The first day of my exciting new life as a working journalist started with a question.

“What are you?” the editor asked me. He said I didn’t look like “a minority,” and wasn’t that the reason I was given such a good opportunity?

What was I? I was a diversity, equity and inclusion (DEI) hire long before the term existed. And I was Yvonne Condes (Cón-des) de la Torre, who grew up Yvonne Condes (Con-diss), a second-generation Latina GenXer taught by my hardworking parents to assimilate so I could have an easier life than they did. I may have looked white, and spoke only passable Spanish, but inside, I was a proud Chicana.

“I’m Mexican,” I said. However, that three-word question got me thinking about where I’d come from, how I’d gotten to this place in my life, and how different my journey had been.

Months earlier, a professor had taken me aside just before my interview with a newspaper editor hiring for a highly competitive “minority” internship.

“You want to get this,” he said of the year-long, paid program. “If you have something in you, show it now.”

Deep down, I wasn’t confident I did have something. My traditional Mexican American parents didn’t talk to me or my sister about getting good grades or going to college, even though it was expected of our brothers. After high school, I waited tables while going to community college and then transferred to my hometown university. This process took years longer than it did for my childhood friends, who went straight to four-year colleges and had careers by the time I graduated.

Who was I to aim so high?

It turns out I did have something. I got the internship, and it propelled me into a life I didn’t know was possible. As the Trump administration wipes out DEI from the federal government and pressures corporate America to do the same, I wonder what would have happened to me without having had that opportunity.

The program was a dream come true. Interns spent four months at three different newspapers in a national chain and were provided with a furnished apartment in each city and a stipend to live on.

One of my stops was at a small paper in the Midwest. I covered everything from school board meetings to carjackings to a young mother fighting to keep her husband in the country after an immigration sweep at his job. I worked hard, delivering an enthusiastic “Yes!” for every assignment I was given, including the time I swallowed my fear of flying to ride in a prop plane to cover the county air show.

Sadly, my occasional acts of bravery didn’t morph into confidence. I went to work each morning worried my editors had figured out that I wasn’t supposed to be there. Unfortunately, my imposter syndrome reached beyond my position in the newsroom. I could feel the class differences all around me.

I had made friends with the paper’s adorable graphic artist and her college friends. We’d spend weekends going to parties or bars where I would often end up arguing with a stranger about politics or why they should never use racial or ethnic epithets. I don’t think I knew what a “stealth Latina” was at the time, but that’s how it felt — I was undercover, and constantly heard what white people really talked about when they thought they were among one of their own.

When I offered to drive on these nights, my new friends politely declined. I drove a faded red Nissan Sentra with 100,000 miles on the odometer that my dad found at a police auction right before my internship. The backs of the front seats had been sliced open, and the trunk liner ripped out to look for drugs. It was a stark contrast to the shiny new Chevy Malibus two of my friends drove.

After I completed the internship, the Midwestern newspaper offered me a full-time job with benefits. It did not include housing like my internship had, so I found an unfurnished one-bedroom apartment near work. Kind editors and friends dug through their garages and basements to gift me furniture, and I put a bed on my credit card. While I was overwhelmed by the generosity, it wasn’t long after I moved into the apartment that I realized I was in over my head.

At night, alone in my apartment, I would stare at the stack of bills I had no way of paying. I had applied for my first credit card at a college fair back when it didn’t matter if you had a job, assets or a co-signer to gain access to thousands of dollars in credit.

It’s just for emergencies, I told myself.

My credit card emergencies began with a semester of school (before I learned about low-interest student loans) and ended with day-to-day items I couldn’t afford once my student loan payments began.

I needed help — free help — so I made an appointment with a credit counselor provided by the county. The counselor was just a year or so older than me, and she shook her head as she looked through my paperwork.

“Can you live with your parents?” she asked. I wondered if she also drove a Chevy Malibu.

Moving home wasn’t an option. I also shut down her next suggestion to ask my parents for money. They didn’t have any extra to give.

An editor friend I told about my money troubles said she had an idea: A nice man we both knew was rich and could loan me money. I didn’t feel good about it, but I was out of options. My soon-to-be benefactor and I met for lunch at an outdoor café to discuss a consolidation loan I would pay back in monthly installments. The terms were more than generous: The interest was low, and I didn’t have to do anything creepy to secure the loan.

Soon after I began my journey to good financial health, I started dating a journalist who had gone to a prestigious university followed by graduate school. He was financially solvent and a beautiful writer.

I tried not to think about how we came from different parts of the cultural and economic universe until one day I spotted a check from his parents tossed on a table in his apartment. It was for a few hundred dollars, but to me, it might as well have been a million.

Is he rich? I asked myself. Does he know I’m poor?

I wish I could say that I started an adult conversation about generational wealth and what it meant not to have it. About how I felt like I would never catch up financially or in social strata. But I didn’t have the words or maturity to explain that or how I was tired of being broke, stressed out and alone. Instead, I started an argument with him.

Soon after, I got a job in Northern California, where my sister lived. Years before, she, too, had put herself through college and then law school in California. When I relocated, she was able to do for me what no one had done for her when she survived on peanut butter and jelly sandwiches during law school. I lived with her rent-free for a year, chipping away at my debt and saving money for my own apartment.

My boyfriend and I broke up. Even if I hadn’t moved away, the chip on my shoulder was just too heavy.

A few years later, I met a wonderful man. He was a responsible homeowner who had never experienced the overwhelming panic of not knowing how he would make rent or if there was enough room on his credit card to pay for a root canal.

We were already engaged when my employer offered buyouts at the beginning of the great newspaper decline that continues today. I didn’t think about what it meant to leave a good job in journalism because I couldn’t see beyond my bills and how nice it would be to walk down the aisle as an equal and not a financial burden. So I took the buyout and used it to pay off the remainder of what I owed my benefactor in Illinois.

At 31 years old, I could finally breathe. Since then, I’ve continued writing, raised two kids, started a couple of businesses, sold one, and never once took for granted what that DEI internship helped me to become.

I’m sharing my story because losing DEI initiatives in this country will be devastating, and we’re already seeing the effects. Universities are slashing programs that help Black, Latino and LGBTQ+ students get into and thrive in college. By destabilizing the Education Department, the Trump administration is throwing student loan and financial aid programs into chaos.

Without student loans, I never would have made it through school. My situation wasn’t easy, but I also know it could have been exponentially more difficult if I had experienced racial profiling and discrimination. The lid of my Nissan’s trunk was held down with a bungee cord and would bob up and down when I drove. But as a “Whitina,” the police never pulled me over like one Latino student I wrote about in college who was stopped constantly because he was brown and drove a fully operational low-rider. I can only begin to imagine the terror of being thrown into a detention facility and disappeared.

Diversity programs aren’t giveaways. They level the playing field so workplaces, schools and government better reflect America. For example, Latinos are nearly 20% of the U.S. population, yet only 8% are journalists. Of the hundreds of people laid off from print and digital newsrooms in 2024, a disproportionate number were people of color.

DEI gave me an opportunity, but I earned my job and changed my circumstances, thereby changing the trajectory of my life and my children’s lives as well. I have two sons in college who I’ve taught to believe in themselves, and to love and appreciate their Latinidad. I also confessed to them what I learned the hard way about financial health.

My family is a melting pot like much of this country, and I believe that diversity, equity and inclusion is what makes America great — not throwing obstacles in the way of young people trying to get a good education and a decent job.

Yvonne Condes is a freelance writer and contributing editor to Picturing Mexican America, a project that works to uncover the whitewashed history of Mexican Los Angeles. You can find her on Instagram @yvonneinla.

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