Honoring Patti’s Legacy: 5Qs for Patti from Moníca Ramírez

After more than twenty years at the helm of Esperanza United, Patti Tototzintle is retiring. To preserve her wisdom and lessons learned, we are organizing a series of conversations between her and the friends, leaders, and colleagues she worked with along the way. This month, we have Mónica Ramírez, founder and President of Justice for Migrant Women, member of Esperanza United’s Policy Advisory Council, co-founder of the Latinx House, and much more. Mónica has dedicated her career to uplifting marginalized communities and Latinas in particular. She organized an event to honor Patti’s legacy, in Washington DC, which featured a Q&A between the two Latina leaders. Read the highlights below and check out the video for their full conversation. 

MONÍCA RAMÍREZ: Gender-based violence is a heavy topic and stopping it is foundational to achieving social justice and affirming all our human rights. Why did you dedicate your career to this cause?  

PATTI TOTOTZINTLE: I went into the organization with no intention of staying on and then I really fell in love. We had a lot of stuff going on and a lot of questions about who we were. I felt like one of my contributions was to ask that question, “Who are we? Who are we meant to be?” 

I really did believe that community was the missing ingredient – it doesn’t matter who we are as an organization or what systems want to do or what government wants to do, if we go in as community at the center and survivors. 

From shelter to community advocacy – going wherever you have to – to community engagement work and intervention work – working with women, with girls and with boys and with men – and then really expanding [nationally], everything I’ve ever done has kept us on this path. [Keeping community at the center] has allowed me to keep my passions of leadership development, of community building, and really building these ingredients. 

MONÍCA RAMÍREZ: One of the things I’ve appreciated about your work at Esperanza United is your focus on Latina leadership. Can you share the many ways you’ve centered our communities’ voices?  

PATTI TOTOTZINTLE: People used to talk about a victim as “a victim, that’s who she is. She’s a victim. Let’s get the victim’s voice in here.” But it wasn’t necessarily that voice of power… [At Esperanza United, we’re] really learning from women themselves. For me,  supporting leadership is listening, listening to Latinas [we serve], but also Latinas in community that may not necessarily ever come to us for services. They live in the realities of their own households, of their own families, of their own communities. And so it’s always about: how do we support with safety networks, with resources, with tools, with putting the work in their hands? It’s about putting the work in the hands of community. 

How do we have ripple effects throughout community? To me, leadership development is at the core of everything we do. It’s not just what we do, it’s how we do it, and that’s what’s important. 

MONÍCA RAMÍREZ: What achievements are you particularly proud of? 

PATTI TOTOTZINTLE: One of the first ones that comes to mind is the work that we did moving from education of our youth in training sessions and telling them what they need to know to getting into peer education. How can they not only support their peers, but educate their own families? We’ve listened to girls over the years who said to us, “Why are you just meeting with us? Why aren’t we going to classrooms and training others? Why aren’t the boys in here?” Because of Latina girls, we started working with Latino boys. We started doing things together jointly, and still offering separate activity so they could also grow in with their own circles. I’m very proud of that early work.  

The other thing I’m very proud is from ‘92 to ‘94, we created a tool, a product called “My Girlfriend Did It,” and it was on same sex domestic violence. We did that because there wasn’t any other tool. It was a documentary that 20 years later, 25 years later, even today, people still ask us for.  

The other thing is being able to become a national organization. We had the responsibility to take everything we had learned on the ground and carry that out so that other Latina organizations and mainstream service providers who work with Latinas could really gain from our insight. It wasn’t because we wanted to be the biggest, baddest here [or because we thought] we knew everything. No, we knew what we knew, and we were willing to share that with others. 

I’m proud that we are also a funder. We received a $13.2 million grant from HHS to regrant to Latino organizations across the country and we have 28 sub grantees [with our national partner Mujeres Latinas en Acción]  that are all Latino organizations. 

MONÍCA RAMÍREZ: I do a lot of work on economic justice and that intersects so poignantly with your work on gender-based violence. Can you share why you prioritized collaborating with organizations like Justice for Migrant Women over the years? 

PATTI TOTOTZINTLE: We took to heart that in order to really stand, we had to work with our Latino brothers and sisters and organizations out there. We’ve always believed in intersectionality. It is not just domestic violence. Housing is important. Immigration is important. Economic justice is important. Migrant workers are important. We’ve always understood that intersectionality is the beginning of our work, not the end of the work.  

And so, because of that, it’s important to create relationships and create partnerships locally and nationally with organizations that we feel we need to learn from, and vice versa, so that we can all do a better job at serving Latino communities. Because it doesn’t matter what family, what community, what organization someone is in, one in four women are dealing with domestic violence or some form of gender-based violence. 

MONÍCA RAMÍREZ: I love all the work you’ve done building a Latine coalition. Can you share why it’s important to you and the movement at large to do that sort of organizing? 

PATTI TOTOTZINTLE: It’s more important today than it was a month ago. We can’t stop. This is going to be challenging. I think about the sub grantees that we have – 28 organizations across the country and Puerto Rico, many of them are emerging. They’re looking to do the best work possible in their communities, and in order for them to be able to do that, we can’t quit once the grants end.   

It’s going to be important for the NHLA too, for example, to play even a stronger role in encouraging our networks. We need to give the message to everybody we work with about what it’s going to take to work together in our own communities where we’re based, but also across the country. We won’t make the change we need to make unless we find a way to work together.