Alma Lizzette Cárdenas-Rodríguez is program manager and academic advisor at Fuller Seminary. In 2020, she published Groanings from the Desert, a collection of English and Spanish teo-poemas, prayers, and thoughts that invite readers into her pain, joy, hopes, and dreams. She created Wine and Write, a ministry for women to meet bimonthly to connect by tasting wine, journaling, and storytelling to unearth the purpose within. She holds a master’s in transformational urban leadership from Azusa Pacific University and received an urban youth workers certificate from Fuller.
Raquel Toledo is Houston program manager and an academic advisor for Fuller Texas. Her book, DIGNA: Cómo vestirte de fuerza, honor y paz, explores domestic violence and the church and is a guide for Latina women in identifying intimate partner violence (2021). She founded the nonprofit organization A Gift of Value; she has been in ministry for over 25 years and has mentored Latina women for over 10 years. She holds a master’s degree in human services and counseling from DePaul University and a second master’s in Intercultural and Urban Studies from Moody Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois.
Chantelle Gibbs: I’d like to talk about your experience and work in ministry with young people, specifically young Latina women. To start, can you introduce who you are, shed light on the work you do, and how you began that work?
Alma Cárdenas-Rodríguez: My name is Alma Lizzette Cárdenas-Rodríguez, and I am Mexico-Estadounidense, born, raised, and living in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California. I am a writer, poet, mother, wife, friend, mentor, and mentee. In this season of my life, I’m an academic advisor at Fuller Seminary. Because my background is in youth ministry, I am passionate about seeing youth, young adults, and women specifically step into the fullness of the wells I believe we each carry within for our collective well-being. About a year ago, I started a ministry called Wine and Write, which invites women to taste and see what God might be inviting us to unearth and step into in their particular season of life. We sit with the contents of the wine glass to become aware of ourselves, the environment around us, and how it contributes to or hinders our work and our purpose.
Raquel Toledo: My name is Raquel Toledo. My parents are from Puerto Rico, and I was born and raised in Chicago. I’ve been in ministry for over 25 years and started working in youth ministry when I was 17. I was a high school Spanish teacher for a couple of years and then transitioned to academic advising; I worked for a community college for about 15 years before coming to Fuller as an academic advisor.
Back in 2013, I launched a foundation called A Gift of Value to focus on self-esteem issues in women, young girls specifically, and how Christ can bring confidence that is needed and valued. I thought the launch would be small, but we had over 200 ladies show up. After sending out an anonymous survey to collect topics the women wanted discussed at the next meeting, reading the responses was a wake-up call for me—domestic violence, sexual abuse, incest. That’s when I felt a “holy discontent.” I knew then the Holy Spirit wanted me to work within the church and bring healing there. I’ve been walking that faith journey and serving young ladies and women for the past ten years.
CG: In your contexts with Latina women specifically, what are some things you’ve observed in your communities that you continually feel called to speak to?
ACR: My whole life, I heard that Jesus was coming soon. I would hear people ask my mom, “What are you going to do when your daughters get married?” and she would say, “I don’t even think I’m going to witness that moment because by the time they’re old enough to get married, Jesus would have come!” So, I remember turning 18 and wondering, What am I doing and what’s next? The LAUSD K–12 system did not encourage our communities to attend college. I had no plans for college and no dreams.
I left church at 18 for the first time after realizing how unhealthy it was. But then I had a near-death experience at 21. I realized, God, if I didn’t die in that, I’m here for a reason. I came back to church right away and started working with the youth and young adults. A lot of the ways they’d treated us before I left hadn’t changed. That’s what brought me to Fuller; I thought, “God, if I’m going to work with youth and young adults, I hope not to repeat the same patterns. I want to be an affirming voice.”
In that process, I learned about women like Malala Yousafzai, and by the time I was done with my master’s degree, I found my voice and truths that set me free through theological education. I realized that youth, young adults, and women don’t have to wait until they’re 30 or 40 to find their gifts and find their voice. How can I contribute so that women and young adults are able to find their voice, be affirmed in their gifts, and unearth the well that they have within? And when I talk about unearthing the well within, I’m talking purpose, I’m talking dreams, I’m talking about the ugly stuff that wasn’t talked about in the testimonies growing up at church or the hard parts of the story that weren’t often shared. That’s what inspired me to write Groanings from the Desert.
