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Welcome to a salute celebrating South Texas Latina leaders.

I'm your host, Melanie Mendez Gonzalez.

This episode will introduce you to the diverse talents of three impressive women.

Whether it's developing corporate communication strategies, building a public relations business, or continuing to thrive in a successful acting career.

These Latinas lead.

Salud!

Starts now.

Being an actress is a dream career for many young women.

Imagine having success in that field, not just for a short time, but for decades, and still creating a fantastic life as a mother and community member.

Such is the case for Ara Celi , who's legendary on camera sign off, is still going strong.

Just inside loop 1604.

My name is Sally and I am a very proud mother wife, friend, business owner, actress I have.

I kind of wear all kinds of hats and I'm so, so glad to be a part of this beautiful community here in San Antonio.

I was born and raised in El Paso, so I had a very strong family.

I was one of six we didn't have any means to brag about.

My parents were not educated.

My dad made his living working at the flea market.

That's how he supported all six of us.

So I've been working since I was six years old.

I started cleaning my grandma's house and she actually sold the flea market as well.

So I helped her from 6 to 16 where I could actually work, and I worked at the movie theater.

But I've always had a very strong work ethic, and I also understand the importance of family.

I am not at all like any of my siblings.

I'm second oldest, but I till this day, I'm still the one who kind of calls the shots and make sure everything's okay and if anything goes wrong, they come to other.

I used to dance and sing for my brothers and sisters, and I'd make them laugh.

And I really, I really felt like that was something special.

So I understood the importance of even on watching a commercial on television.

Way back in the day, like the Mikey's Life cereal or, you know, or or even when I watch Drew Barrymore on E.T.

and I just remember thinking, I want to do what she's doing.

I don't know how my mom can only hit that like, that's not real.

That's television.

You don't do that.

You can't do that.

But I thought, for sure you can do it.

Just didn't know how, but I knew I would get there.

I want to see.

I was on saved by the Bell.

The college years.

I was on Buffy the Vampire Slayer.

I was a cast member of the soap opera All My Children.

I've done amazing films and shows and novellas and theater.

I've done it all.

But my favorite life gets to my heart still today.

Puts a smile on my face.

I did a movie called looking for Lola and I play Lola and it just makes me laugh.

It was a silly 90s rom com film, you know?

I mean, does it get better than that?

There were two gentlemen in my life that that really made me who I am today.

I still believe that in my soul.

Their names are Richard Guy and Rex Holt.

They were known as the beauty gurus here in Texas.

They had five.

Miss Texas go on to win five miss USA, and they were actually based in El Paso, but they also had a house in Beverly Hills, and I competed for the Michele Paso.

And I got to know them.

And it was so intimidating because all of these beautiful women that were competing for this Miss El Paso, they all seemed so groomed and put together and they had coaches.

I didn't know this world like I didn't.

I wasn't raised with any of that.

I was more comfortable with the seamstresses helping them.

And these two men saw something in me.

They're no longer with us.

But I think that they loved the fact that I was so grounded.

My family was so important to me, and they knew that from the very beginning.

I wasn't a title chaser.

I wanted an experience.

And I got that, and they took me all over the world with them, and they dressed me like a doll, and they were the ones who taught me to be proud of who I am.

When I started auditioning in Hollywood, they were telling me, you know, you could look Persian, Lebanese, Italian.

You have so many different looks to you, you should change your name.

But I want to change my name, although people didn't know how to pronounce it.

But Guy and Rex said, why don't you don't change your name, just go by your name.

Ara Celi.

And I told him the whole way my name is actually split up.

So that's how I my sag and after card acting.

I've always been to Sally and it worked out really well because it didn't then put me in that pigeonhole of just a Latina.

They wanted us to be the Latina actress, which I didn't understand why.

There are all kinds of roles and and races and like, why do you always have to put like a label on me?

I don't understand it, but it was it was the time.

My name's Sally and I want to take you on a tour of.

I was so happy to work, like I didn't care what the role was.

But you know what?

You get credit, you get roles, you get recognition.

It's building your character.

It's building your your presence.

And you're getting to work with directors and people.

If you're likable, if you're, easy to work with, if you're kind of you're compassionate.

It's all of these really simple little values.

I think that that will keep you working forever and ever.

Because winners don't just play the game, they own it.

You know, my mother, when I was very young, would often say they make us illegal candidates.

And that's the best piece of advice that she ever gave me, and that I have passed on to my children and to anybody I come across.

And it's basically, tell me who your friends are, and I'll tell you who you are, because it's the truth.

It's who you surround yourself with.

And I want to help somebody that's going to be kind and respectful and generous and grounded, because we just kind of hold each other up.

That's the only way that we'll keep in the limelight, keep in the world of success.

Keeping the greatness is by helping each other get their.

