Alright – so today we’ve got the honor of introducing you to Araceli Esparza. We think you’ll enjoy our conversation, we’ve shared it below.

Hi Araceli, thanks for joining us today. Learning the craft is often a unique journey from every creative – we’d love to hear about your journey and if knowing what you know now, you would have done anything differently to speed up the learning process.

Before, I was a writer, and still today is that I’m a reader. I truly enjoy reading books about many things. I started writing poetry in high school and joined a poetry circle made up of only women of color. This experience was very powerful for me and pivotal in my decision to pursue a master’s in creative writing. I learned about storytelling and how to incorporate storytelling as part of a movement; now, I teach women how to free their voices, money, and speaking opportunities through our organization, Midwest Mujeres.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I’m really proud of the fact that we have provided a space and a learning community for black and brown women and Latina women to explore their narratives and rewrite them in a way that will help them gain credibility and possibly a new stream of income. I’m a connector; I enjoy bringing people together to create change and awareness. In my early 20s, I dedicated myself to social services as a nonprofit outreach person. Then, I gained more education on development and decided to pursue a nonprofit development and strategic organization. Integrity, trust, and encouragement are close to my brand; I want to connect people, create social capital, and collaborate in helping the community thrive. This all leads to cultivating actions that directly impact women of color. I am creating this program to sell on a national level to other nonprofit organizations who want to create equity and a powerful way to impact the lives of Local Latina and Black women through storytelling. What sets us apart is how we incorporate stories of resilience to economic development, and the women get to overcome their fear of public speaking.

How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?

The year was 2019, I was fired due to racial discrimination, and it was Martin Luther King Day. About a month later, the pandemic started, and we were in shut down. I was devastated because of the racial discrimination that I had faced, and now fast forward to 2020, we see ourselves during George Floyd’s murder and uprising. I faced the same question: what am I doing? Who am I?

Before working at the non-profit organization, I dabbled into becoming a consultant, mostly out of desperation because I wasn’t getting the jobs I wanted. I was so desperate for anything and everything that I didn’t take stock or the time to dive into who I was or what I was good at.

Throughout this pandemic time, I have used my popularity on Facebook to help marginalized communities have space to speak out and speak up about racial discrimination in their lives. We hosted “live shows” about healthcare, being a mother, an artist, or the barriers one faces when you are a political candidate from a marginalized community. I used my platform to help other women of color take the mic and build their own narrative. I saw myself as a producer and a supporter. One day, I found an Instagram ad about a speaking boot camp run by women in Canada. I think it was the marketing that caught my eye; it was so welcoming. I immediately signed up. And I went through a 6-week program that challenged my stories and business.

I knew I wanted to tell the story about how I was racially discriminated against, but I didn’t have the anchor; I didn’t know exactly why it was so important for me to talk about it. Through this program, I could dive into the statistics and the healing. I utilized my creative writing skills to help me heal and flesh out all of the pain that I had gone through. That’s when I began building Midwest Mujeres. It’s a program where I help other Brown and Black women to free their voices and tell the story they never have been able to tell.

I coach Latina women to tell stories they never thought they could. Our healing and transformative approach utilizes a theatrical stage to perform their stories. The pandemic killed so many people in our country. I was one of the first to get the virus before there was a vaccination, and it rocked me to my core. It changed everything about me.

Faced with my mortality and seeing how Covid-19 was changing our society, I was inspired to take ownership of my talent for storytelling and motivation. Women of color need to tell their story, especially Latinas who only earn $0.55 to the dollar, and that number has not changed in the last 50 years. We are underpaid and undervalued, which has not changed in the last five decades. We are overrepresented in hospitality and restaurant Industries. I highly respect the contribution of the Latino workforce in our community. My mother was a janitor, my grandmother was a janitor, my husband worked in a restaurant for over ten years, and now he’s a mechanic. We all have stories to tell about resiliency, survival, and hope.

The more that Latinas and Brown and Black women and all women, including Transwomen, tell our stories of survival and resiliency, the more empathy we will grow. When we tap into the universal themes, we engage people who otherwise would not listen to us. Storytelling has scientific relevance in our brains. Storytelling activates a mirror when someone is telling a story; we anchor in to find similarities, and we try to picture exactly how the story went. If the storyteller is good, they have done their job by evoking a feeling, and if the storyteller is great, they have inspired you and left you with a new perspective on a problem.

Have any books or other resources had a big impact on you?

Several books on philosophies have impacted my entrepreneurial thinking. Before becoming a business owner, I attended Hamline University to obtain my Master of Fine Arts in children’s literature. During my studies at Hamline, I read an essay about storytelling. It discussed how some stories are like mirrors and some stories are like windows.

When I speak about diversity, intersectionality, and racial interpersonal relationship building, I tell people that sometimes we need to put the mirror up to see ourselves, either in the workplace or in the stories.

Sometimes, we invite people to come through the windows because they might not be able to relate directly to the story. Still, we can invite them in, but that also makes me think about how we come in through these windows. Are we like a robber? Are we only trying to appropriate these stories and acculturate the very story essence so that we can gain money and capitalize on these stories without respect for the communities from which these stories come from? That is the question that I sometimes have for marketing and other businesses that work in the space of culture, fundraising, community development, and economic development.
My biggest advice is to tell your story; it’s worth it, and you are worth it!

Contact Info:

• Website: www.araceliesparza.com and www.midwestmujeres.com
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/araceliesparza_speaker/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/MidWestMujeresMentoring
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/araceliesparza/
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/@MidwestMujeres

Image Credits

Mayra Linares for my solo picture, all others are my own pictures.