Chimigos: Celebrating Hispanic and LatinX Heritage Month
If you’ve ever been to a quinceañera, you’ll understand that it’s a big deal: A young girl becomes a woman and is celebrated with food, family, friends, music, and lots of traditions, like a white dress, a dance with her father, and a performance with her friends.
Quinceañeras are a quintessential Mexican celebration that honor a young lady turning fifteen. “Thinking back to all the quinceañeras I attended makes me smile so big — the music, the dancing, the atmosphere,” explains Shelby Olivas, a co-lead of our LatinX Chimer Resource Group, Chimigos. Tinoi Lautoa and Jessica Lara, two of the group’s other co-leads, agree: “Quinceañeras are one of my favorite Mexican traditions,” Tinoi says. “Much of my adolescence was spent rehearsing dances for my cousins’ parties,” Jessica explains.
And for Ivan Parrales, the group’s fourth co-lead, the Mexican tradition that he loves the most is celebrating Christmas on the eve of the day–December 24. “I love that we party until midnight on what others see as Christmas Eve — the tamales, the gifts, the music — it’s so festive,” he says.
Jessica loves Christmas, too — she makes tamales every year with her Abuela and is slowly learning the recipes so she and her mother can keep up the tradition.
Celebrations of LatinX heritage can take many shapes and flavors: parties, foods, sharing a native language, dances, or just a sense of community. For the co-leads of Chimigos, it takes on all of those forms and more.
In honor of September, which is LatinX Heritage Month, we’d like to celebrate our Chimigos’ heritage and take a look into what it means to our group’s co-leads.
Meet the leads
Chimigos was founded in 2019 as a Chimer Resource Group for LatinX Chimers. It serves to build connection and community, and provide a way for LatinX Chimers to share their cultural experiences with each other as well as with other Chimers.
The group has four co-leads — here they are!
Ivan Parrales
A member of our Fraud Operations team, Ivan joined Chime because of our human-centered product and culture that emphasizes being kind. He’s a co-lead of Chimigos because he wants to connect with his community, learn more about his background, and represent the LatinX Chimer community in Chicago.
Jessica Lara
Jessica is also a member of our Fraud Operations team and she loves the accessible, non-predatory nature of what Chime offers our members. She hopes to find community through Chimigos and help educate non-LatinX Chimers about her personal experience.
Shelby Olivas
Shelby is a Technical Sourcer on our Recruiting team, where she believes it’s of the utmost importance to believe in the mission of the company you’re recruiting for. She’s half Mexican, half Puerto-Rican, but her family raised her with an emphasis on American culture, so Chimigos has been a great way for her to reconnect with her LatinX heritage and community.
Tinoi Lautoa
Tinoi joined Chime because until graduating from college, she never felt fully financially equipped and wants to help our members achieve financial health earlier — and more easily. She works on our Member Services team to make sure our members are heard and feel they can rely on Chime. She’s half Mexican, half Samoan, and loves her Mexican community — she joined Chimigos as a co-lead to help spread the love!
What heritage means
Merriam-Webster defines heritage as ‘something transmitted by or acquired from a predecessor,’ a tradition, or ‘something possessed as a result of one’s natural situation or birth.’ But for our four Chimigos co-leads, heritage takes on a much deeper meaning.
Community
For Jessica, heritage is community: it’s family, extended family, neighbors, and friends who share the same history and experience. It’s the way her dad has a network of LatinX people for everything — whether it’s to help throw a party, fix something around the house, or find a referral for a doctor. “Community building is definitely present in immigrant communities, but even after living here for generations, our Latinx community is stronger than ever,” she says.
Honoring the past
Both Ivan and Jessica feel that heritage is a sense of resiliency, of history, and of honoring the past. “When I think about what my ancestors went through, I can’t help but see parallels to the obstacles we’re continuously overcoming even today,” Jessica says. The way Ivan sees it — through his lens of a history degree — heritage is about bringing forth the experiences of our ancestors and making sure that they are remembered. “We’re going to have our own set of challenges and we will write our own stories, but we should always honor what’s come before us.”
Connection
For Tinoi, sharing heritage with others means finding connections with those around you. In a new setting, for example, if she hears someone speaking Spanish, she immediately knows that there is some kind of shared heritage and feels a connection. “Right away, if I hear someone speaking Spanish, I know that I can relate to them — it’s a foot in the door for us to connect over our heritage, language, and traditions.”
Learning
For Shelby, whose family didn’t celebrate many LatinX traditions growing up, heritage is an opportunity to learn. “It’s really important to me to start to understand my heritage now so I can pass it down to my future generations,” she explains. “I’m very proud to be Mexican and Puerto Rican and I think heritage is about knowing your history, your traditions, and passing it down.”
Furthering heritage and memories through Chimigos
No matter what heritage means to each Chimigo co-lead, they are all equally devoted to celebrating it during the month of September and throughout the year. And by doing so, Chimigos members put Chime’s values into practice — especially our ‘being human’ value. “Our CRGs, really show that as a company, we are first and foremost a group of humans, and we’re here to share our experiences,” Shelby says. So through events both educational and just for fun, Chimigos will continue to create settings where they can share their experiences, learn about each other, and educate other Chimers about what it’s like to have LatinX heritage. They’ll host events for Dia de los Muertos and ongoing gatherings for Chimers to gather at, as well as activities focused on intersectionality with other CRGs.
“We have the support of other CRGs and the workplace experience team to create an environment where everyone can bring their authentic selves to work,” explains Jessica. What’s more, being members of Chimigos helps every co-lead not just celebrate their heritage, but develop skills like leadership, communication, and connection with coworkers. “We’re all more comfortable speaking up since leading this group,” Shelby says. “We’re looking forward to using our voices to share our rich heritage with our fellow Chimers.”
