Jasmin Jimenez: Driven to Create an Equitable Society
“You can teach someone to write well. You can teach someone to be a great orator. You can teach someone to analyze data, but you can’t teach anyone to care.”
These were the best words of wisdom that Jasmin Jimenez says she received from her former professor Deb Morrison at the School of Journalism and Communication.
After college in 2014, Jimenez put her degree in journalism and advertising into action. She began her began her career at Spark PR, a boutique public relations agency in San Francisco, where she represented consumer, lifestyle and enterprise technology clients across Silicon Valley. Then she moved on to Edelman, the world’s top public relations firm, where she represented clients like Dow. Jimenez was also a publicist with Ancestry, the leading consumer genomics company, working in the company’s San Francisco office in late 2018.
Jimenez says George Floyd’s murder in May 2020 altered the course of her public relations career and her life’s purpose.
“Floyd’s murder left me grief-stricken and concerned for the future of our country,” Jimenez recalls. “I spent nights crying and feeling confused about the state of affairs. I knew we couldn’t keep treating historically underrepresented people like this.”
This moment of reckoning and reflection for Jimenez came at a time when the entire nation was grappling with the harsh realities of systemic racism and police brutality.
Jimenez has seen and experienced racism firsthand—but the viral brutality of Floyd’s murder was shocking.
Humble beginnings
Jimenez’s father immigrated to the United States from Jalisco, Mexico, when he was 13 years old. He and his nine siblings moved to Turlock, California, where they worked in the fields, picking everything from strawberries to pecans. Jimenez’s mother migrated frequently between California and Mexico, and she helped teach her younger siblings how to read and write in English.
Even as a child, Jimenez noticed that Turlock was a predominantly white, conservative community, with what felt like a “Grand Canyon-sized divide” in social classes. Jimenez notes that her family members have been on the receiving end of racism countless times.
In high school Jimenez was a captain of the soccer team, a back-to-back cross-country MVP, and she was involved in student activities. However, Jimenez didn’t escape racism.
“Once afternoon at soccer practice, I was standing with my friends and another student walked up to our group. My White male friend introduced me to the new White student by saying, ‘This is our friend Jasmin—she’s Mexican, but don’t worry, she’s one of the good ones.’”
Jimenez says these experiences, along with the vilification of Mexicans in the media, spurred her to deprioritize her family’s history. She recalls trying not to affiliate with her culture and she quietly resented being treated like the token Mexican friend in some groups.
We’ve all heard the stereotypes that permeate the media, Jimenez points out.
“Mexicans are coming to this country to steal jobs; they are related to the cartel and are dangerous,” says Jimenez. “If you hear these damaging messages enough times, especially when you’re young and impressionable, you start to believe them.”
Not knowing how to handle the glaring racism, she recalls clinging to her White friends’ cultures instead of her own.
“Now at 30 years old, I often feel a heavy weight of remorse that it took me this long to realize I am worthy—that my heritage and my unique perspective are valuable,” said Jimenez. “I will no longer neglect my culture and I hope others can learn from my experience.”
Changing paths, finding purpose
With the subsequent racially-charged murders of Ahmaud Arbery in February 2020, Rayshard Brooks in June 2020, Dijon Kizzee in August 2020, Deon Kay in September 2020, and Walter Wallace in October 2020, among others, Jimenez felt that she needed to be a part of creating a more just and equitable society.
She began to think about her career as well as her life goals, and soon, her thoughts turned to action. She decided to shift from public relations to diversity, equity, and inclusion (DEI). In fact, Jimenez became the first-ever DEI business analyst for PPG, a 140-year-old Fortune 500 company that is a global leader in aerospace, marine, commercial, industrial, packaging, and architectural coatings.
“One day, I hope to have kids and what am I going to say I did in response to Floyd’s murder? I don’t just want to tell them—I am going to show them.”
While her role with PPG was recently created, she was able to spearhead the company’s first anti-racism campaign, securing numerous pieces of coverage, including Forbes, that reached millions of readers worldwide. And the internal work that she does with her DEI team impacts more than 50,000 PPG employees.
“Before applying for this job, I thought about what I wanted to do with the rest of my life,” Jimenez says. “One day, I hope to have kids and what am I going to say I did in response to Floyd’s murder? I don’t just want to tell them—I am going to show them.”
The second thing that Jimenez did in response to Floyd’s death was apply to—and get accepted into—Johns Hopkins University to pursue her master’s degree in organizational leadership. She says that the various killings also made her realize that there are not enough people of color in positions of authority, allowing racism to thrive in various sectors of our society.
“Today, it is crucial that organizations listen to underrepresented people – both at work and outside company walls – in order to instill real, lasting change in our society,” Jimenez says. “Now more than ever, American organizations should consider accelerating their investments in diversity, equity and inclusion. On top of being a morally good thing to do, countless studies have also proven that teams with people of diverse ethnicities, ages, sexual orientations, languages, among other attributes, perform better than non-diverse teams. Diverse teams tend to generate solutions more quickly and creatively because of their unique backgrounds and understandings.”
Her goal is to leverage her education to ultimately secure a role as a chief people officer, a position where she can establish equitable policies throughout entire organizations.
Marvin Mendoza, the global head of DEI at PPG says that Jimenez’s ability to empathize, her willingness to navigate ambiguity, and commitment to learn and grow in the DEI space make her a tremendous asset to the company.
“She has a bright future ahead and I look forward to supporting her development,” says Mendoza.
Looking back at her journey, Jimenez says that she is ready to put in the work to uplift and empower minorities in and out of the workplace.
“Even if I don’t see monumental societal progress in my lifetime, I can go to sleep thinking that at least I’m trying,” Jimenez says. “And maybe there is a kid in Turlock who will see that I propped myself up and cared enough to help make the world a better environment for them – and I hope this encourages them to be gutsy in their own way.”
This is sure to make Professor Morrison proud.
- By Rayna Jackson, BA ’04 (romance languages), UO Alumni Association director of communications