- Juana Bordas has a passion for Latino leadership and truly believes in uplifting the Latino community.

- Women in general, and people of color.

What is it we need to do in order to rise to the higher levels of leadership in this country and to bring the incredible history and assets and potential that we have?

- Being a servant leader is what drives her to create a world that works for everybody.

- Juana became such a leader nationally because she had a vision and she went after it.

[upbeat music] - [Reynelda] As strong and enduring as the Rocky Mountains they stood beside, as visionary as the views of the Grand Plains they looked across, the women inducted into the Colorado Women's Hall of Fame are trailblazers whose work has improved and enriched our lives.

They're teachers, scientists, ranchers, leaders in business, education, religion and the arts.

Women who have been recognized for their many contributions to our state, our country, and the world.

I'm Reynelda Muse and these are the stories of Great Colorado Women.

- Juana is for me, a force of nature.

I've never seen anybody more true to a mission, to an objective to her core values.

- Some people go their whole life not knowing what their passion is, but I think Juana knew early on and the way she's been able to do that is helping people find their own passion by providing a variety of different trainings to help people discover that leader in them.

- There's just no one else like her.

She's bold, she's audacious.

What Juana has done is say that there is another paradigm of leadership that is embedded in culture but is also leadership for social action, leadership for community change, leadership to better society.

- Her books are about Latino people being proud of their culture, knowing what they can bring, what assets they have in their community, what assets they have in their culture.

- We need people on the ground as leaders with a vision of a different kind of society.

One that is based on the values that this country was founded on.

And if you just stop a minute and think, 500 years colonization, marginalization being minorities, 500 years slavery, 500 years of women, not even not having the right to vote they were property at some point.

How did we get here?

What is it about the way we lead that has enabled us to not only be here today, but to be the vibrant people that we are with our values intact, who wanna make a contribution who wanna make the world better, who wanna make America what it can be.

- Juana's story is one of overcoming very difficult circumstances as an immigrant being raised by a hardworking mother who sacrificed everything to make sure her children were successful.

- I came to this country when I was three and a half years old.

My mother and father had been living on the Caribbean coast of Nicaragua and there was a tsunami that wiped out Cabo Gracias a Dios which is the ancestral land that my people have come from.

My mother and six of her eight children got on the banana boat to come to the United States.

And I can remember being on that boat.

We kept watching Nicaragua get smaller and smaller and smaller as we left.

I think people don't understand what it's like for immigrants to give up their homeland, to give up their families, to give up their traditions, their ancestors, everything they've known, their language.

You have to have a belief that it's gonna be better.

You have to have a belief that you're doing this for the future of your family.

When we landed in Tampa, my father was waiting there.

My father had already come with my sister Rosemary and my sister Mary to do what immigrants have traditionally done.

They send the father or the older to earn money to bring the family.

I have eight brothers and sisters and I'm the youngest daughter.

- All of her brothers and sisters and Juana were pushed to do well in school, to achieve, to be successful.

That kind of drive that was instilled by her parents made a real difference.

But especially her mother, who was just incredible.

Her mother worked multiple jobs to be able to support the family.

- My mother, Maria, was such a smart and strategic kind of person.

She went to the church, she goes to the parish priest and she says in her broken English, "I came to this country so my children could have a better life.

Can you give me a job?"

He gave her a job and my mother worked in the school lunchroom for 10 years.

She said she washed dishes and she cooked food and cleaned so that I could get a scholarship to go to the Catholic school.

- On Sundays, she would get up at five in the morning, walk eight blocks to the Catholic church and she would start taking care of children.

And she got me a job as her assistant.

[audience clapping] When I was growing up, it was really difficult because you know, my parents were immigrants and we were low income and we were just trying to make it in America.

- I think that was a very scary thing to be in Florida in 1940 something and be different and have parents who spoke differently.

My mother's family expected her to assimilate to American culture because they wanted her to be successful here, but they didn't let her speak Spanish.

- I'm the first one in my family that learned English as a child, and so I don't speak with an accent.

And that was real important to my family because as many, many immigrants know, there was a lot of prejudice against people particularly back in the '40s and '50s.

- It was also a very segregated time in our country.

And so she just had to act as much as she could like other people.

When she tells the story, she says that she assimilated and she felt ashamed of her family.

She felt ashamed, she felt that they were poor.

She felt ashamed because she felt that they couldn't communicate as well.

- I wanted to fit in like all young kids do and so I became more and more Americana every day.