RT: As a Latina, as Alma said, you often hear, “Jesus is coming soon. You don’t have to worry about school. You don’t have to worry about the future.” In my case, I believed it, but I didn’t let that stop me. So, while the majority of people at church were not planning on going to college, I thought to myself, I believe it and I need to go to school. I need to have a job.
To me, it’s very important to empower and educate other women to understand who they are. When I was a professor at Seminario Bíblico Hispano in Chicago, I was able to help create a certificate for women in ministry. Recently, Centro Latino approached me about partnering to create a diplomado for Latina women in ministry, and it’s been very successful so far. It’s a six-month professional certificate program through FULLER Equip, with six different modules equipping, training, educating, and helping these ladies believe in themselves and believe they can do what they have been called to do in their contexts.
Chantelle Gibbs is content producer and managing editor for FULLER magazine.
Alma Lizzette Cárdenas-Rodríguez is program manager and academic advisor at Fuller Seminary. In 2020, she published Groanings from the Desert, a collection of English and Spanish teo-poemas, prayers, and thoughts that invite readers into her pain, joy, hopes, and dreams. She created Wine and Write, a ministry for women to meet bimonthly to connect by tasting wine, journaling, and storytelling to unearth the purpose within. She holds a master’s in transformational urban leadership from Azusa Pacific University and received an urban youth workers certificate from Fuller.
Raquel Toledo is Houston program manager and an academic advisor for Fuller Texas. Her book, DIGNA: Cómo vestirte de fuerza, honor y paz, explores domestic violence and the church and is a guide for Latina women in identifying intimate partner violence (2021). She founded the nonprofit organization A Gift of Value; she has been in ministry for over 25 years and has mentored Latina women for over 10 years. She holds a master’s degree in human services and counseling from DePaul University and a second master’s in Intercultural and Urban Studies from Moody Theological Seminary in Chicago, Illinois.
Chantelle Gibbs: I’d like to talk about your experience and work in ministry with young people, specifically young Latina women. To start, can you introduce who you are, shed light on the work you do, and how you began that work?
Alma Cárdenas-Rodríguez: My name is Alma Lizzette Cárdenas-Rodríguez, and I am Mexico-Estadounidense, born, raised, and living in the San Fernando Valley of Los Angeles, California. I am a writer, poet, mother, wife, friend, mentor, and mentee. In this season of my life, I’m an academic advisor at Fuller Seminary. Because my background is in youth ministry, I am passionate about seeing youth, young adults, and women specifically step into the fullness of the wells I believe we each carry within for our collective well-being. About a year ago, I started a ministry called Wine and Write, which invites women to taste and see what God might be inviting us to unearth and step into in their particular season of life. We sit with the contents of the wine glass to become aware of ourselves, the environment around us, and how it contributes to or hinders our work and our purpose.
Raquel Toledo: My name is Raquel Toledo. My parents are from Puerto Rico, and I was born and raised in Chicago. I’ve been in ministry for over 25 years and started working in youth ministry when I was 17. I was a high school Spanish teacher for a couple of years and then transitioned to academic advising; I worked for a community college for about 15 years before coming to Fuller as an academic advisor.
Back in 2013, I launched a foundation called A Gift of Value to focus on self-esteem issues in women, young girls specifically, and how Christ can bring confidence that is needed and valued. I thought the launch would be small, but we had over 200 ladies show up. After sending out an anonymous survey to collect topics the women wanted discussed at the next meeting, reading the responses was a wake-up call for me—domestic violence, sexual abuse, incest. That’s when I felt a “holy discontent.” I knew then the Holy Spirit wanted me to work within the church and bring healing there. I’ve been walking that faith journey and serving young ladies and women for the past ten years.
CG: In your contexts with Latina women specifically, what are some things you’ve observed in your communities that you continually feel called to speak to?
ACR: My whole life, I heard that Jesus was coming soon. I would hear people ask my mom, “What are you going to do when your daughters get married?” and she would say, “I don’t even think I’m going to witness that moment because by the time they’re old enough to get married, Jesus would have come!” So, I remember turning 18 and wondering, What am I doing and what’s next? The LAUSD K–12 system did not encourage our communities to attend college. I had no plans for college and no dreams.