The biggest challenge I ever faced was understanding that it's not personal.

If I don't get a role, it's not because of something I did wrong.

Once I get to a place of being called back 3 or 4 times, or the test and network test, I'm just as good as anybody else up there.

It's just the network decided to go in a different direction.

God knows exactly where you're supposed to be, exactly at the right moment, exactly at the right time.

Don't let anybody dim your light.

Don't let anybody tell you how you should become.

Don't let anybody say, well, now, because you are a mom, you have to be a certain way, don't you know who you are?

You're the only person who knows who you really are.

So just be the best version of you you can possibly be.

By golly, I'm so honored to be in the parade every year and I see these young girls.

I go, I'm not Sally, your pa.

You're my whole life, but you've been my entire childhood or whatever, because you've been watching me for 20 years.

And I want to tell them, get off the phone.

Don't pay attention to the phone.

Or you think life is a filter.

You think everybody lives in filters?

No.

We're supposed to have wrinkles.

We're supposed to have character.

We're supposed to be able to move our faces and be who we are.

That just shows that we're alive.

I think it's really important to surround yourself with with good people.

I have great girlfriends.

That's another thing I would tell women.

It's so important to have great girlfriends.

When you find your group, hold on to them and really trust them because they start to understand you and know you.

My girls know when something's up and I won't even invite them to the house, but they'll show up.

They're like, how are you doing?

What's going on?

And I love that.

I thought I was going to retire, I really thought I was going to retire, I thought I was done with commercials.

I've been on the air doing car commercials for 20 years, which is pretty magnificent.

But now that I face this, like empty nester syndrome, I seem to have fallen even more in love with my community.

And I thought, you know, this is a beautiful love affair that I have somehow created with people through, and the only way you can do it is through the lens really, truly to to reach hundreds of thousands, if not millions of people.

So I think I will continue on this beautiful little wild commercial adventure of mine and maybe I dabble in acting again.

I don't know, I, I sort of feel like maybe I closed that chapter.

I'm not sure, to be honest.

I don't know how I feel about that because although my children will be gone, I still feel like I want to go out and watch them now live their lives.

But what does mama do now?

I don't know, I really don't know.

It's like dan dan dan To be continued.

What does a Latina CEO look like?

Sound like?

Feel like, you know, she's got colorful clothing, she's got red lipstick, and she has big earrings, you know, and that's professional and that's acceptable.

The hardships along the way didn't stop Rachel Benavides.

Despite facing personal tragedies and a change of professional plans, she carried on.

And today she's enjoying leading one of San Antonio's largest public agencies.

My name is Rachel Benavides, and I'm vice president of strategy and service delivery at via metropolitan transit.

Welcome to the Metropolitan Transit Keep S.A.

moving telephone town hall.

In my role at VRA, I am essentially a storyteller.

And what that means is that I want to bring meaning and understanding to the community about what V does, the services that the provides, the communities that we touch, and what it means to really be connected.

There is no typical day for us at via.

When you have an operation this large and you provide services for a community, that relies on you, this much and you're as pivotal as you are to daily operations, you have to be ready for just about anything.

If I do have to say that most days are really, really productive, we talk to a lot of people in the community.

We talk to people who use our service.

We talk to our public partners, stakeholders.

We interact with the media and others who are helping us to tell our story and share the information that needs to get out into the public.

I was born and raised in the Rio Grande Valley, proud Brownsville girl, in the late 1900s.

My whole family is from the Valley.

Of course, I was educated there.

My first job, if I'm being honest, was one Saturday at the chick fil A in Sunrise Mall in Brownsville, Texas.

And, I had a family member who owned a franchise there, and they needed help.

On a really busy Saturday, they called a few of us teenage cousins, and by the end of the day, I had quit because my friends were at the beach.

And that's where I wanted to be.

My first grown up job, was at the Brownsville Herald in Brownsville, Texas, and this is my hometown paper.

So it was a particular point of pride for me.

I was a college student at UT in Austin at the time, and, my mother became ill with cancer.

Back home in Brownsville.

My older brother and I were both in college there.

He had seeing Edwards and me at UT, and he was closer to finishing than I was.

And so we talked and decided that I would go home, take care of mom, get a job, and that I could come back, whereas he was almost done.

I said, you stay.

What ended up happening was that I got a job at the school paper because I re-enrolled at the UT branch down there in Brownsville.

So I got a job at the school paper work study job.

Luckily and thankfully, I, became editor in chief of that paper in the next five years.

And that was a turn in my story that I didn't expect, but one that has brought me to where we are here today.

And it's taught me that sometimes you have to make your own opportunities.

Sometimes when that door closes and the window opens, you gotta climb through the window because there's something waiting for you on the other side.

It will determine what the road is like for you to what you consider success.

