Part poetry, part “how-to” and part protest to the white appropriation of minority culture, Connie Martinez, a courageous Latina – a high school senior – expounds on the value of voice, recounts how she discovered her own voice and advocates for the voices of the unheard.

Consuelo Martinez, a senior at Pasadena’s John Muir High School, is a first-generation Mexican-American and also a soon-to-be first-generation college student. Within the past year and a half, she found her voice in writing, poetry and public speaking and essentially found who she was: a poet, writer, artist and feminist. She showed the power of her generation through an original poem that brought the TEDxPasadenaWomen audience to their feet.