Story & Lesson Highlights with Charo Toledo of Los Ángeles

We’re looking forward to introducing you to Charo Toledo. Check out our conversation below.

Hi Charo, thank you so much for joining us today. We’re thrilled to learn more about your journey, values and what you are currently working on. Let’s start with an ice breaker: Have any recent moments made you laugh or feel proud?
Recently, I opened a package and burst out laughing! It was the first Latina Survival Guide T-shirt I designed. Seeing my own merch in real life felt surreal, like my childhood in Puerto Rico making pretend book covers finally came full circle. I slipped it on immediately and thought, “Wow… I really have merch now. Who do I think I am?”

Can you briefly introduce yourself and share what makes you or your brand unique?
I’m Charo Toledo, a Puerto Rican writer and producer who has somehow built a career out of turning my childhood chaos into television, film, and now a memoir. I’ve written for shows like Hulu’s East Los High and Netflix’s International Emmy-winning El Vato, which still surprises my family, who thought I’d grow up to be “una abogada” or at least someone who irons.

My newest project is The Latina Survival Guide, a memoir told with the same tone I use when explaining my family to therapists: part telenovela, part comedy, part cautionary tale. I started writing it to make sense of my life, and somewhere along the way it turned into a whole brand; complete with merch, which is wild because I can barely fold laundry.

I’m also developing a romantic musical #BlindHope currently with CineBlock Films and a political thriller with MAZDOC because my brain refuses to stay in one genre. But LSG is the heart project, a love letter to every Latina who has survived family drama, cultural whiplash, and their own questionable decisions… and lived to tell the story.

Thanks for sharing that. Would love to go back in time and hear about how your past might have impacted who you are today. What did you believe about yourself as a child that you no longer believe?
As a kid, I was convinced that the secret to being loved was to make myself as tiny and unproblematic as possible; basically an emotional houseplant. Quiet, decorative, low-maintenance. I thought if I didn’t take up space, no one would get upset, and everyone would think I was “so good.”

Now I know better. I am not a ficus. I’m a full-volume Puerto Rican storyteller who writes telenovela-memoirs and somehow has merch. The more I stop shrinking, the more my life expands. Turns out people weren’t waiting for the silent version of me… they were waiting for the one who shows up with jokes, opinions, and a survival guide.

When you were sad or scared as a child, what helped?
My survival strategy was simple: tell the story before the story told me. Any time I got scared, I’d switch into narrator mode; a tiny Puerto Rican crime reporter documenting the scene of my own life. It was either that or emotionally combust, so narration felt safer.

At dinner I’d begin with my signature opener, “¿Te acuerdas?” / “Do you remember?” which is hilarious because of course they remembered; they were there. But retelling the chaos made it feel like something I could control… or at least negotiate with.

And then there was El Caminante… the teenage boy who walked up and down Madrid Street like a warning from the universe, and then one day vanished. Just gone. No note. No finale episode. I should’ve been traumatized, but instead I thought, “Perfect. Character development.” That’s how you know storytelling was my coping mechanism: even disappearances became plot opportunities.

The Latina Survival Guide is basically my 65,000-word adult version of that; turning the darker, stranger parts of childhood into chapters before they turn into therapy bills.

I think our readers would appreciate hearing more about your values and what you think matters in life and career, etc. So our next question is along those lines. What are the biggest lies your industry tells itself?
One of the biggest lies in entertainment is the idea that if you copy what’s already working, you’ll succeed. As if the industry is a photocopier and not a bunch of humans who can smell inauthenticity from a mile away. The truth is, audiences respond to voice, not replicas. If imitation worked, Hollywood would’ve figured out how to clone Shonda Rhimes by now.

Another lie is, “If you chase Hollywood hard enough, it will love you back.” No. Hollywood is a shadow; it moves behind you, not in front. The moment you stop sprinting after it and turn toward your own sun, your own weirdness, your own truth… that’s when the doors crack open.

At the end of the day, the only strategy that actually works is the one that terrified me as a kid: being fully, stubbornly, unapologetically myself. Or as my grandmother would have put it, a lo tuyo, nena; to thine own self be true, but with seasoning.

Okay, we’ve made it essentially to the end. One last question before you go. Are you doing what you were born to do—or what you were told to do?
I’m finally doing what I was born to do. The Latina Survival Guide feels less like a project and more like a calling; the kind that follows you quietly through every decade of your life until you are strong enough, wounded enough, brave enough to answer it.

Every job I stumbled into, every heartbreak that split me open, every success that glittered for a moment, every failure that nearly took me out; they weren’t detours. They were initiation rites. They were the training ground for a woman who would one day sit down and write the truth with humor, courage, and just enough irreverence to survive it.

I come from a lineage of women who turned life into legend with nothing but perfume, grit, and instinct. I didn’t realize it growing up, but I was always gathering their voices, their secrets, their survival techniques. LSG is the book of spells I inherited without knowing it.

Because in my world, resilience isn’t quiet.
It’s loud. It dances. It sparkles.
It refuses to die.

La sobrevivencia es un arte. Survival is an art.
And some of us were born holding the brush.

For years, I followed the path I was told to follow.
Now, for the first time, I am walking the one that was carved for me long before I knew it existed.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://Thelatinasurvivalguide.com
• Instagram: Charchartoledo
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/charo-toledo-1ba3031a/
• Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/charotoledo/
• Youtube: https://youtube.com/@charotoledo2065
• Soundcloud: https://on.soundcloud.com/pzZhJ5FwkDgJ059ss3

Image Credits
Profile photo: Sarah Hoag