Ethics, Diversity & Inclusion
Understanding people is just as important as understanding markets.
These three projects 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’ve 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 (COM 534)
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 held its name sacred. This memo and recorded presentation analyze the rebrand through a communication ethics framework, examining how an organization manages the tension between mission-driven and business-driven identity.
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 (COM 535)
Treating a diverse population as a monolith is both an ethical failure and a strategic one. This final project — proposal, annotated outline, and multimedia presentation — argues that cultural competence in Hispanic marketing is strategic expertise, drawing on my own bilingual and bicultural positioning, including years reporting for Spanish-language media. It reflects the same cultural-bridge work I bring to clients today, from Spanish-language media strategy to multicultural communication training.
What it teaches: cultural competence isn’t a soft skill — it’s expertise that determines whether communication connects or fails.
Recreating the Codes of Gender: Written Reflection with Images (COM 535)
Ethical representation begins with the ability to read visual convention critically. I recreated advertising images to expose how familiar poses, framings, and gestures quietly encode traditional ideas of gender subordination, then analyzed the recreations through Goffman’s gender-code framework in a written reflection and recorded presentation.
What it teaches: we can’t communicate responsibly until we can see the conventions we’ve been taught not to notice.