My family is a working family.

My grandfathers were both from Mexico, my grandmother's from the valley and their stories are very poignantly reflected in my.

My grandmother on my mother's side raised ten children, while my grandfather was a laborer and a fisherman and family man.

And I was raised in that environment.

Drive me through you challenges.

And the thing is not to give up on what you were doing, but to figure out how to move forward from where you are.

My parents married young, and, they raised my brother and I, and they taught us that if you want something, you have to work for it.

They taught us that circumstances don't define you.

There's always a way.

And I noticed now that their words really, really ring true when I find challenges, when things get hard, when things don't go the way that I expected them to, you find another way.

I'm fortunate to have been offered a lot of leadership positions in the jobs that I've done, and I know that that's the result of hard work, but it's also the result of having mentors and sponsors, people who will help you on your road to success, but who will also advocate for you in rooms that you're not in.

And I can't stress how important it enough it is for people, particularly for young women, to understand that early and to start building those relationships.

A mentor will always sort of give you advice and their lived experiences, and you can take that and apply it and make sure that you're you're finding your path the best way that you can.

A sponsor will make sure that there are opportunities for you and point you in the right direction and speak for you when there are decision makers happening.

I'll say this.

And it's not because I want to give up my power, or because we don't have a say in what we do.

But some of the most important decisions about your career are made when you're not in the room, right?

Promotions, new jobs, hiring you after interviewing you.

Those decisions are made based on the relationships that you have.

The impression that you give, the way that you make people feel, not just about you, but about how you feel about the work.

People will hire you based on your past performance.

But what you also need to realize is they're hiring you based on your potential, what you can do, not just what you have done.

It's important for me to give back and to inspire and organize others so that we can give back.

In March, people may not remember what you said, but they'll always remember how you made them feel.

And that is the truth.

And you can apply that to your life and to your interactions and to your relationships the way that it fits best.

One of the biggest compliments that I ever got from someone that I've worked with, she started out by saying, you know, I was really worried when I came to work in your department.

I heard that you were tough and I was concerned about what that was going to be like for me.

But by working with you, I got better.

I learned to raise expectations for myself.

And if that's the only thing that I ever do in my career, that's that's enough for me, is that I touched someone's life.

And I taught them what I knew, and I changed their perspective about what excellence means.

Be responsive and not reactive.

And I had to really break that one down.

Because it's very easy to react like it's easy to react to an email.

If someone sends you an email and you feel like you're being attacked, or it's really easy to just get on and be like, you know, but the professional person is the one that takes a step back and says, I'm going to learn how to respond.

Successful women are rarely satisfied with just one area of expertise.

Take Melissa Taylor Williamson she started a public relations, branched out into podcasting, writing a column and then writing a book about public relations.

And did I mention she's also a PR consultant and trainer?

Melissa shares her tips on promoting yourself and your brand with our Jesse.

They go, yeah.

Good to see you, Jesse Long.

Happy to see you.

Please have a seat.

We have a lot to talk about.

So much going on.

Exactly, exactly.

Obviously your public relations expert, you've even published two books, including one for Latinas.

Let's talk about what is public relations, not just in terms of media relations.

There's much more to public relations.

Absolutely.

Public relations for me, is a major point of view on how I view all communications type of work.

It is a people first point of view in which our goal is to build two way, win win relationships between organizations and the publics they should be serving.

So it's a long term, long game strategy, just like any relationship.

Jesse, you don't want a faucet, you don't want to try to make it happen too quickly or organically.

It has to build with the right action steps and, you know, communication.

With that in mind, let's talk about social media, because everyone's on social media.

What's the best way to navigate it, especially if you're in business or say for instance, you're looking for a job, right?

What's the best way to use social media to your advantage?

We want to think about social media, very much like we would take the same amount of steps and responsibility if we were going to set ourselves up to be prepared and speaking on stage.

It is literally public speaking.

It is the communication and broadcast channels of today.

Jesse, so we want to respect it as such.

Social media can really help our personal brands or professional brands.

If we curate a particular image that's in alignment with how we want to be seen, right?

Reputation builds over time, but can be destroyed so quickly by bad behavior or even inattentiveness to how we post and what we do online.

So I tell clients and my family members and even my kids that everything we do online can be seen from what we like now, what we view on certain channels, how we engage and particularly when we comment, something we do online can live forever, even if we don't intended to, when we try to delete.

So we want to be very thoughtful and make intentional steps of what we post online.

I've always said social media can be your best friend or your worst enemy, depending on how you use it.

And that's why, again, what are some of the biggest mistakes that some people make when using social media?

So putting public relations type principles on how we perform on social media would be helpful.

So we want to post on social.

We want to comment on social.

We want to curate on social with when we're in a good space, when we have a cool head, when we are a little more lighthearted.

