Today we’d like to introduce you to Yesenia Mendoza-Menchaca and Paulo Menchaca.
Yesenia and Paulo, let’s start with your story. We’d love to hear how you got started and how the journey has been so far.
Paulo and I met in the community college in the Central Valley of California, in a town called Porterville which is between Bakersfield and Fresno. Both of our families worked in the fields picking oranges, grapes, olives and cherries so we have a deep understanding that we are living the dream that our immigrant parents had for us when they came to this Country.
Fast forward to us as professionals: Paulo is a high school Spanish teacher and I am a Licensed Clinical Social Worker who works for LA County as an administrator. We both have Master’s Degree’s that involved learning about Child Development and yet when we became parents we were both humbled by how unexpectedly hard parenting felt and how lost we were with how to do it in a way where we felt good about ourselves. In the beginning, we couldn’t really articulate what was wrong, but we knew it wasn’t working for us or our kids.
Eventually, we immersed ourselves in reading parenting books, going to a parenting class and parenting conferences. One thing led to the next and before we knew it we were actually doing a whole lot of soul searching and we realized that that was the true gift of parenting. About two years ago we decided that we should do something with the knowledge that we had accumulated. We felt a deep sense of responsibility to help other parents who were also searching and trying to be the best possible parents. We also felt a void in the podcast community that did not include many Latino voices who were talking about parenting.
As first generation immigrants, we believe that our parents immigrated to this country so that we could have a better life than they did and that often includes parenting differently than we were parented but that stretching is not easy for many of us to figure out. So we started a blog and the blog later turned into a podcast and we love where we have landed.
Has it been a smooth road?
Our biggest struggle has been with being consistent in our releases of our podcasts.
There is so much that goes into podcasting than just the recording. The recording is actually the easy part! So getting everything else to happen in a timely manner for us has been and is the biggest challenge given that we both have full-time jobs and normal parent duties every day. We also had to figure out how to navigate this project as a couple and not let it become something for us to argue about.
So, as you know, we’re impressed with Somos Padres Podcast – tell our readers more, for example what you’re most proud of as a company and what sets you apart from others.
Somos Padres is a parenting podcast where we talk about and share information about parenting AND we also embrace parenting as the vehicle thru which we can recognize the places where we need to do some work on ourselves.
I (Yesenia) would call it healing, Paulo would call it evolve and others would call it something else, but I think that it doesn’t matter what we call it. It is the recognition that our children are our mirrors that reflect back to us the places where we need to grow as human beings and talking about that is what we are passionate about.
Let’s touch on your thoughts about our city – what do you like the most and least?
Not sure if you mean Glendale or if you mean LA. We will answer for LA. We love the diversity and we mean that in every way from cultures to food, to sports, to outdoor spaces. We have it all here in LA!
Dislike: Traffic is the only downer…
Contact Info:
- Website: www.somos-padres.com
- Instagram: @iam.yesenia, @paulomenchaca, @somos.padres
Image Credit:
Carolina Adame
Getting in touch: VoyageLA is built on recommendations from the community; it’s how we uncover hidden gems, so if you know someone who deserves recognition please let us know here.
