Ces Heredia

InStyle • 5th January 2022

The Jonas Brothers' Breakup Helped Me Come to Terms with My Own Family Drama

After I moved away from home to attend fashion school, my younger sister and I rarely saw each other in person. Somehow, though, we still found the time to gossip about dates, music, friends, and annoying teachers via text or the cousin group chat. And it was one of our cousins who first broke the news to us over WhatsApp: the Jonas Brothers had broken up, breaking our little hearts in the process.

My relationship with both my siblings, but especially with my sister, has always been complicated

5th January 2022

What It’s Like Being Jewish in a Small Northern Mexico Town

I Discovered Ways to Embrace My Judaism, Even When I Felt Isolated

Judaism felt more like my truth: I was not only allowed to question everything but I was often encouraged to do so. Things were never taught as black and white; there’s always a scale of grays to consider. I could explore and discover religion at my own pace instead of there being one absolute way of thinking and doing things. I remember first calling myself a Jew at around 12 years old. I never did this in public, just when I w

5th January 2022

COVID Killed Our Dream Restaurant

Despite a Difficult First Year, the Restaurant Pulled Through

It wasn’t all sugar, spice and everything nice, though. There were a lot of fights, arguments and disagreements that we had to work through. Money played a significant role in those disagreements. While I was constantly advocating for not elevating prices too much and offering free delivery to our customers, I’d be outnumbered by my parents. For nearly two years, we struggled to make ends meet and to meet break-even points with the r

5th January 2022

Why Fat-Shaming Is Bad for Personal and Public Health

I was always picked last in PE classes. “Nobody wants the fat girl in their team,” my classmates told me. “We’ll lose if you’re with us.” I hated gym class. It was a 45-minute-long hell that I had to suffer through twice a week. It included my two least favorite things: mean kids who would call me names and bully me because of my weight, and the unrelenting mid-morning heat of a small town near the Gulf of Mexico.

I’ve Been Getting Fat-Shamed My Whole Life I’ve been fat for most of my life, exc

5th January 2022

What I’ve Learned About Myself—and Society—Through Developing My Personal Style

Self-Expression Through Fashion Has Always Been Important to Me

Once I was allowed to pick my own clothes growing up, I knew I wanted to look different than my classmates, something that my parents weren’t entirely fond of. I clearly remember begging my mother to let me wear a long-sleeved, purple, camo top and bell-bottom jeans under a denim miniskirt for school picture day. I also remember her saying no and me sneaking the clothes out in my backpack and wearing them anyway. What can I say? Ev

5th January 2022

Was My Childhood as Happy as I Remember It?

Most people I know yearn for their childhood, for those so-called “simpler times” when naps and playtime were fundamental parts of our busy schedules and when our biggest responsibility was making sure we brought the right toy for whatever playdate our parents had set up for us. Nowadays, we hear a lot of talk about nostalgia and adults dreaming about the days when life was better, with no social media to distract us and kids could just be kids. As children, we tend to see the positive in everyt

5th January 2022

I’m Leaving the Family Business: This Is Why

“Over 90 years being a family-owned, family-run company!” That’s the slogan that appears as a footnote on every social media post my family’s business makes. It sounds nice, doesn’t it? Ninety-plus years in business, building a loyal client base. Ninety-plus years of fathers handing the reins over to their sons (or daughter, in my case, although I’m the first woman in 90-plus years to hold an actual position on both the board and management rather than simply being a silent partner). I grew up a

HuffPost • 23rd September 2021

I’m A Latina. Please Stop Calling Me ‘Spicy.’

Even at my young age, though, the differences between Vélez’s characters and those of her American counterparts were obvious to me. While American actresses were considered beautiful, ladylike and classy, Vélez was constantly portrayed as a sex bomb, and maybe a little too passionate for her own good. She starred in films like “Hot Pepper” and “Mexican Spitfire,” where her “spicy Mexican” persona wasn’t one of her character traits; it was her only character trait.

Vélez didn’t originate the ste

Alma • 13th August 2021

How Antisemitism Has Changed My Desire to Have Kids

When I was younger, I used to feel like life had a specific timeline or a set of steps that I had to follow in order to achieve success. It involved a series of things I had to do or achieve by a certain age: graduate high school, get a scholarship for college, graduate, get a stable job, find a partner, and get married — all before 25. And then there was the ultimate goal I had to aspire to in order to become a truly fulfilled woman: become a mother.

In reality, though, motherhood wasn’t one o

Alma • 8th July 2021

The Jewish Trans Mexican TikTok Star You Need to Know

While I still don’t get it 100%, that doesn’t prevent me from spending way too much time scrolling through the endless loop of viral challenges and 60-second dance videos on TikTok. It was during one of those daily scrolls that I came across Hadassah Tirosh’s page. I’d be lying if I said her Jewish-sounding name wasn’t the first thing that caught my attention — the second being her very distinctive and unique laugh.

As I scrolled through her page, I realized that Hadassah was not only, in fact,