Around the time I was headed to the National Association of Hispanic Journalists convention in New Orleans, U.S. Rep. Brandon Gill was on television holding up a picture of a pink “Latina Power” hat sold in the Smithsonian's National Museum of American History gift shop.
Gill, a Republican from Texas, looked at Anthea M. Hartig, director of the museum, during a congressional oversight hearing on the Smithsonian Institution and asked: “What is Latina power?”
He wasn’t really asking.
Gill’s question was an indictment, a challenge to whether the Smithsonian should be selling something he deemed inappropriate.
It wasn’t just about whether the hat belonged, but whether we Latinas belonged.
Hartig answered that the hat represents the “forces derived from being a Latina.”
Ana Navarro later offered another definition on The View: Behind the Table podcast. She called Latina power “a sisterhood that lifts each other up because the circumstances and the conditions in this country often want to force us down.”
Amen.
That definition stayed with me because while Ana was talking about Latina power, I was living my own version of it.
I was sitting inside a small room at a Marriott in downtown New Orleans last week with five extraordinary journalists.
Around the table were women who have spent their careers expanding what journalism can look like and just who gets to shape it.
There was Tamoa Calzadilla, managing editor and publisher of palabra, NAHJ’s bilingual multimedia news platform; Luisa Ortiz Pérez, co-founder of Vita Activa, a helpline supporting women journalists and activists facing online abuse and gender-based violence; Martina Guzmán, founder of VERDAD, an AI tool exposing disinformation on Spanish-language radio; Maritza Félix, founder of Conecta Arizona, a Spanish-language news service serving immigrant communities; and Desirée Yépez, managing producer of national news at Radio Bilingüe, the leading Latino public radio network.
And then there was me.
Six women. Six different paths. Six different platforms, but a shared understanding that what we have built, what we are still building, matters most when we use it to make room for others.
Somewhere along the way, we started to call ourselves Las Seis. The six.
I was leading a conversation about what comes after the titles we’ve earned, something I’ve spent the last year thinking deeply about, and about the difference between titles and influence.
What I've come to appreciate during my own transition is that titles are given to you by employers. But influence is earned. It shows the world what you’ve done with the seat you’ve been given.
Titles belong to institutions. Influence belongs to you.
And there we were: six women, six veteran journalists still building, still creating, still asking ourselves what comes next. But just as important, reaching back even as we move forward.
Out of generosity, but also out of necessity because despite being surrounded by Latinas at NAHJ, we remain underrepresented in journalism, especially in positions where decisions get made.
I made a promise to myself years ago that I wouldn’t walk away from my platform until I could turn around and see a deep pipeline of other Latinas ready to take that space. As reporters, but also as columnists and newsroom and community leaders who don’t just amplify voices and agendas but demand action and make change.
Over time, I realized there was more than one way to build that pipeline. So I took a leap of faith and chose to fight for it from another angle.
That is Latina power.
It isn’t something you put on your head or wear on your chest. It’s something you carry in your heart and soul and gut. Something you build, despite the obstacles, and something you pass on.
That’s why no answer would have satisfied that clown of a politician.
He already knew, and he was threatened by it, just as so many others are who continue to question it, diminish it or try to make it smaller.
They can take the hat off the shelves. They can post warning signs, as President Trump has ordered, outside museums warning visitors about “inaccurate” U.S. history. They can try to erase it, or the women behind it.
But it won’t do them any good because Latina power is about women who refuse to disappear, women who understand that another woman’s success does not take away from their own, women who open doors because they remember what it felt like to hope someone would one day do that for them.
Women who are committed to leaving behind something bigger than a title.
That, to answer U.S. Rep. Gill and his ilk, is Latina power, and that’s the kind of power no museum can sell and no politician can take away.