🙋🏽👧🏿👱🏾👧🏻The Latinx Collective: Issue #16: This week's five

THIS WEEK'S FIVE:

Are you ready to smile? In her long life, 118 year old (!!!) Julia Flores Colque has witnessed two world wars, revolutions in her native Bolivia and the transformation of her rural town of Sacaba from 3,000 people to a bustling city of more than 175,000. These days she can be found singing folkloric songs in her indigenous Quechua tongue while strumming her Andean guitar, and enjoying the company of her dogs (one of them named "Chiquita"), cats and rooster. By the way, I think I found her secret...she never married and has no children.😉

This story is a few months old but I just stumbled on it & wanted to share. Geisha Williams made history last year becoming the first Latina CEO of a Fortune 500 company. Her story is impressive and inspiring: Geisha, a Cuban immigrant, was the first person in her family to get a college education. She graduated with an engineering degree from the University of Miami and a summer job at a local power plant helped her find her passion for the world of electricity & energy. She's now CEO of the publicly-traded, $ 1.6 billion company, PG&E.

Great read! Cal State LA’s Chicano Studies program, founded in 1968, came at the beginning of ethnic studies at American universities. It presented a different approach to teaching history by focusing on one ethnic group and its relationship to the rest of the United States. This spread across the country; now there are dozens of Latino studies programs and departments at U.S. colleges.

Variety recently announced its annual list of 10 Actors to Watch and there are two Latinx actors featured. From the write-up: Anthony Ramos -member of the original “Hamilton” Broadway cast, also known for the "She's Gotta Have It" remake on Netflix, among other roles, and Marina de Tavira – an actress with a long theater career, she is soon to be seen in Alfonso Cuarón’s “Roma.” She also recently appeared in the series “Ingobernable” for Netflix and “Falco” for Amazon.

Here are five scholarships and fellowships aimed at diversifying media for future generations. Why do we need this? Newsroom diversity remains painfully low, with whites and males still making up the majority of voices. In 2017, only 25 percent of top newsrooms had at least one non-white editor, while minorities made up only 16.6 percent of all newsroom employees. This is despite the fact that Latinos make up ~18% of the U.S. population. Share the list with any budding Latinx journalists you know so we can level the playing field in journalism. 💪

SPOTLIGHT SERIES:

The first Hispanic and third woman appointed to the United States Supreme Court, Puerto Rican-American icon Sonia Sotomayor has released 2 new autobiographical books, this time aimed at children. One is a picture book for elementary school readers. The other, aimed at middle school readers, is an abridged version of her 2013 memoir. I read her memoir ("My Beloved World") about two years ago and it inspired me to seek out other Latina-authored memoirs. I think these new versions for kids will really inspire and help children dealing with disease, losing a parent or how to navigate being a rare person of color in education or work spaces. You can check out the new books here, and here.

My Beloved World was stimulated by a lot of questions kids were already asking me: “What was it like to lose a parent when you were young?” “What was it like having a condition like diabetes?” “Was it scary?” Once [children] see you in a position of power, a lot of them who are facing their own challenges ask: “Have you ever been afraid?” “Can you ever succeed if you fail?” They’re natural questions, you know?

Thanks for reading this week’s issue of The Latinx Collective. Tell me what you thought of this issue and feel free to submit ideas anytime.

💖Many thanks to subscriber Nicole Garcia (CEO, Enjifit) for the feedback:

Great to receive the latest issues of the Latinx Collective! It’s so inspiring to read such updates straight in my inbox. It’s always encouraging for me to see other Latinx making it as entrepreneurs and in the tech space.