Numancia on Substack

I’ve spent 22 years watching what happens to communities when women are economically locked out, and what becomes possible when they aren’t.

What started as an observation became a conviction. Now, it is a research agenda.

Numancia on Substack.

The publication is named after the ancient Celtiberian city in northern Spain. In 133 BCE, Numancia was surrounded by Roman forces under Scipio Aemilianus (the general who had already destroyed Carthage). Rather than surrender to conquest and enslavement, the Numantines chose to burn their city and die on their own terms.

The story gave birth to a concept, numancino. The refusal to surrender under impossible conditions. Miguel de Cervantes wrote a tragedy about it; Latin American independence movements invoked it. It is an archetype of collective resistance, not of a singular hero or general, but of an entire community holding its ground against a force designed to erase them.

For me, the word is also personal and deeply rooted in my Hispanic heritage, a tradition defined by collective resilience, dignity, and survival. It further resonates with my lived experience as an immigrant woman navigating institutional systems that were fundamentally not designed for her success.

In this context, Numancia transcends historical reference to become a conscious framework for maintaining agency when surrounding structures demand concession. It represents the strategic decision to hold one’s ground, even when the only path forward requires a radical dismantling of the status quo.

Today, I am researching that same spirit of resistance, in a different century, through different mechanisms, but with the same stakes.

Numancia is a collection of field notes documenting an independent doctoral inquiry into one central question:

How does women’s entrepreneurship function as a protective factor against youth radicalization in underserved communities, and through what economic, technological, relational, and cultural mechanisms can that protection be strengthened?

Before entering formal research, fifteen years of advising women business owners navigating growth friction gave me a ground-level education no seminar could replicate. I arrived at this inquiry not from a quiet library, but from lived experience—which is where the most critical answers still live.

Writing at the intersection of gender theory, economic sociology, and community resilience, my notes are designed for policymakers, NGO professionals, and practitioners who work upstream of the crisis.

It is for those who understand that the most sustainable interventions occur before radicalization takes root, not after.

This research has been 22 years in the making. It is time.

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