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Con Dios y ganas todo se puede You can still accomplish your goals.

You just have to rearrange the timeline.

To work hard and just push yourself.

Hola!

And welcome to Salud.

I'm your host, Melanie Mendez Gonzalez.

On today's episode, we're going to visit with Latino leaders from the justice system, higher education and high school athletics.

All of these women have faced challenges and certainly come out on top.

What they have to offer in leadership advice is good advice for everyone.

But first, we're headed to court vamos When compassion for your community meets resilience to guarantee justice, you will find our next guest.

Judge Rose is Speedlin Gonzalez, who presides over Bexar County Court at lot number 13.

Welcome, Judge Hello.

Let's get started by you telling us a little bit about yourself.

I'm a valley girl.

I'm originally from Brownsville, Texas, and I was born and raised there and I came to San Antonio in 1985 after transferring in from the oldest military academy in the country, in Norwich University in Vermont, which is where I started my my undergrad education.

And I got an upper respiratory infection in my second year and I came back to Texas and my parents being the Mexicano that they were, they said, you're not going back up there.

And if you want to go to school, we'll pay for it.

But you're going to St Mary's University, and the only time I left was in the mid-nineties and I went to Austin on a on a job.

It was for juvenile probation.

And then my dad got sick in Brownsville.

So I went back to Brownsville for about a year, during which I use that time to apply to go to law school.

Then I got in at Saint Mary's, so I came back and I've been here ever since.

Now you're presiding Judge, so you have a long career of law.

What kind of challenges have you faced?

In my late twenties, I was still in the social work fields.

I graduated from St Mary's in December of 1986.

I walked the stage in 87 and I had a full scholarship to graduate school.

I was supposed to get my master's in public administration, and I was a product of the eighties.

I was 21, and I was hitting the club and I ended up dropping out.

And, you know, I was still of that generation that feared her parents.

I wasn't about to call them and say I dropped out of school and I messed up the scholarship.

And I remember talking to God and saying, is this as good as it's going to get?

And lo and behold, I get into law school and I, I work for the same populations that I used to work for before doing family law, criminal defense work in the drug courts, work in mental health court.

Now, I sit on this bench and I'm working with the same populations that I was working for before.

So it's been a transition into a different way of serving those populations.

In serving your community over the years in your career, you've also become a leader in our community.

So how would you describe your leadership style?

Honest.

Some people would say in your face, I remember an elected official telling me I was a bull in a china shop.

And I think that there is an aversion to honesty and truthfulness.

It comes across as being blunt and people said, you need to be nice or you need to sugarcoat things.

And my response has been, and what purpose does that serve?

Where if we start with blunt honesty now we know exactly where we stand with each other.

So that's been a challenge to be seen that way by the people that I serve.

I'm often told that people see me as competition.

I'm like, I don't want your job.

I love what I do right now from the bench, it's.

A you have people who work for you as in their jobs, but you're also leading people in your community.

Judge, how do you navigate those two roles of leadership?

Well, with the two people that work for me are Olga, who's my court reporter, and Sybil, who's my court coordinator.

We as a team have a job to do, which is the administration of daily work in this court.

And we have to keep those boundaries when it comes to community.

I have to remain open to seeing how I can serve them as a friend, how I can serve them as a family member, how I can serve you as your elected official.

So it's almost, to use a cliche, case by case basis.

Judge, what would you say to a fellow LGBT plus community who might feel targeted or discriminated against?

The feeling is real and the feeling is that the feeling is valid.

I've been targeted many times.

I've been discriminated against many times.

So the question is, what are you going to do about it?

In many cases, I joke, we're better looking and better dressed than the rest of everyone, but I think it's important that we have high visibility.

I tell my community that it's important for me to sit where I sit, at least for the time being, being the best that I can be at what I do.

But it's important that I be a role model that kids, the teen agers see me in the position that I'm in and say, if she can do it, I can do it too.

So speaking of role models with sometimes become our mentors, who have been your mentors?

First and foremost, my mom, she grew up in the shadow of World War Two in South Texas.

She was a proud America.

And if you told her, you know, you're Mexican-American, she would get insulted and she'd say, There's nothing Mexican about me.

I'm an American, 100%.

She was strongly patriotic.

She was the one that said, you cannot speak English with an accent if you're going to succeed in this country.

And she went back in her forties to get her education and got her bachelor's and her master's degree in five years were summa cum laude, working full time, raising my brother and me.

My dad, on the other hand, was a mexican citizen and he was very proud of being a Mexicano.

He did not speak English and he refused to have my brother learn my brother and I learned Portugal or Tex-Mex, and we had to speak perfect Spanish to him.

So my brother and I grew up in a very bipolar home.

