Latina group hopes to help foster leadership
When Liz Rubio was attending Conroe High School in the late 1990s, she was on track for an Ivy League education and achieving her dream of becoming a lawyer. Then life happened.
Before finishing high school, she became pregnant. She put her college aspirations on hold to work minimum-wage jobs and raise her son.
Rubio grew up the daughter of Mexican immigrants in a small, low-income Hispanic community in Montgomery County called Deerwood. Although the county’s Hispanic population has grown to more than 20 percent as of the 2010 U.S. Census, when Rubio was growing up, the percentage was in the single digits, only reaching 13 percent in 2000.
“I never had somebody to look up to, especially Hispanic role models,” Rubio said.
That’s part of why, 17 years, a bachelor’s degree in political sci-
ence and a job as an awardwinning assistant court coordinator later, Rubio wants to be the role model she lacked growing up.
She, along with about a dozen other women, have come together in a group designed to foster leadership among Hispanic women in the county. The group, called MCLatina, is the brainchild of Maria Banos Jordan, the president of Texas Familias Council, an organization focused on empowering Montgomery County’s Hispanic population.
“I’m reminded how much growth we’re still seeing in Montgomery County of the Hispanic community,” Banos Jordan said. “There’s a huge Latino workforce, they’re just not visible in the community … there’s a tremendous need for Latino leadership.”
Banos Jordan launched the MCLatina program last year after a study by Luis Zayas, a professor at the University of Texas at Austin, addressed statistics that showed teenage Latina girls have a higher rate of suicide and attempting suicide than their nonLatina peers. She hoped that the group would serve as a support system to women and an example to girls as they struggle to find the balance between their family’s culture and the American way of life.
“Being a woman is hard. Being a Hispanic woman is a little bit harder,” Rubio said.
Rubio said that her concern for teenage girls, like her daughter, and the prevalence of depression and self-harm in middle school and high school is one of the main reasons she wanted to join the MCLatina group.
“These are important issues to talk about,” Rubio said. “I can’t turn away. It’s my responsibility.”
“It is important for all young women to see the many diverse faces of caring, accomplished women in their community,” Banos Jordan added.
Rubio was one of the seven women to complete the program last year, and now she’s participating as a “Legacy Leader” to the new members. The group also has a handful of Madrinas — or mentors — who are older women hoping to pass their wisdom on to the next generations.
The women gather at Lone Star College-Montgomery once a month to share their stories and struggles, to take classes on leadership and money management and to learn how they can make a difference in their community.
“Trying to juggle everything at once — school, being a mother, being out there in the community — Maria (Banos Jordan) teaches us how to balance our lives,” Rubio said.
Banos Jordan encourages them to volunteer and be visible at community events. She talked a shy, reluctant Rubio into public speaking and organized a cooperative where MCLatina women teach cooking classes and hold counseling sessions for the women of the low-income Deerwood community.
The group plans to collect food to provide basic supplies for 70 families in Deerwood this Christmas and is organizing a leadership conference for girls at Caney Creek High School near Conroe in February.
“What MCLatina is all about is empowering us so we can empower other girls,” Rubio said.