Leading with Awareness of Identity and Power: A REACH Advisor Perspective

Leading with awareness of identity and power, for me, is less about a title and more about how I choose to show up as a first-generation Latina daughter of Puerto Rico, an orphan, an Army mom, and an HSI leader who has navigated many systems that were not built with my story in mind.

My leadership style is rooted in being a bicultural, bilingual Puerto Rican woman who has moved between New York, the island, and now Denver classrooms and boardrooms. I carry my family’s history of loss, migration, and military service into every room, which leads me to lead with deep care for students and colleagues who are carrying invisible burdens while striving for excellence.

Being first-generation and an orphan means I rarely forget what it feels like to be the only one, or the one translating system for everyone else. That lived experience shows up in my leadership as a bias toward mentorship, storytelling, and creating clear pathways, whether I am designing a psychology course or mentoring a new colleague who is still trying to believe they belong in higher education.

Power in decision-making spaces.

In my industry partnership and HSI work at MSU Denver, power shows up in who sets the agenda, whose data “counts,” and which students are named as priorities. Sitting at tables that shape the Classroom to Career C2 Hub and programs like the Industry Career Advising Program (ICAP), I’ve learned that power is often exercised quietly through data, timelines, and which voices are invited to “consult” versus co-create.

My commitment is to use my positional power to center first-generation, Hispanic, and underrepresented students not as an afterthought but as the starting point for design. That has meant advocating for mentoring and experiential learning models that reflect Seal of Excelencia standards, pushing for cross-departmental collaboration, and ensuring employer partners understand they are entering an HSI space intentionally designed to serve, not just enroll, Latino students.

Belonging, to me, is when a first-gen student walks into a career mentoring event or critical thinking workshop and sees their language, music, and hometown stories reflected in the space and doesn’t feel they have to leave parts of themselves at the door to be seen as “professional.” It is when a Latina student in STEM or a military-connected learner looks at the leadership of an HSI and recognizes elements of their own journey in the people making decisions.

Belonging, to me, is an act of everyday radical love in systems that have too often been shaped by scarcity, fear, or deficit thinking. As Bad Bunny reminds us, “The only thing more powerful than hate is love,” a call that pushes me to use my leadership to interrupt harm, extend kindness, and build structures where our students experience love not just as sentiment, but as policy, practice, and possibility. It looks like using my story as a first-gen, orphan, Army mom, future HSI president to signal to others that their complex identities are not obstacles to leadership but the very source of the vision and resilience our institutions need now.

Written by Dra. Lori Marie Huertas

REACH Advisor & Assistant Director of Industry Partnerships at Metropolitan State University of Denver