I don't think immigrants really think about the fact that they're gonna lose their children to the American mainstream if they don't teach them the values and the cultures and the language.

My grandmother came when I was in high school and she came from Central America.

I have broken Spanish, I can kind of understand it and I couldn't connect to my grandmother who was Indian and I realized that I had lost a deep part of my soul.

- I think she's had to reconcile some of the pain of what she felt she endured when she realized how much she and assimilated in her early life.

It's a sense of identity and navigating the tension of do we belong or do we not belong in the United States?

- Latinos weren't even declared a group till 1977 so there's no thing as a Latino, there's no thing as women's rights.

Those kind of things hadn't happened yet.

And so by the time I'm leaving high school, I'm beginning to ask the question, who am I?

And you know, why was I born the way I was born?

And then I go to college and it was segregated.

There were no African-Americans there.

I never met another Latino.

So it was really like going to an alien land.

The University of Florida in 1960 was two men for every woman.

So I already had that disadvantage, right?

Being a woman, being an immigrant, being the first to go to college in my family, the man that was doing the orientation though, he said, "Look to your right, look to your left.

Only one of you will graduate."

And that just scared me to death because here I am my family having made all these sacrifices for me to be sitting in that seat that day, I said, "No, I'm going to be the first literate, educated person in my entire ancestral line."

And so I knew right then that I would finish college and I would become an educated woman.

When I was in college I actually saw John F. Kennedy when he was running for president.

He was a total inspiration to my generation like Barack Obama was to the millennial generation.

He started the Peace Corps.

And when I was contemplating what do I do with this degree?

What do I do with this great prize that I've been given?

How do I take this and do something with it that's going to benefit other people?

And so I joined the Peace Corps.

I got an opportunity in 1964 to go to Santiago, Chile.

It was a really vibrant country.

I had never seen a Latino in any position of influence in my childhood, ever.

Not as a teacher, not as a bus driver.

And I go to Chile and the president is Hispanic, the congressmen are Hispanic.

They had people who had won Nobel Prizes.

And I knew at 21 years old that it was not my culture that had held our people and myself back.

It was the fact that I was living as a marginalized person as a minority in the United States and that we had this incredibly great culture.

- When she was in Chile she regrew her connection to a Latino culture.

- I used to be embarrassed about where I came from and now I know I came from greatness.

- In the Peace Corps, she ran women's cooperatives.

- I started production co-ops and I taught them how to make things and how to price them and how to sell them and how to work together.

- She learned that you can actually teach people to have control in their lives and have more power in their lives.

And I think that really led into her creating supportive spaces for women to build their lives up.

- I came back and I understood that my life's work was gonna be helping Latinos find their place.

I met my husband who I call my friend Theron in the Peace Corps.

- Both of them were kind of social activists.

They wanted to serve their country in a way that was building a peaceful world.

My mother got a degree in social work and my father got a law degree, but he worked in legal aid.

So he came and worked with farm workers in Southern Colorado.

- When I lived in Pueblo, I worked on the Vietnam Moratoriums.

I started the first woman's group in Pueblo back in 1969.

- Then she ended up in Denver where he got his first job with Legal Aid Services.

- When I came to Denver, I got a job with what was then Mile High Childcare Association.

So I spent about seven or eight years working in the community.

I was organizing, I was going out into the community, I was licensing homes, I was training women when I got a call from the minister at the church on the west side and he said, "Oh, a group of women wanna get together and talk about what they could do to start some sort of center or do something because their kids are going to daycare but they aren't going anywhere.

They're not getting educated."

So I went to the organizing meeting and ended up staying 10 years to build this organization.

- Mi Casa Resource Center in Denver is really known as a staple organization that really started focused on women and providing services to women to uplift them.

- I've always believed in the power of work that if you can give people a way to earn their living in a way to advance that that's the best thing you can do for them.

And that was the basis of my work at Mi Casa.

- You'll hear Juana say time and time again that once you give the tools to the women the Mujeres in the family that has ripple effects, it really impacts the entire family as a whole.

- She started a program at Mi Casa, it was called Mi Carrera and it was for high school girls to try and figure out their career path.

- And we had this great program where they would get job placements and training and build this network and we had like a 98% success rate at getting these girls into schools.

- What's really great now is that it has evolved and it continues to grow and it continues to provide different services that uplift families.

It's just really great to see that something that she helped build is still part of our Denver fabric.

