"You aren't paying me to care; I cared long before there was a client, a brief, a project, or a budget".
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I’m Essence, a Mexican American creative and community advocate born and raised in South Central Los Angeles. I use storytelling to give language to experiences people often feel but struggle to explain. Whether I am creating independently or working alongside a community, I want people to feel recognized without being confined to someone else’s idea of who they should be.
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Who am I?
The Story Behind My Work
My work begins with knowing what it feels like to be isolated and misunderstood. I grew up feeling as though belonging required me to prove my identity to people who had already decided what it should look like.
As a Mexican American woman, I have felt the pressure of being interpreted through assumptions about my race and ethnicity. Being queer, neurodivergent, and someone living with mental-health conditions added other layers that people often separated, even though I experienced them all at once. I learned how lonely it can be when others recognize only one part of you and overlook the person those parts belong to.
That isolation made me curious about what people carry beneath the identities others assign to them. It taught me to listen for what has been dismissed or left unsaid. Now I create the kind of work I once needed: work that does not ask people to simplify themselves before they are allowed to belong.
I care about...
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The well-being of people who have been taught to make themselves smaller to gain acceptance.
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The experiences of LGBTQIA+ and immigrant communities being acknowledged and respected in media, especially when those identities overlap. People do not experience their sexuality, gender, culture, race, class, or immigration experience separately from one another.
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Making room in media for complex people instead of reducing people to a single identity or expecting them to fit into a story that was never written with their full experience in mind.
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I want to challenge the systems and stories that reduce people to stereotypes while creating room for them to define themselves.
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The Lens' Behind My Work
Context Matters !
I look beyond individual choices to understand the social conditions that influence how people experience identity, belonging, and opportunity.
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I use a sociological lens to look beyond individual experiences and consider how systems, relationships, and cultural expectations shape the way people move through the world.
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I pay attention to the social conditions surrounding a story so that people are not reduced to stereotypes or treated as if their experiences exist in isolation.
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I bring this perspective into my writing, facilitation, and creative projects by connecting personal stories to the larger patterns that influence identity, belonging, and opportunity.
Stories Need Complexity !
I approach storytelling in a way that avoids reducing people to stereotypes or separating their experiences from the environments that shaped them.
Facilitation Creates Connection !
I create space for people to connect their own experiences to broader social patterns while still allowing them to define what those experiences mean for themselves.