I left church at 18 for the first time after realizing how unhealthy it was. But then I had a near-death experience at 21. I realized, God, if I didn’t die in that, I’m here for a reason. I came back to church right away and started working with the youth and young adults. A lot of the ways they’d treated us before I left hadn’t changed. That’s what brought me to Fuller; I thought, “God, if I’m going to work with youth and young adults, I hope not to repeat the same patterns. I want to be an affirming voice.”
In that process, I learned about women like Malala Yousafzai, and by the time I was done with my master’s degree, I found my voice and truths that set me free through theological education. I realized that youth, young adults, and women don’t have to wait until they’re 30 or 40 to find their gifts and find their voice. How can I contribute so that women and young adults are able to find their voice, be affirmed in their gifts, and unearth the well that they have within? And when I talk about unearthing the well within, I’m talking purpose, I’m talking dreams, I’m talking about the ugly stuff that wasn’t talked about in the testimonies growing up at church or the hard parts of the story that weren’t often shared. That’s what inspired me to write Groanings from the Desert.
RT: As a Latina, as Alma said, you often hear, “Jesus is coming soon. You don’t have to worry about school. You don’t have to worry about the future.” In my case, I believed it, but I didn’t let that stop me. So, while the majority of people at church were not planning on going to college, I thought to myself, I believe it and I need to go to school. I need to have a job.
To me, it’s very important to empower and educate other women to understand who they are. When I was a professor at Seminario Bíblico Hispano in Chicago, I was able to help create a certificate for women in ministry. Recently, Centro Latino approached me about partnering to create a diplomado for Latina women in ministry, and it’s been very successful so far. It’s a six-month professional certificate program through FULLER Equip, with six different modules equipping, training, educating, and helping these ladies believe in themselves and believe they can do what they have been called to do in their contexts.
Chantelle Gibbs is content producer and managing editor for FULLER magazine.
I was telling my group when we met last fall, “You’re doing this certificate not to prove to anybody who you are but to confirm who you are. So long as you know who you are and who Christ created you to be, you can be in any context—around those who believe in you and those who don’t.”
When I look at my timeline and see how God has used my voice for women—when I receive private messages from them saying they’ve found something they can share in their faith community or family—that’s powerful to me. I’m doing what God has called me to do because I’m giving that woman a safe space that she might not have in her home, faith community, or work.
CG: You both have published works in the last couple of years. Can you share the stories behind your poetry collection, Alma, and your book on domestic violence, Raquel?
RT: My message, directly or indirectly, is for women: Use your voice. I raise awareness with domestic violence and intimate partner violence, and wrote a book in Spanish, DIGNA: Cómo vestirte de fuerza, honor, y paz. Although it’s been two years, I’m still promoting my book aggressively because it’s not a domestic violence book translated from English to Spanish. It’s a book that is from a Latina to Latinas. When I did my qualitative research and a thesis on this subject at Moody Theological Seminary, I had an “aha!” moment. I’m bilingual, but there are a lot of Latinas who are not bilingual and only speak Spanish and cannot educate themselves. They’re not getting the support at church because most church leaders will encourage the victims to “pray for the miracle” and wait for the aggressor to change. Trust me, I believe in miracles, and with these cases, you must pray and also act and seek help. It’s a sensitive subject. So, I’m on a long-term mission.
ACR: We left our church in 2019 after working with youth and young adults for over ten years. I knew I needed to go through a grieving and healing process because when you walk away from a church or faith community, it’s like a break-up, not just with one person, but with groups of people that you had life and dreams with for that place.
Four years prior to that moment, I was in the middle of completing a graduate certificate program in urban youth ministry at Fuller. God brought to mind that I had wanted to write a book for youth and young adults that brought to light the imbalances of the structures and systems in place that either hinder us or allow us to move forward into our voice and purpose. I was going to share stories like I had never shared before, share the groanings that I had never shared before. I grew up in a context where testimonios often talked about the blessing but never about the hardship that led to that miracle or that blessing. I heard God say, “You’re going to write a book, and not only are you going to share your story, but you’re going to share hard parts of the story,” parts that until that day I had not shared, not even with my own mom. I was going to write a memoir.
But as I began to write, poetry started to sprout. To this day I am asking God and my ancestors, “Where did that come from?” I imagine there are writers and poets I don’t know about somewhere in my lineage. But that’s what became Groanings from the Desert, a collection of poems, reflections, and prayers, some of which came out in English, some in Spanish. And with all its beauty and imperfections, the same year I started writing it was the same year that I published it.