We had curanderismo and trajabos in this corner and we had an altar and a rosary.

And the other quarter we had Spanish over there and we had English over here.

We were very immersed in both cultures.

And then I have to give it to the teachers of South Texas.

I can tell you every single teacher that I had through the end of junior high, they did a wonderful job of instilling values, of showing us the value of education, of showing us morality and how to treat each other.

Well.

What achieving could mean for a family from South Texas?

So you mentioned that you would love for your teachers to see how their work has shown up in you and your career.

And one of those things is that briefly.

Yes, tell me about that and why it's so important for me.

I always had a platform of how we could improve the outcomes in this court.

We all know that Bear County has the highest numbers of domestic violence cases in the state, and so I had a very good mentor, judicial mentor and Judge L Alonso.

And when he found out what I was running for, he said, I need to talk to you about some numbers I have to defend this in the court.

We're coming in, having been arrested under the influence of alcohol, cocaine, meth, or any combination of almost 100% of them were self disclosing that they were adult survivors of childhood trauma and childhood abuse.

I was fortunate enough to meet my wife, Stacey.

She's a published expert on trauma and addiction.

We had the the format and the outline of what a specialty court could look like.

And a specialty court has to include drug treatment.

And no one was really buying into the idea that we could treat them so that they would not re-offend.

And Judge Alonso said, let's try writing a bill.

So Stacey and I, we wrote a bill that created a specialty court in County Court 13, and that ended up being House Bill 3529 and it created a whole court.

And what it is, it is a first time offender program.

It provides trauma informed wrap around substance abuse treatment for those who want it.

That is incredible.

Judge, when you hear the phrase a successful Latino leader, what are qualities that immediately come to mind?

Latinas don't give up.

No, to us means just not right now.

No means.

Let's find another way to do this.

No means a challenge.

We see a problem and we tackle it, especially if it affects our children, if it affects our families.

If it affects our community, absolutely.

So my last question is, as a Latina, as a member of the LGBT community, people who want to be a judge, what advice do you give to those future leaders?

I'll give the advice that we have to prepare for the opportunity to come knocking.

The worst feeling is to have an opportunity be presented and you're not ready.

And so what does that mean?

I'll give you two examples.

For Latinos that want to lead in the public sector, our biggest downfall is to jump in without any education or training on how to run a campaign.

You need to know what you're doing so you don't fall prey to the coyotes, to the people that just want to come and get money from you, and then they leave you high and dry.

Women need to get invested in their own future and their own success for people that are looking to go to law school and becoming lawyers or a judge, I say to you, prepare our gente has this costumbre of the night before we light a candle and we pray.

I'm sorry.

That's not going to help you score high on your LSAT or help you pass your exams in law school.

And so that's what I say to our hand to prepare.

That is valuable advice that we can all take into consideration.

Thank you so much.

We appreciate you.

Thank you.

So tell me about your village.

Gosh, I have a very strong village comprised of comadres Comadres are basically women that uplift me, that help me, that provide me advice.

And it's important to have that very strong network.

When some leaders walk through a door of opportunity, they leave it open for others to follow.

That's what our next guest does.

Doctor Loraine Pulido is the communications manager at Via and and Alamo College's board trustee.

Welcome, Lorraine.

Thank you, Melanie.

To me, you are a role model for so many moms who have raised a family while earning a successful career.

But you started as a teen mom at Highlander High School when you were 16.

That's correct.

Tell us what that was like, Larry.

As you can imagine, it was very difficult at first.

I thought my whole life was coming to a halt.

But I was very blessed to have teachers and classmates and family members that really wanted me to succeed.

They supported me.

They helped me.

And when I had my daughter, I only missed two days of school because I was an honor student and I really wanted to continue with my goals, which included attending college.

So I surrounded myself with people that really cared and that wanted to help me.

And it is true, their contribution to my life that I made it through and you never forget that.

You never forget the people that were there for you.

And where did you find the support to continue on with not only one degree, but three degrees?

A very similar situation when I went to college to the University of Pennsylvania and I took my daughter with me and I was married at the time.

And so both my husband and I were going to school at the same time, and we had to kind of manage the care for our daughter.

And unfortunately, we ended up being divorced and I ended up being a single mom before I graduated from college.

But I had such a strong network of friends that really wanted to help me to succeed.

And that's how I made it through to earn my degree from the University of Pennsylvania, which is an Ivy League.

Then I decided a couple of years later to pursue my master's, and I did so at Columbia University.

Then I returned home to San Antonio and I still felt that hunger to succeed because my daughter motivated me.

Having a child depend on you for their livelihood is the biggest motivation that you could ever have.

