I’m a fifth-generation Mexican American woman who has spent a lifetime experiencing the world through a unique lens - growing up within my heritage culture, shaped by it deeply, yet never quite fully claimed by it nor by the broader American society either. Always somewhere in between.

Over the years I’ve explored many labels. Chicana and Mexican American are the ones I mostly use - depends on the room and the day. Each label has held parts of my experience. None has held all of it. Spanish wasn’t passed down to me. People assume a therapist who looks like me speaks Spanish. I’m not fluent. The judgement of not being enough - from mainstream society and from within the culture itself - doesn’t disappear with a label.

There’s a pull in two directions - from heritage culture on one side and mainstream American life on the other. That friction shows up differently depending on where a woman sits in it. Some long for a heritage culture they can feel but can’t quite touch. Others love where they come from and feel the weight of everything it asks of them. I work with women at both ends of that, and everywhere in between. Mexican, Filipina, Korean, Nigerian, Chinese - the specifics change, the friction doesn’t. That’s the space between worlds, and it’s where I work.

A lifetime of experience - through love, loss, motherhood, heartbreak, reinvention, and starting over - combined with formal clinical training and years of working with bicultural and multicultural women, is what brought me to specialize in cultural identity work. Not because I read about it. Because I’ve lived it. I’ve been there. I’m there now. With you.

Therapy with me isn’t scripted or sterile. It’s thoughtful, direct, and human. We can talk about the hard things without filtering ourselves. I ask the questions you might not be asking yourself, and offer reframes that challenge the way you’ve been thinking. As a lifelong artist, I see patterns others might miss - perspectives that are just left of center, in a good way. Sometimes that’s what shifts everything.

Outside of therapy, you’ll find me on a trail with my dogs, watching a good documentary, at a flea market, or exploring places where culture thrives.