I was born in Guatemala in 1974. A few months after I was born, my father was appointed Consul of Guatemala in Los Angeles. My father accepted and my mother and I moved with him to Los Angeles. Spanish was my first language. This posed a challenge when I started going to school but I was able to grasp the English language fairly quickly. I still speak Spanish with my parents and I am very proud to be able to communicate fluently in Spanish. As a lawyer, this has also allowed me to help Spanish speaking clients.

In 1979, my father was appointed Ambassador of Guatemala in Japan. We moved to Japan and lived there for about three years. I attended an international school where English was the primary language. Adjusting to life in Japan was very difficult because I was faced with a completely foreign language and culture. In 1982, due to a political uprising in Guatemala, we were forced to leave Japan and move to the United States where I have lived ever since.

Since high school I thought I wanted to be a lawyer. I loved to argue with friends over politics and current events and thought being a lawyer would be something that I would enjoy. I also wanted to be able to help my family so I wanted to choose a career where I would be able to make a good living. I knew that law was a competitive field and that I would need to get good grades to get into a good college and into a good law school. My family did not have the financial resources to pay for my education so I knew that I needed to get even better grades in order to get grants and scholarships to help pay for college and law school.

With these goals in mind, I made every effort to get good grades in high school and got into the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA). I spent a lot of time in the library looking for ways to get financial aid and I was able to get a couple of grants and scholarships which helped pay for the tuition. I also worked part time. During college, I took a lot of different courses, such as anthropology and astronomy, to make sure that law was really what I wanted to do. Since I did not have any family members or friends who were lawyers, I took some law related clashes and talked to counselors to find out what being a lawyer meant.

I graduated from UCLA in 1999 and went to the law school at the University of Southern California. Although the first year was difficult, I enjoyed the classes and knew that this was the profession for me.

Today, I am a partner at a private law firm in Pasadena, California. This is the first job I obtained out of law school. I practice employment law which means I help companies solve problems they have with employees. I also practice trust and estate litigation where I assist families who are being torn apart by disputes over a trust or a will left by another family member. My practice is always changing and it is always challenging. There is never a dull moment.