- I went through a tremendous change as a Latina as a young woman about my own empowerment and who I was.

but he and I went our separate ways because at that point, I was pretty much a Latina leader.

I was running organizations I wasn't the same person he married.

- Juana did struggle early in life being a single mom, she's able to draw on that experience and apply it to lots of women in our country today because she understands those challenges.

- So I'm sitting at Mi Casa, I've been there 10 years and I realized that I could be there for the rest of my life, that women would still be coming that needed a high school degree that they'd still need a job that they were still single mothers or they had gotten a divorce and didn't have the means to support themselves.

I'm thinking, well, if we had enough leaders, maybe we could start solving some of these issues.

So I'm sitting there thinking about leadership and I get this call from the Adolph Coors Company and they had met with a group of Latino leaders who said we wanna start this national Latino women's program.

Would you do that?

They gave me enough money to put the curriculum together and it's a really incredible curriculum that lasted for like 40 years.

- She was the first executive director of the National Hispana Leadership Institute.

So that was a national program focused on Latino women to really help women again kind of figure out their career paths, figure out their purpose, figure out their missions.

- The first session was all about learning who am I as a Latino?

What's our history?

How can we bond together?

How can we form a network?

Then we would go to the Harvard John F. Kennedy School of Public Policy because again, if we're gonna change things, we have to understand public policy, how the society works, what is the strategic levers that can create change.

And then we would go to the Center for Creative Leadership, the top corporate center in the country so they could learn, how do white men lead?

What do we need to know?

And once we know that, we can bring our assets, our way of leading, our culture, our stamina, our resiliency.

- She gave these women the kind of tools they needed to be better leaders.

And when people saw that and saw the success that she had created, she immediately gained great respect from people in Washington DC.

- We wanted to expose them to as many people in power as we could.

Each woman as they graduate, has to come up and say what her purpose is.

- And the woman with the energy behind all of this Juana Bordas, president and CEO.

[audience clapping] - So the changes that we have seen in women's roles in the last 20 years calls forth a new generation of leaders.

Latinas are particularly suited to this call to leadership.

They have always been the foundation of the family, the wellspring of our community, the preservers of culture and tradition, their commitment to hard work, service.

And we all know that through our mothers, the work and the service that our mothers did has put us here today.

That is why we are here.

[audience clapping] The National Hispana Leadership Institute is here to ensure that they are prepared for national positions of leadership to impact public policy and to be the leaders of our future in the 21st century.

Our collective strength can build bridges of understanding and hope.

Our courage and determination will ensure our success.

It is my believe that Hispanic women leaders in America will return the vitality, integrity, the care and concern for it's people that this country was built on.

[audience clapping] - There have been hundreds of women that went through that leadership program who have run for office who are running major organizations and institutions and significantly have a cohort of hermanas, of a sisterhood that they can call on on those women across the country.

- The Center for Creative Leadership was one of our partners for the National Hispana Leadership Institute and they offered me a job.

- Only the most talented and successful go there and become part of their network.

- I stayed there four years and it was like getting a PhD in leadership.

While I was there, I also had the opportunity to work with the Kellogg Foundation through a thing called the Kellogg Scholars.

And it was all basically the white male scholars who have written on leadership.

In the past, leadership came out of the military model and out of the corporate model.

So it was a top-down model where you had leadership by the few.

- There are several different kinds of models of leadership.

Latino leadership is much more in concert with the servant leadership model.

'Cause it's essentially about saying what I do I do for community, what I do I do for family and what I do I do with not directing from the top.

- It's called leadership by the many.

Everybody has to contribute.

We all have to try to do our part if we really want to change and transform society.

And then I'm sitting with these scholars and they're talking about leadership and I'm telling them that's not how leadership is in communities of color.

That's not how leadership is for women.

And they stopped me and they said, "Juana, if you wanna change how people think about leadership, you have to write."

- You're not validated until you write that book.

And then that really was the challenge for her.

- And so all of a sudden I realized that if I were gonna have an impact on training leaders, I needed to develop materials and books and information that showed how our people have gotten here.

- Her first book, "Salsa, Soul, And Spirit" in which she interviewed salsa Latino, soul African American and spirit Native American leaders, really was groundbreaking.

- "Salsa, Soul, And Spirit Leadership For A Multicultural Age" was not only the first book on multicultural leadership that looked at Black and Latino and American Indian leadership.

How we got here and how that's integrated but also provided different way of looking at leadership.

The leader is equal, is one of the principles in the book.

