From the course: How to Succeed as a Latina in a Global Work Environment

Be a pilot of your own path

From the course: How to Succeed as a Latina in a Global Work Environment

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Be a pilot of your own path

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- Welcome, I'm Claudia Romo Edelman. I'm the founder of the We Are All Human Foundation, and I'm delighted to be able to have this course with you today. Latinos, own your power, own your voice. It is important because we normally don't have that luxury. I moved to America merely seven years ago, and I was living in Europe for 25 years. And then I started getting ready for my move to New York for work. And I started looking at data about like Hispanics. What is that word? I lived my entire life as a happy Mexican, I never heard the word Hispanic until I started planning my trip to New York. And then I started realizing that was going to be the move of my life, why? Because I started looking at the numbers, the data, how powerful we are, how many we are, how economically vital we are for America. Then when I moved to America, didn't feel that powerful, didn't feel that many, didn't feel that strong. And then a couple of years after, boom, I got married to an American, so I knew I was fried. I was no longer going to be a diplomat moving from one place to another, I was going to be here to stay. And then I realized that because of my choice, my daughter, a little Latina, a little Hispanic, was going to make 50% of the salary. Here, opportunities to make the same salary were hindered by my choice to stay in America because Latinos, we make the least of everyone in the country. And it is pretty much what made me decide that I needed to work in this space. And imagine, 25 years after working for the United Nations, UNICEF, the United Nations Refugee Agency, the World Economic Forum, the Global Fund to Fight Aids, Tuberculosis and Malaria, after so many years of working in global organizations, I came and I started looking at my resume for the first time in so many years. And what I realized is that there was something consistent in my resume. I was always the right hand of someone. And I remembered for the first time one story that happened to me when I was eight years old. My father was a civil engineer in Mexico. He was building highways, so it was normal for us to get in a car and just go. And that was a time when there was no GPS or no ways, there were like the maps. Remember the paper maps? And so I would like struggling and putting it together and folding and I'd say like to the right, to the left, and let's go here. And he used to tell me all the time, "Oh my God, you're such a great copilot." "Yeah, you're such a great copilot, "let's go again to another trip. "Oh, you're such a great copilot." And that voice actually sticked to my head in a way that I never realized until a couple of years ago, three years ago precisely. I looked at my resume and that was it. I was a copilot my entire life. And I took a decision for my daughter, for my community, for myself to be a pilot, to be a pilot of my own agenda, to make the change that I never realized that I didn't have. To be the pilot so that we Latinas, we can have the same salary, we can have the same voice, we can have the same opportunities as everyone else.

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