(Image: Giselle Martinez)

This week, we’re featuring millennial entrepreneur Giselle Martinez as our Everyday Chica. La dominicana spoke with Ain’t I Latina? about turning her passion for baking into a business, identifying as Latina and why her mom’s her biggest inspiration. 

As a media production specialist, you’ve worked on various projects and companies including MTV and MTV Tr3s. How did you get your start in media?

It’s funny because I kind of fell into it. I went to school for business and was working fulltime as an after-school counselor with the YMCA.  In the summer of 2006, my best friend was working at MTV Tr3s, which was getting ready to launch in the fall. I had just left my job with the YMCA and had no idea what I was going to do next. I spent a lot of my new free time visiting my friend at her cool MTV office in Time Square. I was in awe of the place, especially because it was an almost all Latina staff working together to launch this bilingual channel. I spent so much time there helping out that one of the producers eventually hired me as a production assistant. I stayed with MTV Tr3s until 2010 when the offices moved to Miami, Fl. I’ve since worked with a few other networks and production companies, but MTV Tr3s and the ladies I worked with will always have a special place in my heart.

You are an entrepreneur, making your own line of delicious cake pops. Has baking always been a passion of yours? Talk to me about your baking business.

I have always loved to bake. When I was young I used to go into my mother’s kitchen and pretend I was hosting a baking show on TV. I’ve always found baking to be therapeutic and relaxing, especially now that I have my own kitchen and don’t have to take out all of my mom’s pots and pans out of the oven first.

I started out making cake pops for friends as gifts, then I began making them for special occasions like birthday parties and baby showers. Working as a production freelancer sometimes leaves me with a few weeks in between gigs so in order to supplement my income I started to sell the cake pops by the dozen. My business is just kicking off and I’m still working on a name and logo, but in the meantime I enjoy sharing my cake pops with people outside of my immediate friends and family.

How do you identity? Do you consider yourself Afro-Latina, or use another term to describe your race and/or ethnicity?

I’ve always identified myself as Latina. It wasn’t until I was older that I started hearing terms like Afro-Latina or Latinegra. To me the beauty of identifying as Latina has always been the diversity of it, we come in all sorts of different colors, shapes, sizes and styles. A Latina can be anybody from a light-skinned chica with blonde hair and blue eyes to a dark skinned woman with brown eyes and kinky/curly hair. I don’t have anything against the term Afro-Latina, and yes I identify with it too, I just don’t see the need for the specific term. You can see my afro by looking at me and hear that I’m Latina when I speak.

What is your earliest memory of identifying as Afro-Latina/Blatina/Latinegra, etc? How did you come to identify as such?

I grew up in a Dominican neighborhood and went to school with mostly Black and Latino students. It wasn’t until I went to college and started working that I began to get asked the infamous “what are you?” question.

I don’t know how many times I’ve been asked, “You’re not Black?” when people hear me speak Spanish, or they tell me that I “don’t look Dominican.” I used to get upset and say “Please tell me what you think a Dominican looks like because I can pick out 10 very different looking people and they are all as Dominican as it gets.” I didn’t have to look any further than my own first cousins to choose from. Now, when people ask about my background, I don’t get upset; I just say, yes, I am Black. I also happen to be of Dominican descent and speak Spanish. They are not mutually exclusive.

 Which Latina matriarch do you most identify with and why?

I don’t know if she’s old enough to be considered a matriarch, but I know Zoe Saldana is well on her way to becoming one. I cannot get enough of that woman. She is such an amazingly talented artist and has starred in some of the biggest movies in recent years. But she still has such a humble aura about her. I love that she is so family oriented and doesn’t put on airs. Hearing her speak about her family and tell stories about how she grew up, I feel like we could’ve been in the same family. As proud as she is of her culture, she has not let herself get pigeonholed into stereotypical Latina roles. I see her and I see myself and my cousins, Latinas that were born in the US but with strong ties to our cultural background.

Who inspires you?

My mother is my first and biggest inspiration. She is the strongest, selfless, loving, most abundant woman I know. I am also blessed to have been continuously surrounded by powerful women in my life. Being around so many amazing women in turn inspires me to be my best self.

If you’d like to nominate someone for our EverydayChica feature, please email us at aintilatina@gmail.com, or hit us up on Twitter or Facebook!