Diversity, Ethics, & Inclusion
The three projects below explore how ethics, cultural competence, and inclusive communication shape stronger relationships, better decisions, and more responsible leadership. This theme is personal: as a bilingual, bicultural communicator, I have spent a career helping audiences feel seen and understood. These projects show what that commitment looks like as professional practice and what it can teach any communicator.
Nonprofit Rebranding Through A Communication Ethics Lens: UnidosUS
When the National Council of La Raza became UnidosUS in 2017, a legacy Latino civil rights organization had to renegotiate its identity with constituents who attached different meanings to its established name. This memo and recorded presentation examine the rebrand through communication ethics, stakeholder listening, institutional identity, and the tension between mission-driven and business-driven priorities.
What it teaches: In a rebrand, what an organization owes its audiences matters as much as what it stands to gain.
Cultural Competence As Strategic Expertise In Hispanic Marketing
Treating a diverse population as a monolith is both an ethical failure and a strategic one. This research-based multimedia project argues that cultural competence must be embedded at the strategy stagenot added through translation after decisions have already been made.
Drawing on scholarship, industry cases, and my own bilingual and bicultural experience, the project examines how language, national origin, generation, migration history, socioeconomic context, and lived experience shape message meaning and trust.
What it teaches: Cultural competence is not a soft skill; it is expertise that determines whether communication connects or fails.
Recreating Codes of Gender in Advertising
Ethical representation begins with learning to recognize visual conventions that often pass as natural or neutral. In this project, I recreated advertising-style images to expose how pose, scale, touch, gaze, and framing can encode traditional ideas of gender power and subordination.
The accompanying reflection applies Goffman’s gender-code framework to the recreated images and considers the responsibility communicators carry when visual choices reproduce — or challenge — cultural assumptions.
What it teaches: We cannot communicate responsibly until we can see the conventions we have been taught not to notice.
