, you’ll get more comfortable being yourself and speaking up anywhere.
Q. Who is another Latina we should feature on Informada?
A. I’ll share two- Rosalia Rivera, who is behind the Instagram account @consentparenting all about child abuse prevention. Also, my friend Laura Molinar. She founded a nonprofit called Sueños sin Fronteras to advance reproductive justice in immigrant communities. They are working to get funding for these initiatives from the city of San Antonio.