LUZ IS A DIGITAL HOME
FOR LATINAS,
BY LATINAS.

A Note From Our Co-Founder

Lucy Flores

I've always lived my life in the hyphen, but didn’t always know it. My life started out tough. Raised by a single dad, in a neighborhood with more gang members than school counselors, things didn’t go well for me. I got tracked right into the school-to-prison pipeline and ended up on juvenile parole by 15, and dropped out of school by 17. The labels started early. Criminal. Gang Member. High School Drop Out.

But after I got the intervention I so desperately needed, the labels remained, but the titles changed. First-gen college student. Lawyer. Latina elected official (the first ever in the state of Nevada). But even with the new titles I never did feel like I quite fit in.

I struggled to live authentically as a bilingual and bicultural Latina professional who enjoyed carne asadas as much as back yard BBQ’s, who could easily fit in at a black-tie gala and a quinceñera, who could speak policy and politics in English on CNN and Spanish on Univision but as is often said, still wasn’t American enough for the Americans, or Mexican enough for the Mexicans. And all the while mainstream media created narratives for us, and about us, but rarely with us.

Luz Media was born out of the dire need to reclaim our stories and celebrate our uniqueness. Luz strives to disintegrate the labels and celebrate the hyphen. Latinas are so much more than we’re recognized for and given credit for. Our skin is black, it’s brown, and it’s white. We are descendants of indigenous peoples, enslaved families, and yes, even the conquistadors who inflicted mass genocide on our shared ancestors. We are American. We are Latinas. We are Latinx. (or Latine, or Hispanic, or Latino...)

We are whatever we want to be, united in our Latinidad.

We are more than 32 million strong and command over 700 billion dollars a year in purchasing power. We are 1 in every 5 women now and by 2060, we will be 1 in every 3. When we lead small businesses, we see the strongest revenue growth amongst all women.

Luz was built because we were tired of being undervalued, marginalized, and misrepresented. We built Luz so that young girls could see themselves represented differently than generations past. We built Luz because there is strength in numbers and together we are unstoppable.

Luz is the past, present, and future. Luz is all of us. Luz is within us. And yes, we light up the world.