On Wednesday, Hispanic Heritage of Odessa held its second charla (chat) which features local women from the Hispanic community.
A charla is a community talk.
“We try to bring in as many Latinas as we can that talk about the different things they do in the community,” Hispanic Heritage of Odessa Executive Director Carol Uranga said.
Uranga said the discussions vary from different themes.
“All times, they’re a personal, individual conversation that brings us all out and we encourage other Latinas to get involved in the community and let them know what’s out there,” Uranga said.
“It’s free advertising for the people who host it because we go to different businesses in town,” We talk about all kinds of different themes.
The event was put on by Hispanic Heritage of Odessa and helped organized by the organization’s president Liliana Marquez. The discussion took place at Casa Ortiz near Medical Center Hospital.
Marquez said the purpose of Wednesday’s discussion is to help empower local women.
“It’s a chat between women who express our feelings and our needs and wants and it’s also to promote ourselves as the business women that we are and the mothers, as the daughters as a friend to others,” Marquez said.
One of the guests on Wednesday was master peace officer Elizabeth Baeza.
“She talked to us about fraud and about scammers in the county and the city and we need to watch out for them,” Uranga said. “So many people don’t pay attention and suddenly they’ve been robbed silly. That was really important. We also had the bilingual program that was brought to us by Monica Cervantes.”
Wednesday was the second edition of Hispanic Heritage of Odessa’s charla. The discussions will continue to be held every 9 a.m. on Wednesdays with next week’s event taking place at Truist Bank on Seventh Street and Texas Avenue.
“It’s a way to interact with each other and to talk about different topics because sometimes we have questions and we’re not sure who to ask,” Marquez said.
The discussions are also live streamed on Facebook every week.
“There are topics that some people may not know about (such as the scams), so that was the whole purpose of doing a live Facebook,” Marquez said. “We’re able to send a message out and the message could be about the scammers. There are many topics, many areas that we cover in our live coverage.”
Marquez says so far the feedback for the discussion has been great.
“We’ve been wanting to do this for a while,” Marquez said. “Finally, we got started and the feedback has been so good. Women are so excited. Everyone’s loving what we’re doing and the live show on Facebook. Everybody’s making comments and suggestions. We’re getting a message across. The feedback is great. The agenda’s getting pretty booked. We’re inviting even more businesses that would like to invite us.”
Hispanic Heritage of Odessa has been around for over 30 years.
“We try to encourage,” Uranga said. “Every time we have an event and every time we do a project, we try to bring in the culture, the tradition and history of Hispanics because we want to encourage Hispanics to get out and reach into the community to take that step and be part of the political process, a part of the public entities. We make a difference because we’ll never change if we don’t get involved in the community. That takes stepping out and being involved.”
