The Storytellers America Doesn’t See

When a city faces a public health crisis, a school district needs to rebuild trust with multilingual immigrant families, or a corporation navigates a cultural flashpoint, institutions often look for someone who can bridge the gap between communities and systems. Not just language, but lived experience, cultural understanding, and trust.

Increasingly, that person is a Latina.

Yet despite being among the most effective communicators shaping public understanding in America’s most critical institutions, Latina professionals remain largely invisible within the communications industry itself. While Latino professionals represent approximately 14.5% of public relations specialists nationwide, they hold only 8.8% of public relations and fundraising manager positions, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Latinas make up only a fraction of those leadership roles.

We are helping shape narratives on the front lines while remaining largely absent from the tables where communications strategy is set.

A year ago, those disparities inspired me to contribute a chapter to Latinas in Public Relations: Shaping Communications, Communities, and Culture, a first-of-its-kind collection featuring Latina leaders across public relations, journalism, government communications, corporate affairs, and media strategy. I felt a responsibility to share a professional journey that, statistically, remains underrepresented.

The book launched during a challenging period for Latino communities. Across the country, communities faced immigration raids, harmful rhetoric, and cultural attacks, while many organizations quietly scaled back diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts that had helped create pathways into leadership for communications professionals.

The timing underscored an important reality: representation is not simply about visibility. It is about who gets to shape the stories, policies, and public conversations that affect our communities.

That absence feels particularly urgent today.

Latina communicators often serve as bridges between institutions and communities that have historically been underserved or overlooked. They manage crisis communications during immigration policy shifts, build civic engagement campaigns in Spanish-speaking neighborhoods, translate public health guidance for families who may distrust government systems, and help organizations communicate with authenticity during moments of uncertainty.

This work requires more than technical communication skills. It demands cultural intelligence, empathy, credibility, and the ability to navigate multiple worlds at once.

For many Latinas, language, culture, family responsibilities, and professional ambition intersect in ways that shape both personal and professional experiences. Rather than becoming obstacles, those experiences have produced a generation of communicators uniquely equipped to build trust in environments where trust is increasingly scarce.

This is not background work.

It is the work of public trust.

At a time when confidence in media, government, and institutions continues to erode, Latina communicators are doing the difficult relationship-centered work of rebuilding credibility between organizations and the communities they serve. Yet too often, that contribution is undervalued or overlooked.

The disconnect becomes even more striking when viewed against demographic realities. Latinas account for 17% of adult women in the United States, representing the largest numeric growth of any major female racial or ethnic group over the past decade.

In California, where I live and work, Latinas represent 39% of employed women, making them the largest share of the state's female workforce, according to Mount Saint Mary's University's 2026 Status of Women and Girls in California Report.

The question is no longer whether Latinas are shaping the future workforce. They already are.

The question is whether organizations are creating pathways for Latina communicators to lead.

Every corporation with a Latino consumer base should ask a simple question: Are any of the people shaping your communications strategy Latina? If the answer is no, that is not a pipeline problem. It is a priorities problem.

Public institutions should ask a similar question. If Latina professionals are doing frontline community engagement work but are absent from leadership and strategy discussions, that gap reflects a structural issue, not an accident.

Organizations cannot claim to value authentic storytelling while overlooking the people best positioned to tell those stories.

Communicators helping to shape Latino narratives in America should also help lead the conversations about them. If our institutions are committed to accurately reflecting the communities they serve, Latina voices must be present where decisions are made — not just where messages are delivered.

The solution is straightforward: don’t just hire Latina communicators. Invest in them. Promote them. Give them opportunities to lead.

The story of who gets to tell America's story is still being written.

It is time for more Latinas to hold the pen.

Brenda Duran is a senior communications executive with over a decade of experience shaping government narratives, building communications departments from the ground up, and leading strategies that strengthen trust between public institutions and the communities they serve.

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Episode 3 of Our Copa: The latest episode of Our Copa, which I co-host with the fabulously smart and amazing Merritt Mathias and Musa Okwonga, takes us back to Brazil of the 1980s, under a dictatorship. And how Sócrates helped create a movement that would cement Brazilian soccer as a breeding ground for political experimentation, idealism, and action.

Julio Ricardo Varela edited and published this edition of The Latino Newsletter.

The Latino Newsletter welcomes opinion pieces in English and/or Spanish from community voices. Submission guidelines are here. The views expressed by outside opinion contributors do not necessarily reflect the editorial views of this outlet or its employees.