In other words, it's not about hierarchy or dominance, it's about equality.

And that the real leader and I wanna quote Federico Pena who was the great pair of Denver, he said, "The real leader is the one who treats everybody the same."

That you have to have that basic respect for people.

And so that kind of a principle, which is now being used in leadership, the leader is equal, is something I learned from the people I interviewed for that book.

- I love that book because it really talks about the strengths that each of our communities and our histories bring to the United States.

- And not only did you write one but you wrote a second and now a third.

- "The Power of Latino Leadership" which I just wrote a second edition of.

That's such an important book because Latinos are at the crossroads of power.

Latinos come from 26 countries.

We're an international community.

And what futurists are saying is that this age is gonna be a global and international age and it's gonna be a multicultural age.

And Latinos are already global and we're already a mixed people.

And so I see Latino leaders as the leaders of the 21st century.

I believe that we have the kind of leadership that's needed today and that is going to be something that can really help build a humanistic, a diverse and inclusive society.

I have an invitation for you and that invitation is to become a Latino by corazón, to become a Latino by heart or by affinity because we need a different model of inclusion in this country.

And Latinos are not a race, we're a culture and studies show that we are indigenous, we're African Americans, we're Afro, we are European and we're mixed.

So we have all the different cultures and races within us.

And like I said, we come from 26 countries.

Mestiza is the word that is used in Central and South America for a mixed race person.

And in fact, the majority of people in this hemisphere are mestizos.

So Mestiza Leadership International.

My goal was to create a company that provided leadership services that reflected both multicultural leadership mainstream leadership and Latino leadership.

- In essence, she took what she learned at the Center for Creative Leadership and she applied those lessons to the grassroots or to our community and said how do we reach this objective of providing the highest quality of leadership training to people across the United States?

- She's so vibrant, she does it with passion and heart and she shows up like that each and every day.

- I use that kind of energy when when I train.

And so my trainings are very different and I integrate music and dance and movement into my work because we're kinetic learners.

We don't learn just by reading, we learn by doing.

- She's also worked with HACD which is an organization that looks at Hispanic corporate interests and how do Latinos move up the corporate ladder, if you will.

- And the goal of the program is to first of all form this network, again, the Young Latino Corporate Network that's gonna help each other to connect them to their culture and their roots to ensure that they never forget where they came from and that one of their goals in life is to give back.

- Every year for I think at least the past 20 years, if not longer.

She trains a cohort of young corporate leaders in major corporations throughout America.

And for a lot of them it's an awakening of how can they be Latino as well as a successful corporate executive.

And that these are not mutually exclusive.

And they're literally now, I don't know hundreds if not thousands of executives that she's trained.

- I just finished training 72 young Latinos that are in corporate America and those of us who have been in social change work all our lives.

We never thought we would see corporate America change but corporate America is changing.

I'm working for some companies now that have sustainability that have diversity and they're really trying to make this switch because they see the future coming.

- Now you're starting to talk about diversity and equity and how important it is for people to show up authentically but Juana's been talking about this for years.

- I've always believed that diversity is not about color or race or ethnicity or sex or anything.

It's about your consciousness.

It's about whether you really believe that every single person on this planet is equal and should be given the same sort of a treatment and support and help and nurturing as everybody else.

In 2002, I realized that most of my work in the future was going to be on the national level and yet Denver is my home.

I thought to myself, well, what could I do to leave a legacy for Denver?

I brought together some of the women that are in the Hall of Fame, Ramona Martinez, Polly Baca, Anna Jo Haynes, Lena Archuleta, who was the first Latina in the Hall of Fame.

We came together and we started the Circle Of Latina Leadership.

These young women came together.

It was a nine month program, so it was very intense.

- It built you up as a person.

It gave you the confidence that you needed to lead.

- [Juana] We have 165 graduates, and if you look across Denver today these women have literally become the next generation of leaders, which was our motto.

- They are in leadership roles at corporations.

They are executive directors of nonprofit organizations doing incredible work for our community.

- That's probably the thing I'm proudest of in my own city is the fact that I've been able to help these young women, find their path and find their way to leadership.

- She's not done yet.

I mean, she's got so much energy and so much more in her.

- I plan in the next 10 years to help build a multicultural nation.

I will do that through teaching and writing and through helping organizations become more diverse and inclusive.

- I think Juana's legacy will ultimately be the impact she's had in communities across the country by making leadership training available at all levels that will produce change and better our communities in ways that we can't even imagine.