And so that's when I decided I needed to go further and pursue that Ph.D. And I like university, and I'm so grateful that I did, because now as an adjunct professor, I'm able to give back to my students and also through my service in the Alamo Colleges Board of Trustees.

I feel that I can relate to our students better because of the experiences that I had.

Along the way.

You've been a working mom as well.

You have a very impressive career in communications.

What are some of the challenges that you face in those roles?

There have been quite a number of challenges, as you can imagine, especially being a woman, being a Latina, being first generation.

There were all those challenges.

But I try to take those challenges to actually motivate me and to kind of give me that energy that I needed to prove people wrong.

Those people that had misconceptions about teen moms not being able to make it in life, I wanted to do everything I could to prove them wrong and to help my daughter, to see me as a role model and to help uplift others through my story.

Lauren, what advice would you give to a young woman today who might be going through what you went through?

So I would say don't give up.

You can still accomplish your goals.

You just have to rearrange the timeline and determine who are going to be the best resources for you, whether it's financial resources that are out there.

There's many programs to help or human resources, whether it's your family, your friends, professors, advisors ask for help.

You are definitely not alone.

Absolutely.

Here feel it consists of people from your families, your friends that also you mentioned being a professor.

And I imagine that that comes from both your peers, but as well as your students.

Tell me a little bit about what it's like to mentor students who maybe you see yourself in today.

It is the most rewarding experience that anyone could ever have to feel that something you've done said can help to elevate someone else.

Especially young minds are students which are so vulnerable and most of them that I teach at A&M come from very humble means.

And so to have someone there to to help them, to let them know that they can do it, that their background, if it was in any way, you know, challenging, does not define them, that they can turn it around and they can do it.

So when they hear my story, I think it gives validity to what they may be going through.

And I'm still in contact.

22 years of teaching at different schools and I'm still mentoring my students that are now, you know, grown adults fulfilling themselves in their careers.

It's the most rewarding job.

I can tell.

You love it, Lorraine.

You give back through mentoring your students.

You have raised your family.

You work for VA. What made you decide to turn and go into public service?

It's always been something in my heart.

If you look at what I said in my yearbook, it said that I really wanted to be an elected official at that time.

I think I put I wanted to be congresswoman, but the sentiment is the same.

I wanted to be of service as an elected official to my community, particularly in the South Side where I've remained.

I grew up in the South Side, and that's where I still reside.

And I wanted to serve in a position where I could impact education, particularly higher education, because of my 22 years of teaching at the college level, I feel that I'm the most in-tune with what the students are going through.

During the pandemic, it was even more evident that that's where the Lord wanted me to be because I felt like I could relate.

When there were people with with food insecurity, not knowing if they were still going to have a roof over their heads, not knowing if they were going to have a job.

Those are all situations where I myself have been in at some point in my life.

And so I think I was able to practice more compassion and more love and support.

So I hear in your story the impact that you're making in type in the people, in the community, which in turn make your community better.

What are the challenges for you when you're in that seat or when you're talking to the community?

It's not having enough financial and human resources to help everyone that needs help.

We've been slowly going through and and checking off boxes.

Now we're providing, you know, more resources.

And we were able to provide some assistance to our students by relieving them of some of their their debt.

For one of the semesters during COVID, we've been able to use some of the CARES Act funds.

But gosh, it would be nice, of course, to have additional resources to help all the students and make sure that there's nothing getting in the way of their pursuing their degree and finishing successfully.

So if a quality of feeling Latino leader is being heard, what message do you want to send to the community?

You know, we are here for you.

We're going to make a difference.

Join me.

Let's not just talk the talk, but let's walk the walk.

If the pandemic has taught us anything is that we are stronger together.

Absolutely Lorraine.

And it's been so wonderful to be with you today in this conversation.

Thank you for inviting me.

It seems like nowadays more people are attending women's sports.

Do you see that?

Oh, absolute.

I've seen a huge increase in our attendance and, you know, our audience for the last couple of years.

That's awesome.

On the court, winning is everything, but the coaching doesn't stop there for our next guest, her impact can be seen in her athlete's development and service in her community.

Please welcome Jessica Cardenas, Director of girls athletics and head basketball coach at South Side.

Welcome, Jessica.

Hi.

How's it going?

So, Jessica, we're we're south side now, but tell us about where you came from.

You grew up in San Antonio, correct?

I grew up on the south side of San Antonio.

I went to Harlan Dale High School.

I attended Texas Lutheran.

And then my first job outside of when I graduated from Texas Lutheran, I came back and I started coaching at South San for a couple years and then here I am, so I'll see.

Tell me about your parents, Jessica.

What impact did they have on your leadership style today?

They had such a great impact on me.

They came over from Mexico.

I was born and raised here.

