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Ruthie E. Flores describes herself as a “traditional Latina” who still lives at home with her parents. But the 33-year-old Norwalk native, recently hired by Univision Communications Inc. as communications manager for Spanish-language television stations KMEX (Channel 34) and KFTR (Channel 46), has made a career out of challenging the status quo.


As manager of Univision’s external and internal relations, Flores will focus on community outreach.


One of Flores’s main challenges is overcoming a companywide attitude that giving press interviews will highlight individual executives’ personalities and detract from the Univision brand. “It’s not something I could do overnight,” she said, although she claims to be gradually convincing Univision executives to open up.


Flores started doing public relations during a 1998 internship in Peru, where she was an advocate for Latin America’s politically “disappeared.”


“I realized the power of getting messages out to the media,” she said. “Not only communicating the news, but also making the news.”


The approach had its risks. “We would get threats on a weekly basis from the government in Peru,” she said. She then went to Harvard Divinity School to study liberation theology, the belief in faith-based empowerment of impoverished communities.


Flores comes to Univision from a one-year stint at the Disneyland Resort in Anaheim. The job turned into a tug of war and she felt she wasn’t being heard within the Disney organization. “It wasn’t fulfilling,” she said.


In her spare time, she rollerblades and is training for the L.A. Marathon. She said she still takes her niece to Disneyland.

Eric Berkowitz

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