After I published, my parents started sharing stories they had never really shared before, which was so powerful and healing. There are stories we can make up in our minds that can hinder our relationships with one another, our countries, and the countries our parents came from. So the gift of giving myself permission to write, publish, and be more open about storytelling led them to share their stories, and I realized the story I had made up in my mind had nothing to do with the reality of what happened. By telling our stories, we don’t realize the gaps in different generations we’re filling, and we’re affirming what generations to come are feeling in their bodies.
RT: Her book is awesome because it’s bilingual, it’s Spanglish. When I read her poems, I thought, “Wow, this is a book that every Latina and everyone should read.”
ACR: And that was another thing—I didn’t even know I had Spanish like that in me until I started writing!
CG: What is a challenge or an opposition you faced in your journey thus far that you’ve had to overcome?
RT: For me, the challenge is the myth of domestic violence. I’m raising awareness on a subject that many are in denial about. But that’s not intimidating for me because I go by the text messages and emails that I’ve received from women who have read my book. They tell me, “I thought I was by myself,” “Thank you so much for sharing your story,” or “Thank you so much for educating us on the subject.” So that’s my reward every day, every month, every year. But I understand not everyone can talk about the subject because the culture—mostly the men in our culture—will try to intimidate you. But I don’t let that get to me at all.
ACR: As for oppositions, I think about imposter syndrome. I was consistently told in grad school was that I wasn’t an academic writer. I would hear that constantly, which was so exhausting because when I asked for help to fix it, there was little to no support. Later, I realized that, from where I sit, academic writing is a dialogue between different authors and different ideas. So as a woman of color that grew up in a church and culture where I wasn’t invited into dialogue, it was a hard thing to then extend into my academic writing. It’s still this idea that we feel like we need to have a paper or a title in order to affirm the gift within us.
CG: What would you say is the biggest misconception or a missed opportunity you often see when working with Latina women, namely the youth that you work with?
ACR: When it comes to working with youth and young adults, and even having been able to witness parents and young adults in the spaces that I create with Wine and Write, I think one of the misconceptions is that we protect each other or protect the next generation when we don’t share our stories. There’s a fear of being seen differently or less than.
But when youth have a space and platform to share and begin to tell their stories, I’ve seen relationships mended in ways that wouldn’t have happened had we not given ourselves permission to share. I’ve seen young adults affirm their parents so beautifully as a result of unearthing some of those stories that had been hard to share.
RT: When it comes to Latina women finding themselves, it’s challenging because I think in different contexts or in different countries in Latin America, the woman is invisible. If you’re in ministry, the man is the one with the calling, the one who is going to guide you. Being an “independent” and using that title for a Latina woman can be offensive to Latino men because we’re not supposed to be independent. We’re supposed to depend on the male figure. For example, I got married in my 30s, which isn’t the norm. At a certain age, you need to be married. At a certain age, you need to have children. Once you have the first child, then you need to have the second child. In the Latino community, so much has to do with our history and culture versus letting God decide your journey.
CG: What are you hoping for the next 50 years for Centro Latino? What are you hoping to see in the youth that you continue to work with?
RT: Trust God. He knows what’s best for you. I’m thinking about Martha and Mary and my own journey and how that passage blew my mind. Even my own journey into theological education was not seen, not affirmed, and not exciting for my church leaders at the time. Education was a safe space for certain people called to ministry and more specifically, men. They didn’t really see me in ministry or leading any type of work. But then I look at this passage with Martha and Mary; just like Jesus affirmed Mary’s choice to sit at his feet, to sit at the feet of a rabbi, girl, you get to choose. Mujer, tú escoges la mejor parte. ¡Tú has escogido escuchar la voz de Jesús! (Woman, you choose the best part. You have chosen to listen to the voice of Jesus!)
ACR: As an academic advisor, I often see in our students that in our serving God we forget to serve ourselves, yet serving ourselves is serving God. So that’s what inspires me to do the work, and that’s what I see for the church going forward: Even as some of us are starting to understand that ministry and purpose can possibly be something different than what we all grew up seeing, it’s so easy to forget to take care of our physical and mental needs and tend to our souls. When I think about Centro Latino and youth and women and academia, as we’re unearthing these new ways of being, and new expressions of faith community, I envision that we never lose sight of that part, that taking care of us is serving God.
Elizabeth Conde-Frazier shares about her legacy of work in theological education for the Latino/a church.
