The Year of La Mujer Spotlight Feature

Imagine you are five months pregnant, working 80-hour weeks, and managing the high-stakes world of marketing, PR, and film shoots for a massive Smithsonian cultural museum. You are exhausted. Stressed. Standing at a crossroads, realizing you are working yourself to death. Literally. You do your best to hold yourself together and keep everything in, because we are taught that showing any sign of burnout can be viewed as weakness, especially as a female entrepreneur in a mostly masculine professional environment.

One day, you go home and cry to your husband out of fear of losing the security you spent years building. He looks at you and says something that essentially changes the trajectory of your life path: “If you had the same faith that I have in you, you wouldn’t be worried.” And with that pivotal moment, where words can become a guiding light, you type out your letter of resignation, unsure of the path to come. With complete certainty that change is imminent, 30 days later, a leap of faith is taken.

And within three months, the freelance path that once seemed to be a risk transforms into a full-fledged media company with half a dozen clients. Imagine what that would be like. And this, mi gente, is just a fragment of the Southside Native, CEO of San Antonio’s JMT Studios and JMT Media NYC, Jaclyn Tacoronte’s lived experience. This is the classic blueprint of what I call a “Phoenix Moment” rising from the ashes of corporate burnout to build your own table when you are not invited to sit at existing ones.

Yet, as quickly as Tacoronte discovered when growing her business, building the table is only half the battle. The harder work is the conversation no one really wants to address. The harder work is navigating the invisible, engineered friction that exists between the Mujeres trying to sit at that table, with a limiting belief that there is only one seat available. As La Prensa Texas launches its national cultural movement, “2026: The Year of la Mujer,”

we have an opportunity to dig deeper into the symptoms holding us back: exclusion, competition and comparison, gatekeeping, and silent hostility. In our recent Let’s Talk About It community column by renowned Publisher Yvette Tello, Tello invites all to sit at the table to open the discussion of said symptoms, and women across San Anto bravely shared stories of being gossiped about and undermined within professional circles by other women.

Award-Nominated Tacoronte experienced this firsthand early in her business journey. While applying for a critical Minority and Women Business Enterprise (MWBE) certification in New York, a tool that can change the economic trajectory of a family for generations, interpersonal politics and cattiness from a local female official delayed her legislative approval for three agonizing years. A process that really should have taken three months took 36 months instead, simply because one woman’s success was perceived as a threat to another’s seat.

We often look at this type of behavior as a personal flaw. We even tend to write it off as mean girl culture. But a much deeper truth lives under the perceived claws: it is an engineered systemic issue. Think about it. When a patriarchal corporate structure only allocates a single token seat for a woman or Person of Color at the top, unfortunately, the environment naturally mutates into a zero-sum game. We are conditioned to “put our elbows out,”

as Tacoronte noted. We look across the table, policing what another woman is receiving, because we have been trained to believe that her win is our direct loss. This internal friction is a highly effective distraction; if we are busy fighting each other for crumbs, then we are NOT looking up at the glass ceiling together, amigas. This toxic competition was not always our norm. If we dig beneath our current workplace conditions, we will find our true ancestral blueprint.

Long before colonization and patriarchal corporate structures and systems existed, indigenous tribal societies operated on shared responsibilities. Women were the core harvesters, Medicine Keepers, and social anchors of the community, as Tacoronte summarizes. Historically, storytelling was actually a sacred bonding mechanism used to pass down survival data, share resources, and even maintain communal safety, and in many ways, it still is.

Through the lens of colonization, however, our communal bonds were intentionally broken. Our collective power was viewed as a threat, and we were forced to compete for the system’s favor. Chisme was then weaponized from community protection into character assassination and information currency. Directly speaking, when we choose to participate in such Chisme, amazing women that we could learn from choose to walk alone to protect their peace, and the system wins yet again.

We burn our collective power fighting each other instead of building together. So, where will the path lead us from here? When I asked Jaclyn Tacoronte, who is a Commissioner with Women in Film & Television Texas, how we shift from survivalist gatekeeping to true community, she gave me a simple roadmap: “Mentoring even one young lady like, truly mentoring, caring about, that can change an entire generation. And that is really defining impact over influence.”

Today, Tacoronte operates “ten toes down” on her identity as a Southside San Anto Native, refusing to please the crowd or match the frequency of corporate envy. Her blueprint for anyone starting out is beautifully down-to-earth: “It’s not that serious. Don’t take things personally. People are going to move and navigate for whatever their motive is. And you cannot change that.” Tacoronte credits her ability to navigate these spaces to the unshakeable foundation built by her early mentors; women like Ms.

Ida Obregon, her former Southwest High School teacher, and April Wicinske, her very first corporate internship coordinator. These women didn’t gatekeep. They cheered her on, opened doors, and understood that one woman’s success is every woman’s success.