How I Learned to Lead Without Splitting Myself in Two

I didn’t grow up speaking fluent Spanish. My accent is imperfect, my vocabulary uneven, and I often find myself caught between two instincts—one shaped by my Mexican culture, the other by my Midwestern upbringing.

I’m not first-generation. I’m not fully bilingual. I am both Mexican and American—and somehow never quite enough of either.

In the winter, I blend in.
In the summer, I get asked where I’m really from.

That quiet friction—of trying to belong without being told—has followed me most of my life. But nowhere has it felt sharper than in the world of ballet.

Ballet is elegant and exacting, yes—but it is also deeply, stubbornly Eurocentric. Its institutions reward those who conform to unspoken ideals of lineage, body type, aesthetic, and voice. As a young director, I quickly learned that success often depended on softening the parts of myself that didn’t quite match the room.

So I adjusted.
I didn’t lie—but I edited.
I minimized my family.
I skipped over my cultural roots in conversations with donors and colleagues.
I chose stories that felt “universal,” which in practice meant safe. Clean. Familiar.

At the time, I believed that’s what leadership required: polish, distance, restraint. I thought maturity meant being neutral. That professionalism meant staying quiet about the things that shaped me most.

Then I became a mother. And suddenly, my presence in the field became a problem.

Motherhood doesn’t fit easily into ballet. It interrupts the illusion of endless availability. It complicates the schedule. It challenges the myth that artistry is best cultivated in isolation. Once I had children, I felt myself being re-categorized—no longer ambitious, no longer emerging, no longer taken as seriously.

At the same time, I began to hear a different kind of criticism—this time from within my own faith community.
You work too much.
You’re never home.
Don’t you think your kids need you more than your dancers do?

Most of these questions came from people who had never met my children. People who had no idea what my home looked like, or what it took to keep both my family and my calling alive.

What they didn’t see were the grant proposals I wrote between feedings.
The rehearsals I ran while pregnant, nauseous, and determined.
The ballets I choreographed late at night, after bedtime stories and lullabies.

They didn’t see the moments my toddlers sat on the studio floor with snacks and crayons while I built a world of movement just beyond their reach.

I do not need to be told what I’ve sacrificed to be here. I carry that knowledge in my bones.

But over the last 14 years of directing, I’ve come to carry something else, too: acceptance. Not the kind that waits for outside validation, but the kind that quietly builds its own table.

I used to believe that leadership meant choosing.
Art or motherhood.
Professionalism or culture.
Faith or industry credibility.

But I no longer believe in those binaries. I believe in integration.

I am Mexican-American. I am a mother of three. I am a choreographer whose work lives at the intersections of faith, grief, legacy, and longing. I do not need to shrink to be taken seriously. I do not need to perform cultural neutrality to access leadership. I do not need to apologize for being formed by complexity.

Ballet was not designed to hold women like me.
It was not built to hold mothers, or bilingualism, or inheritance, or faith.
But that does not mean we do not belong.

“Ballet was not designed to hold women like me.
It was not built to hold mothers, or bilingualism, or inheritance, or faith.
But that does not mean we do not belong.”

I have stopped waiting for permission to lead as myself.

I no longer flatten my stories to make them comfortable.
I no longer erase my motherhood to prove my professionalism.
I no longer dilute my heritage to be legible.

And in doing so, I’ve discovered something remarkable:
I have more to offer—not less—when I bring all of me to the table.

I lead to be whole.
And I lead so the next generation of women won’t have to choose between their integrity and their impact.

Wholeness is not the opposite of leadership.
It’s the kind of leadership the world is starving for.