Norma Seledon’s mother was a teacher who often provided additional lessons to her six children after school. Seledon herself didn’t take a traditional path to teaching like her mother’s, but she still felt that call to help and mentor others.
Now 63 with decades of service to the Latino and LGBTQ+ communities behind her, seledon has no desire to slow down anytime soon. She plans to keep mentoring others and foster intergenerational understanding so all community members can feel equipped for future challenges.
Seledon said she doesn’t think she would have even given herself the title of activist until her 40s or 50s. Born in Mexico as the oldest child, and the first to speak English, she said she’s known for a long time she “needed to step up a little bit.” For her, translating for her parents became a sort of advocacy on its own.
Her parents wanted to go to college, even if at the time she did not know what that would entail.Two coworkers helped her apply to schools in Chicago, and she ultimately decided on Loyola University Chicago, where she received her B.S. in Psychology.
Seledon had a less traditional timeline than many college students, as she took a year off around her junior year to have her first child. By the time she was going to come back, she was pregnant again. But the best grades she had were when she was pregnant and had two jobs—“You don’t know what you’re capable of until you do it,” she said.
Seledon began working for Mujeres Latinas en Acción in 1988.
She said her time there is what she compares other organizations against to this day, and it’s when she learned about collective leadership and responsibility.
During the mid-‘90s, she began to understand her same-sex attraction.
While at Mujeres, Seledon ran a leadership development program and worked as a domestic violence counselor. She said she didn’t take on the identity of being a lesbian in the organization, but was eventually asked to leave once it was discovered she was involved with another woman working there .
As she navigated what she described as a difficult divorce with her ex-husband—and a lawsuit involving the Mujeres after she became executive director—she met some of the women trying to create what would become Amigas Latinas.
Seledon worked with co-founder Evette Cardona to begin rolling out topic-centered gatherings at different women’s houses—creating a safe, comfortable environment that became a staple of Amigas Latinas. During a period marred by a divorce and leaving a job she loved, Seledon found a lot of solace in the Amigas community and the work they did.
“Amigas started to do very important work, like what it was like to be a mother and a lesbian,” she said. “Some of us had a social work background or counseling background … so we did some amazing things in the community, where we’d gather both people from the queer community and Latino community and train them around domestic violence issues.”
At the time, Seledon said quite a few members on the board were partnered with each other, and they reflected it by hosting a number of family-oriented events. She said by normalizing women loving women in family environments, she hoped they influenced the next generation.
Her own children, early teens at the time, came with her to many events. Seledon said they even went on a radio show and talked about what it was like being the children of a Latina lesbian.
Seledon’s work around this time also included health-focused groups such as the Lesbian Community Cancer Project and the Illinois Caucus on Adolescent Health. She later moved on to work in Chicago Public Schools where she intended to only work for a couple years—she ended up staying over 20 years in the budget and grants departments.
During those two decades, she worked to establish different training programs on LGBTQ+ information as well as various parent engagement opportunities. She also participated in a number of community boards and began doing informal consulting work.
Seledon left CPS in 2013 to work as a freelance consultant with a focus on DEI assessment and training, later moving into her current role as director of leadership & capacity building at Equality Illinois.
Now, her position includes meeting with directors and organizational leaders and helping them with resources to build long-lasting, strong organizations. She also works to encourage individuals to run for public office and foundations to give to LGBTQ+ services.
She said she has always felt like someone who can connect with people across age and culture and act like a “bridge.”
“I felt very comfortable intervening … and helping communities not only with translation of language but translation of culture,” she said. “There are so many things that I feel I didn’t learn till later in life, I really don’t want younger Latinas or Latinos or people of color to go through.”
She said during the last two years at Equality Illinois, she’s seen the theme of intergenerational conflict and struggle come up a lot—older community members assuming younger members don’t have much to add without decades of lived experience and younger ones not having enough opportunities to learn.
When Chicago advocate Starr De Los Santos had the opportunity to join the Victory Institute’s LGBTQ training, for example, Seledon encouraged her to apply. When De Los Santos was accepted, Seledon helped her find money to attend.
“She’s just so supportive, and she makes you believe in yourself when you don’t believe in yourself,” De Los Santos said. “And I think that’s just something that is just so special about her.”
Seledon said she thinks all ages have to learn how to transfer the power of leadership and understand the unique challenges being faced today. Seledon said there needs to be more opportunities for exchanges of stories and mentoring between generations.
“I think you have to be humble about it,” she said. “We are knowledge seekers at any level of life.”
