All of it was Translation

When I am deep in a story, an argument or a moment of joy, my Spanish slips through at the edges...

The rhythm shifts, the vowels warm up, two languages briefly become one. It has happened in boardrooms and on job sites, in proposal meetings, cheering a favourite sports team, and in conversations that turned unexpectedly intense. I have built a career in construction without ever picking up a tool, in an industry where women are still writing the case for our own belonging, and where I decided to stake my claim, in a country I chose and then had to earn. None of it happened in a straight line. All of it, looking back, was translation.

My parents had the foresight to enrol me in a fully bilingual school (English/Spanish) in Mexico from Grade 1 and onward, and language remained one of the constants of my life ever since. I studied Business Administration at ITAM in Mexico City, completing my degree in the early 1990s, and I was already drawn to marketing, communication and the written word. Around that time, after reading his autobiography and feeling inspired by it, I wrote a letter to Lee Iacocca, then Chairman and President of Chrysler Corporation.  To my delight, I received a response signed by him! That letter started the path that led me to Chrysler de México, where I worked in Internal and Corporate Communications. It was an early lesson in how organizations speak within themselves and to the world, and how much depends on whether people understand not only what is happening, but why.

After Chrysler, in 1995, a brief sabbatical during which I travelled through Europe, and then I went to work in our family business. Aromáticos BYD, led by my father, developed flavours and fragrances, and imported specialty chemical aromatics, essential oils and nutraceuticals for the food and personal care industries. It was a very different industry, but  in my role as International Business Manager, it still involved establishing communication and relationships with partners in the US and Europe, and understanding our local market's needs. In retrospect, I can see that my professional life has unfolded through a series of translations. Sometimes that meant English and Spanish. Sometimes it meant translating technical knowledge into business language, or business goals into human understanding, or one country’s paperwork into the possibility of another life.

In 1999, I compiled and prepared the immigration files that enabled our family to move to Canada. It was a life changing project for myself and my family and I took it seriously and with the utmost attention to detail. It involved documents, dates, forms, proof, order, patience and the constant awareness that everything counted. In the end, the effort paid off and we arrived in Canada in 2000 as permanent residents. I began again professionally in Vancouver as an Executive Assistant in a technology company. That was not a simple reinvention, because as an immigrant I arrived with my own history, education and experience, so it was a new and exciting opportunity to carry what I knew into a new place, a different professional culture, and surrounded by new people. Four years later, I became a Canadian citizen.

Supporting executives is sometimes taken for granted, but it is a complex function. It requires attention, discretion, timing, judgment and an ability to understand the movement of a business from inside its daily pressures. This inside view made me sensitive, throughout my career, to roles that are essential and yet, easily dismissed. I had a front-row seat watching how decisions were made, how priorities shifted, how personalities shaped outcomes, and practicing what I learned with my father as my boss, I performed my work efficiently and seamlessly, so the effort almost seemed invisible and I gained the respect of my managers and peers.

Throughout my career, my skills and experience transferred well from one industry to another, but construction interested me before I ever worked in it because it was tangible in a way many businesses are not. You can pass an empty lot one day and, some months later, see a building standing there. There is something powerful about that visible transformation.

In 2012, I joined a medium-sized construction firm in Vancouver as an Executive Assistant, and over time my work moved into proposals, pursuits and business development. Since then, I have held progressive roles in proposal departments across construction and engineering firms, with titles that have shifted from coordinator to specialist to writer to manager. My current role as Proposal Manager feels most accurate to me because a proposal is, in many ways, a project. It has deadlines, moving parts, contributors, pressure, competing priorities and a team that needs to come together around one outcome, so I manage.

Though I have no engineering background, I have learned a great deal from engineers and from the way they think, but I bring a different skill: storytelling. I appreciate the opportunity to work with the technical people, those who actually know how to put a building together, and to get to tell the story of how a project will be executed, how a team will deliver something complex, and why a client should trust that team with the responsibility of constructing their facility. My love of writing has enabled me to tell these stories, and help the people with the deep expertise who may not know how to explain their own value because they assume their qualifications speak for themselves.

A common misconception is that what proposal professionals do is "make things pretty.” We try to laugh it off and sometimes say that we'll draw some flowers around the proposal document to get the job, but it's not really funny. In reality, proposal work entails strategy, communication, organization and judgment. It is understanding what a client is asking, bringing together technical contributors, refining their experience and qualifications, and making the case compelling enough that the company has a chance to win the work that keeps people employed.

In my role, there is a particular satisfaction in entering a meeting with more than people expected from me. Sometimes it has felt almost like a social experiment, going above and beyond the strict boundaries of my job description, bringing forward information or asking questions that people did not expect me to ask. I can see the surprise in the room when they realize I have noticed something they did not, or that I understand more than they assumed I did.

This leads to respect being the value I need most in a workplace. I respect the people I work with, and I expect them to respect me and what I do. Integrity sits beside it. I want to work with people who say what they mean, who do what they say they will do, and who try to do the right thing, even when business decisions are not always simple or straight. These values become especially clear when they are missing.