But, you know, speaking only Spanish, they had to find a way to make it work for them and myself and my brother.

So once we started our life here, we I went to Harlandale and they were very impactful because in ever gave up.

Being the first to go to college at Texas Lutheran.

What were the challenges?

You had been there on your own?

It was rough at first.

Just because I lived on campus, a lot of questions that I had.

It seemed like everybody knew the answers but me.

You know, college was a thing that I knew I wanted to do and I was going to do, but I was just trying to figure it out.

As I went with financial aid, my classes, what I was majoring in, I had to go out and find help because I just didn't know the answers.

One of the things that stayed consistent in your life is basketball.

So what is it about basketball that gives you the drive to continue to figure things out?

I just I really enjoyed play basketball ever since I was little.

I just remember in high school, I it was one of those things where like, I think I'm pretty good at this.

You know, once I figured that out, I ended up playing at TLU and then after after I graduated from TLU it was kind of weird.

I my senior year, I just didn't want to play any more.

For some reason.

I just I was, I didn't know what to do.

I just wanted nothing to do with basketball.

But then I was approached by a former coach and she said, Hey, you should try to coach basketball.

I think you would be good at it.

And I was I was like, okay, I'll try it.

You know?

And ever since then, I fell in love with the game again.

It's a coaching is a whole different thing, correct?

Yes, it.

Is.

So tell me about how you feel when you are leading these young athletes that probably look up to you as a college player.

It's one of those things where I try to coach them up to their best ability.

So I make sure I, I do what's right for them and I make sure I'm always prepared.

And because I know they're looking up to me when you come in and it's one of those things where, coach, you know, what are we doing?

And I have an answer for them as, as they come in.

You know, I just one of my biggest thing is I just try to lead by example.

What are the challenges of always being on as an example for for your efforts.

In front of your athletes?

You can never have a bad day because they look up to you.

You never know what type of day they're having once they come to you.

You always want to be that example.

You always want to be that person that they can depend on.

The way I treat my athletes is the way I want my children to be treated.

And that's one of the biggest thing I I've learned as the years have gone by.

You, it's you don't just deal with the most talented athletes.

You deal with all the athletes across across the board.

So you want to treat each kid like they're your own.

As a female coach and a coach of girl athletes, how much of your role do you think is for being an advocate for girls in athletics?

I feel like you have to be an advocate.

If you don't speak up, then no one else.

Well, you are the the person on the in the front to try to make sure everything is fair and everything is equal.

You know, you have to advocate for your kids.

So you're also a female coach in a mostly male dominated job.

So tell me a little bit about what the challenges are in that role.

I feel like female coaches and male coaches nowadays are almost have almost evened out.

There aren't as many challenges as they were in the past.

Now, you know, I feel like strong female women are holding their own in this in this profession.

What about mentors in your space?

Who else do you look up to in in being a coach or being an athletic director?

When I first started coaching, I had two mentors.

I had Bernadine Raine, who was actually the coach that told me, she's the you should try coaching.

I think you would be good at it.

And once I did get hired, Coach Lucy Sanchez at South End was a huge mentor for me.

She she showed me the way to go.

And, you know, I learned things from her.

I learned how to do things and then also learned what not to do.

But now I have it's a group of us.

It's myself, Lori Wilson, who's athletic director a little, and then Susie Gonzalez, who's the assistant athletic director at Sit US three.

We kind of work together and we just try to run ideas through each other and we just want to make sure what's best for the kids in our program.

So it sounds like you have a great group of other strong Latinas to support you as well.

Yeah.

So what is some advice that you've received that you didn't actually take.

A couple of years ago?

One of the one of the some of the advice I received was, you can't save every kid.

And I didn't believe it.

But then I experienced it.

And it's true.

You can as a as a coach, as a teacher, you just cannot save every kid you can try.

But it's not going to happen.

Jessica, you spend most of your career all day with young girl athletes.

What advice do you give to them?

Just work hard.

It's just, you know, a lot of people or a lot of athletes try to take shortcuts or just don't want to put in the work.

One of the biggest things I asked all my female athletes is to work hard and just push yourself, you know, and believe in yourself.

Because if you don't believe in yourself, no one's going to believe in you.

That's one of the biggest things I tell them, because a lot of times female athletes tend to doubt themselves and just kind of not truly believe in themselves.

But I mean, how do you how do they want coaches to believe in them if they don't believe them?

So thank you so much, Jessica, for being with us as well.

Thank you.

Three dynamic leaders, Judge Rosie Speedlin Gonzalez, Dr. Lorraine Pulido and coach Jessica Cardenas.

I hope you got some good advice and motivation from our guests on this show.

Thank you for being with us.

And make sure to join us next time on Salud Nos vemos