Right?

We're, intentional with what we write and how we write.

So we don't want to have typos.

We don't want to have photos of us in compromising situations.

And sometimes that's as simple as having an alcoholic drink in our hand, right?

Depending on who you serve and what you do, that might not be in alignment with the brand you want to project or can project.

That's excellent advice.

Excellent advice because some people say, well, let me just do this right quick.

Yeah.

And that could be a big mistake long term.

Absolutely.

You talked about professional and personal branding okay.

As far as a business goes, how do you develop that brand and should you be ready to maybe if should your brand evolve obviously with your business?

Well, we hope as people we evolve, right.

Every year we should be growing a little bit and educating ourselves a little bit further.

So our brand, just like our style or fashion style should, you know, be updated every now and then, should evolve with time and with feedback that we get.

Right.

So if we have intentions and goals that we want to advance in our career or be seen as a leader, as a thought leader, for example, right.

Well, then we need to be, creating and producing and sharing interesting and, innovative thoughts and content.

Leaders are often well liked and rooted for if they're shown as both competent and warm.

So I think about my post a lot on LinkedIn, for example, that not only am I showing I'm smart, but I also have to be a little bit likable, right?

Likable enough to work with.

So I share a lot of encouragement and kudos with people.

And, you know, as simple as liking a post can show engagement online, but sharing something you learned or takeaways is also very helpful, right?

Those insights that we learned the hard way, we want to document them and share them.

And it's a very smart way to use social, in a positive way, in a way that long term is going to be well received.

When I think of brand, I think a lot of people when they think of brand is what's your best known for either yourself or your company or what you do.

But what if you don't like what people are saying or what people are thinking what that brand says?

How is it possible to change that?

When we think about branding, we think about brand pillars.

What do you stand for, Jesse?

And so for me, for example, if I want to project a certain image of being reliable and trustworthy and, you know, likable, fun to work with, right then those those are the kind of content pillars that I will stand up on, social media or things I want to share.

So I'm going to show myself speaking, I'm going to show myself helping others or volunteering.

For example, I'm going to show some fun and happy moments.

Positive moments.

You're going to see me encouraging people online.

So I'm thinking about what I want to project, and then I'm actually taking the steps to project and do that.

The fact that, again, so many young people are on so many platforms of social media, and when they grow up, they'll realize, oh geez, I can't believe I said that.

And like you say, sometimes it'll come back to haunt you.

So again, what advice can you give young people, especially as they're preparing to get into the real world?

Take a look at your social media and look at what is the narrative that you're sharing there.

What's the story that you're sharing?

What are your photos say about you?

What do your video clips say about you?

Not just your friends, correct?

Anywhere you're tagged or anything that you interact with?

Again, if you like something, even if you watch a video, sometimes people can see that.

So the algorithm will show you what the social media, bubble thinks of you and you want to think about.

Am I projecting the image that I want to my building the reputation online that I want to have follow me when recruiters search me up?

Are they seeing what I want them to see?

And so I think if we live more intentionally offline and online, it can be congruent and more authentic on social media.

But like you mentioned, a recruiter is going to say, I see you posted this when you're a junior in high school.

Did you mean that?

I hope you've changed because this this is not good.

That's what I like to tell all young people, and really people in general, Jesse's, that we are not always thinking about what we post or sometimes what our friends post and tag us in.

Right?

So we want to have controls on our account and make sure that we're very thoughtful about the image we are curating out there, because we tend to think of the here and now, correct?

Not realizing, hello, ten, 20 years down the road that, and that is where public relations principles can very much help people.

Is it?

And that is a long term, long game thinking.

And you're like, well, today I feel this way, but tomorrow will I be proud of this moment.

Anything else that you think people should never forget when dealing with social media and your brand?

Absolutely.

I want people to remember to use social media intentionally for a purpose when you're not in a good mood.

Any time I tell clients past 11 p.m., nothing good happens on social.

We want to take ourselves intentionally offline, for example, to right if it is a hard time for you, that is something that you want to think about and say, you know what, maybe I want to share this aspect of my life with this partner.

I'm going to take a pause.

So I think just being very conscious of what we do online is a great step forward.

And on that very positive and encouraging note.

Thank you so much for being here.

Thank you Jesse.

Such a pleasure.

We all have it in us to do something more and just, you know, strive for the best, you know, lead wherever you are, no matter what your job is, what you're doing in the community, even if it's, you know, I'm a stay at home mom.

Be the best.

You know, if you're volunteering somewhere, try to, like, find a way to find a solution.

Wow.

Talent, perseverance and personal branding.

Great stories from these Texas ladies.

Thanks for being with us and we'll see you again next week.

To celebrate more Latino leaders here on Salud, I'm Melanie Mendez.

Gonzalez Nos Vemos.