About Star

I grew up in El Paso as the oldest with a younger brother. Our home had a lot of love in it, and it also had a lot of hard things — my dad was violent toward my mom, and I grew up doing what oldest daughters in that situation do: watching, worrying, trying to hold things steady. When it came time to take action, I did, even when it meant doing something most people would never want to do. What I took from all of it was this — I wanted a different kind of life, and I was going to build one.

El Paso and my Mexican American roots gave me a lot to be proud of. The food, the people, the sense of community — that's always been home to me. But I also knew pretty early on that I wanted more education than I was being pointed toward. I wanted a real career. I know what it means to want more for yourself than what you were handed.

I spent years working in and around the legal system — first as a court clerk at the El Paso County Courthouse, then as a legal secretary at law firms handling family and criminal cases. I understood that world well and genuinely thought law school was where I was headed. What shifted everything was the time I spent around the social workers embedded in that system. Watching them work with people in the middle of some of the hardest moments of their lives — something clicked. It connected directly back to my own childhood. I wanted to be the person in the room helping families understand what domestic violence, trauma, and substance abuse do to a developing brain — because nobody did that for me growing up. Misty Copeland has a quote I come back to a lot: "I may not be there yet, but I am closer than I was yesterday." That's not just something I believe. If you do the work, in all the ways that count, it gets better. I'm proof of that.

I earned my Bachelor of Social Work from UT El Paso and went on to complete my Master of Social Work at UT Arlington, graduating with a 3.83 GPA while working full time. Since then I've worked in case management, community mental health, and most recently as a school-based therapist — which has only deepened my understanding of what teenagers and families are actually navigating day to day.