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Rebekka Ramirez is a first time homebuyer in Whittier. She has good fortune conspiring for her on multiple fronts. The first was that her parents moved in with her father’s parents and offered to sell her the home where she was raised. The second was her husband partnered with her financially to facilitate the purchase of the home. The third, she said, was her faith. Adding them all up, she has been able to continue a tradition of homeownership that began with her Mexican grandmother from Nuevo León and continued with her father. She is also one of those rare examples in the Latina/o community that is benefitting from and continuing her family’s generational wealth via real estate. She is a third generation home owner.
Ortiz was born and raised in Texas, east of Dallas and south of the Choctaw and Chickasaw Nations in a town called Scurry. Her family on her father’s side were Mexican and on her mother’s side, they were white and Indigenous. After her parents divorced, Kristy’s mother moved to California and this gave her a chance to escape from her small town to spread her wings and fly. Her ancestral family was in Los Angeles, so close they are buried 10 miles from where Kristy lives now. She came to California in her senior year of high school in her cowboy boots fresh off the farm and soon after graduation began working in the mortgage industry. She was a homeowner for many years but received a buyout from her spouse and now she currently rents a single family residence in Garden Grove.
Lyanne Alfaro founded her own company, Moneda Moves, to share stories about money and culture to empower people to create generational wealth. She’s also a Developer Relations Program Manager at Google, overseeing content strategy for developer stories across social platforms. She is an educated Latina, employed at a Fortune 100, fully engaged in “solopreneurship.” She seeks to bring her career closer to home to focus not just on professional growth but on personal growth as she works with her parents on their joint financial future.
I always knew that part of my American dream included home ownership as being the daughter of an architect, I grew up going to his “obras” and seeing the foundation with rubble grow and convert into magnificent structures. My dad always said one must invest in “Books and Bricks,”meaning, focus on education and invest in homeownership to succeed. He was right. Once in America, I worked hard being an immigrant who did not know anyone and did not speak English well. I went to school, completed two postgraduate degrees and eventually my MBA. I purchased my first condo at age 30 with the guidance of my Latina friends and a wonderful realtor who taught me what I know now. That was my first step of many that followed to get me where I am today.
