Advocating for Latinos in Central Florida, Marucci Guzmán says she’s a professional beggar with a good cause
Marucci Guzmán says she had the dream of becoming a congresswoman to achieve things that would change people’s lives for the better. Growing up surrounded by strong, successful women like her mother Maritza Sanz, a local community leader, it was just natural that she would become an advocate for the underserved and her Latino community.
Today she leads the work at Latino Leadership, a nonprofit committed to the advancement of the Central Florida Latino community; Santiago & Friends, a family center for autism created in name of her nephew Santiago who was diagnosed with autism; and Clínica Mi Salud, a free and charitable clinic for primary care and mental health from a linguistically and culturally competent perspective.
She is also advocating in Tallahassee pushing for several bills, including the Applied Behavior Analysis bill, a method that uses positive reinforcement to encourage children on the autism spectrum toward more responsive and better behaviors. She’s worked on this alongside her husband, State Rep. Rene “Coach P” Plasencia, R-Orlando.
Her energy in advocating for the Spanish-speaking community is so impressive that she’s been named a finalist for Central Floridian of the Year.
With all the different hats she wears, she laughed when asked what her official title is, and confessed that “people ask ... about my title, and I always say, well, it’s technically executive director, but I go by professional beggar ― you know, because I’m not asking for me, I’m asking for the community we serve.”
Born in Puerto Rico but raised in Central Florida since she was three years old, Guzmán says she is very impressed with the progress and growth of the Latino community but stressed that there is “still so much to be done to be more inclusive and achieve equity.” Latinos make up 34-36 percent of Orange County’s population, she says ― “and I would bet a lot of money that the funding and the access to resources within our county is not equitable to that percent.”
She’s seen first hand how Central Florida has grown to “being such an emergent community for the Hispanic community,” she said.
Just in the past five years, Guzmán and her family have been advocating for Hispanics, brown and Black people who have been historically overlooked and underrepresented: Climate refugees from Puerto Rico who were ravaged by the Category 4 Hurricane Maria, followed by a series of earthquakes a few years later, along with Hispanics fleeing poverty and a dictatorships. She’s also fighting for access to Spanish language resources, assistance, and services, COVID testing and vaccination, just to name a few.
Services respond to local needs
Guzmán says that her family listens to the needs of the community, but some of those priorities have come from personal experience, like Santiago & Friends. When Guzmán’s nephew Santiago — now 12— was diagnosed with autism at 18 months, Guzmán’s mom used to go with him to therapy sessions. There, she came across a Spanish-speaking family who would ask her for help in translating care instructions. Then and there, she realized that they needed to help. That’s how Santiago & Friends came to live as a therapy center where the majority of providers and the front-desk staff, are bilingual.
Being able to lead an organization that’s leaving a legacy and making an impact on the communitygives her strength every day. “When you have parents that say, ‘my son said I love you for the first time.’ And they’re eight, nine, you know. My worst day is nothing compared to some of the days that our families experience. And you go, ‘you know what, I don’t know what it’s like to walk in the footsteps of some of our families, but I can help make that journey a little bit easier’.”
A chalkboard in the hallway at Santiago & Friends reminds them every day of that. “Con amor todo se puede” translates to “With love anything is possible,” words that her mom says time and time again when they face a new challenge.
If there was ever a time of need for Guzmán and her family’s organizations to push through, it was back in 2017, soon after the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. The catastrophic hurricane left the Island of Enchantment under a massive blackout for months. There was barely any food and water, and gas lines were hours long. Many people were trapped in their homes and many more died.
Latino Leadership was one of the organizations present at the makeshift welcoming center at the Orlando International Airport. And they took their duty one step further, helping families directly with personal hygiene items such as menstrual pads for women to housing.
“Hurricane Maria took our organization in a completely different direction for more than a year,” Guzmán explained. Suddenly, the location on east Colonial Drive became a safe haven for so many families. It was a place where recently arrived Puerto Ricans went to get food, help navigating housing and assistance programs in the state, and even clothing.
Another personal battle was COVID-19, a pandemic that has affected the entire world, but most directly the Latino and Black community which were at most risk. Her family was not the exception.
“COVID, right, five letter word,” Guzmán said barely holding back her tears.
“I don’t think people really understand the depth of trying to keep an organization afloat during a pandemic,” she says. Protecting staff and clients was important, but “we all have our own struggle. And my mom’s struggle with COVID was incredibly difficult. My staff didn’t know that for a month she was in the hospital, and she was on a ventilator for 18 days. You just have to keep going and you have to keep smiling,” she said.
Facing the unknown outcome of COVID, Guzmán says that you learn a lot of empathy. For a month she could only see her mom via Facetime or talk to her even though she was in a coma. While she was enduring this personal challenge, she mobilized her team to start making testing and vaccination events, providing COVID information in Spanish. She advocated for local governments to aid with Spanish speakers.
“I think some people just assume you know, COVID, it’s gone, it’s in the rearview mirror, get over it get on with your life. But there’s so many people so deeply impacted by it,” she lamented.
Community comes first
Now, as the mother of two young girls, she jokes about what she describes “a beautiful chaos” in her house. “We have seven chickens, we have two turkeys, and a rooster. We adopted I guess you can say, .... both turkeys, and then two chickens from a family that was moving from Orlando, back to Puerto Rico. And then we have three dogs. So if you can imagine three dogs trying to eat all of our feathered friends all day long, it’s a lot of fun. The house is chaotic, the house is never clean. But there’s a lot of love and a lot of laughter.”
That was her “COVID project when my mom was in the hospital, I needed something to entertain myself. So I built a chicken coop. And it’s very cute. It’s a little pink house,” she laughed.
Regardless of the challenges she faces, her community comes first. “Steadily and without hesitation, I always say, ‘my priority is my community.’ I feel for so long, they’ve been abandoned, and they’ve been a second thoughts. And Spanish is literally a lifeline. Spanish is a difference between somebody understanding during a hurricane that they need to evacuate or staying there. It’s the difference between knowing that being vaccinated or wearing a mask, it’s not going to keep you from getting COVID but it’s going to keep you from dying, because the chances of you dying if you’re vaccinated are a lot lower, simple.
“We all have 24 hours. You just prioritize and decide what kind of what makes your clock tick.”