At one point in my career, I worked in a place where respect was spoken about often, almost preached, while my lived experience did not match those words. My professional contributions were taken for granted, my voice was dismissed, and personal boundaries were crossed in ways that should never happen in a workplace. I did not shy away from speaking up against that. That does not mean I enjoy conflict, or that I think every situation requires the loudest possible response, but silence would have felt like surrender and I could not make peace with that. It cost me peace of mind, comfort, and it risked my livelihood, but I have never been able to stay quiet in the face of injustice, whether it is aimed at me or at someone else that hopes that somebody will speak first. I usually speak first.

Construction has also given me moments of pride that are quieter and more rewarding than conflict. I have been on sites where people doing the physical work, the people lifting heavy panels and bringing the project into reality, have thanked me for the work I did so that they could be there building. My first reaction has sometimes been surprise that they even know who I am, but those moments matter because they connect the pursuit of the job with the work itself.

Leadership has a responsibility to recognize women's capabilities and contributions in a more intentional way, not as a symbol or a quota, but because women are genuinely capable of leading construction businesses and shaping its future. Brilliant women engineers and professionals bring technical qualifications, business acumen and the kind of personal skills that build teams as much as they build structures. That understanding must come from the top and move downward, it rarely travels the other way.

My own experience of the industry's challenges has been different from that of women working in the field, and I honour that distinction. I have seen women across every role -engineers, safety professionals, labourers, carpenters- doing their work with quiet competence and focus, and that, in the end, is everything the industry needs to pay attention to.

Outside work, I am still someone who notices and remembers. I smile easily, and I think it may be the first thing people notice about me. I am a child-free woman in my fifties with dark brown curly hair that is threaded with more silver every day. I have a sense of humour, a bit self-deprecating and sometimes unexpected, I like to surprise people with it. I laugh loudly and unapologetically at silly things. People come to me because they know I will listen without an agenda, advise with tact but without judgment, and I mean every word I say.

I remember birthdays, anniversaries, milestones and the small victories people mention once and assume no one paid attention to. I learned this from my mom, who was the most thoughtful person I know. She taught me  that being remembered is its own form of being loved. She does not remember things the way she used to now, so I carry that gift forward for her quietly, the way you carry something precious that someone else can no longer hold.

Strangers tell me things the way they might confide in someone they have known for years. It is one of the great honours of my life, and sometimes one of its burdens, because other people’s pain is real pain, and I feel it as such.

Glen, my partner of 20 years, and I are homebodies, and we like it that way. Building our home in our favourite corner of the world was a significant accomplishment in our lives and we care for it and enjoy being in it.

I love dogs, but especially Bruno and Agnes, my two doodles. I read, listen to audiobooks, write creatively, do puzzles, spend time with family, and care for aging parents. I like organizing and decluttering and making a home feel good to live in. I am creative and deeply curious, though not with my hands, which are enthusiastic but clumsy and more likely to knock something over than build it. I enjoy beauty in many forms: a serene garden, a well-written story, an emotional scene in a film, a painting that makes me stand still, music that moves the body and the mind. More recently, I became involved with the society that supports our local marine search and rescue organization while Glen joined the crew on the water, and I find it fulfilling to use the kinds of skills I use at work for a cause that is necessary and helps people.

I am someone who gets things done. I always have been. While others are still debating pros and cons, I tend to jump in and get started. I have less patience with people posturing or quietly positioning themselves to take credit as I have gotten older. I am less willing to be diplomatic when I do not feel like it, and much less interested in standing in circles when there is actual stuff to do;  I have earned that impatience, and I think I wear it rather well.

I was drawn to GEMS Unearthed because I believe that individuals have interesting, different and authentic stories to tell, and that putting them into words, carefully, honestly, and in narrative long form, is still one of the most powerful things a person can do, one of the most genuine ways to say who we are to the world.

For younger women entering construction, or considering it, I would say that they do not need to be engineers or architects to belong in the industry. If there is a creative side to their ambitions and capabilities, there is opportunity in blending technical knowledge with storytelling, communication and business development. There is a lot to learn and a lot to do. Tools such as artificial intelligence may make some parts of the work more efficient, and I believe that roles like mine will not disappear but evolve, leaving more room for human voices to be heard even more clearly.

Storytelling is the thread that has gone throughout the history of humanity and the history of every industry. Someone still needs to tell the stories of the things we build, why we build them and by whom.

I would tell the next generation of women to be brave, to stand up for themselves and to pursue the goals they believe in as individuals. Not what their parents, teachers, managers or peers expect of them, but what they expect and want for themselves. I think that is the true definition of being happy in what we do professionally, and of course it reflects personally.

After years spent helping other people translate and explain their work, I still believe there is value in understanding one’s own story with the same care: what has been built, what has been risked, what has been carried forward, and what still deserves to be said.