About

Latino Educators Advancing Leadership (LEAL) was founded by Latino practitioners leading charter school systems and education reform organizations, to increase the collective voice, power, and number of equity-driven executive Latino leaders who demand and activate change for and within our communities.

Our Mission

LEAL’s mission is to increase the collective voice, power, and number of executive Latino leaders in education who demand and activate change for and within our communities.

Our Core Values

We believe that LEAL fills an important gap in the education landscape and that by investing in Latino leaders of charter schools, we can help to create a brighter future for students, families, and communities of color across our nation.

Who We Serve

LEAL serves and supports senior and executive Latino leaders in K-12 public schools. These are leaders identified as C-level (Chief), V-level (Vice President), and D-level (Director). Our members are fierce Latino advocates centering their work toward students and a commitment to the belief that all students of color can access quality K-12 public schools.

Meet Our Team

History

In the early part of 2023 LEAL’s Founding board members including Dr. Aidé Acosta (Chief College Officer at Noble Network of Charter Schools), Malka Borrego (Founder and Former CEO of Equitas Academy), Nella Garcia Urban (Chief External Officer at Yes Prep Public Schools), Myrialis King (Chief Executive Officer at Community Academies of New Orleans), and Elsie Urueta Pollock (Founder and Executive Director at Tulsa Honor Academy) held LEAL’s first strategic planning meetings.  

During these meetings, LEAL’s founders took the idea of LEAL and turned it into strategies and initiatives that would guide the organization going forward.  The prevalent question on the minds of LEAL leaders is “How do we encourage the upward mobility of Latinos through representation, not assimilation?”  LEAL will work towards answering that question through comunidad, leadership acceleration, and advocacy.

Defining the Latin American Diaspora: Understanding Identity and Terminology

LEAL acknowledges the challenges in defining the Latin American Diaspora in the U.S. As a matter of consistency, we use the term “Latino” as an identity marker representing all of the Latin American diaspora. As an organization, we recognize and affirm all of our identity markers, including, but not limited to, Afro-Latino, Latino, Latina, Latine, Latinx, Hispanic, Chicano, and other identity markers used by our community in our work.

There is a long history of identifying and self-identifying people of Latin American origin. Here is a summary of the different ethnic labels:

Hispanic

An umbrella ethnic category created under the Nixon administration and used as a Census term to identify individuals from Spanish-speaking countries, including Spain.

Latina/Latino

A geographical term for people whose origins are from Latin America but also includes those who do not speak Spanish or whose first language is not Spanish.

Latinx

A gender-neutral term used instead of “Latino” or “Latina” to refer to a person of Latin American descent. Latinx is a gender-neutral and inclusive alternative.

Latine

An inclusive and gender-neutral term is also used instead of “Latino” and is commonly used among Spanish speakers, as it is more easily pronounced than Latinx and can be used in plural forms. Spanish uses “e” as a gender-neutral ending to words like estudiante (student).

While these ethnic terms are often used interchangeably, they are not interchangeable demographic terms. Hispanic is a linguistic term used to identify Spanish speakers, whereas Latino/Latinx/Latine are geographical terms that include people from Latin America. The terms used to describe the communities in the U.S. have constantly evolved. The term “Latinos” gained popularity as a rejection of the word “Hispanic,” which many saw as an imposed government category and as assimilationist. “Latinx” and “Latine” have gained popularity as a rejection of binary gender politics. See more here: Latinx explained (USA Today) and Latine vs. Latinx? (Teen Vogue).

Defining a group of people with diverse and complex histories, regions, and unique linguistic and cultural expressions is hard. The common thread, and what binds us together, is geopolitics, argues Héctor Tobar in Our Migrant Souls, referring to our shared experiences of surviving empire. We have been brought together by the brutalities of European conquest, U.S. imperialism, and economic migration and thus have evolved as diverse communities across the hemisphere—from all over Latin America to the United States and beyond (Diaspora Baby: What Makes U.S. Latinos so Hard to Define? [L.A. Times]).