I make a part time living in my creative work and I am also an investor focused realtor in Ventura County. I equally love the challenges of business. Both require strategy on many levels: objective, budget, effective networking with key clients to secure additional funding if necessary, and of course, winning! My mother did recognize my tendency for creativity and built a career for herself to ensure my music education beginning at six years old.
She also nominated me to save the Cinco de Mayo performance at the school I had grown up in as their teacher bailed on all 50 kids before their performance. I did dance, but I did not know how to teach, I was only 17, and the kids performed very well. I felt it was way over my head, but so has everything else I have attempted, ha ha. She promised me I could go study Spanish dance with our Parish Priest’s, family who lived in Spain, but I got sidetracked with a first marriage. That marriage showed me what happens when a creative pairs with a non-creative.
Over the next 20 years, I was both a full time mother and pianist with a very demanding music career that would take me to another country, teach me the in’s and out’s of music directorship, and the psychology of dealing with different types of instrumentalists, vocalists, and the receiving public.

Born, curious, my parents could never quite satisfy my need for understanding something, one question one answer would create another question in my mind. My mother did recognize my tendency for creativity, and stood up to my father when he would not pay for my piano lessons when I was six, telling him, she was going to get a job to pay for them herself. She secured a sales job in a lovely little woman’s boutique.
This was 1966 in Kern County, and most Hispanic women at that time stayed home when they had a good provider – as my father was.
After the birth of my first child, I joined the church group to keep a one night a week time for myself. I had a strong ear and quickly rose to leadership, and my musician stepfather encouraged me to start college, where I began my studies in music composition with a minor in business.
On a whim, I inquired about a building in the same shopping center my mom had begun her sales career and decided to open my own music retail store with a school of education. This led to relationships with professional artists I would meet at NAMM each year, some of whom would eventually ask that I work with in their musical careers.
A key introduction brought me into the lives of Pete Escovedo and his family, with whom I have work on projects with and traveled over the years. I’m blessed to have become part of his extended family and his personal manager Vic Pamiroyan, (who we lost this year) became my first business mentor.
Over the years, it became apparent that I had a knack for business strategy. To work in this capacity, I formed my own company: DB Group and over the last 15 years I have consulted with or served in leader ship with Ventura Music Festival, Oxnard Salsa Festival, Oxnard Jazz Festival, brought back the Banana Festival post Covid, for the Port of Hueneme, and numerous large concert events.
This past year I produced Picante, a celebration of the musical of Latin America for the Oxnard Jazz Festival, it was an experiment, and the focus was on Latin Jazz dance music. It was a great thing, and there’s more to come – stay tuned!

In 2015, while serving as company manager and production coordinator for Ventura Music Festival, I got a call on opening day of our nine shows in 13 day season kickoff. The management for ‘London Quartet’ who were to be our scheduled opener needed “local transport“ from LAX. It was a Friday and I had no drivers scheduled until post show. I had to jump in the van, fight through the traffic to be there on time and get them back to concert venue by Soundcheck.
As I approached the airport, I got a call from my sister, letting me know that our father had passed away suddenly, production work is difficult and a specific kind of crazy. I told my sister that I would not be able to speak with her for a few days and to please not call me back until I reached out to her. My family was not happy with me, but one simply cannot explain this type of work, especially when you were the one in charge.
Our visiting artists were thrilled to be in the US and asked if we could stop on the way to get a quick bite in Malibu. I took them to Dukes, and just as we sat on the patio, a baby whale jumps out of the water and starts flip-flopping around a paddle boarder. It was spectacular! I looked up to the heavens, and simply said, “thank you, I believe this was for me.” The concert was a huge success and no one knew anything had ever happened to me that day.

After my parents divorced, when I was 10, my musician stepfather courageously, took to parenting us as my natural father abandoned us. He was a well-known bandleader, and a very good composer. I was shocked when I once asked my mother, who wrote the music my stepfather’s group would perform, and she told me he wrote his own music. There were many of nights that I realized he would be up in the middle of the night, and when I would ask him what he was doing, he would say, “I was just working on another piece of music.” In music composition studies, we did in-depth research on composers as far back as the 1600s and as a composition major you develop a deep appreciation for the writing process. It is often thankless and unrecognized, but I have the deepest respect for composers of original music and that is definitely a personal mission and everything that I work on or produce myself.