No. 19 The One Where It's Okay to Be You

I WAS THINKING: Maybe Code-Switching Isn’t the Problem

For most of my life, I’ve been really damn good at code-switching. I grew up moving between worlds before I even knew there was a name for what I was doing.

At home? Spanish. Salsa. Puerto Rican rhythms, expectations, humor, food, family.

At school? A completely different set of social cues. On the streets of Chicago? Another language altogether — not necessarily spoken, but read through tone, vibe, posture, instinct.

Then I entered the professional world and discovered — surprise! — there was yet another code.

How you speak. How you dress. How much emotion you show. How much of yourself you reveal. How you make yourself heard without making anyone too uncomfortable.

You learn to read the room.

And then you learn to rewire yourself for it.

Code-switching gets talked about a lot as something negative. And there’s good reason for that. When someone feels forced to suppress their identity, soften their accent, straighten their hair, change their vocabulary, hide their culture, or become more “acceptable” to people with power? Yeah. That’s a problem.

Nobody should have to shrink themselves to make somebody else more comfortable.

But I’ve been thinking there’s another side to this conversation.

Because the ability to move between worlds has also become one of my greatest strengths.

I can sit in a boardroom and talk strategy. Walk onto a documentary set and speak creative. Teach a classroom full of students. Hang with artists. Talk shop with entrepreneurs. Sit at my mom’s table for a café con leche with the Puerto Rican rhythm that shaped me.

And none of those Hugos is fake. They’re all me.

That’s the distinction I think we miss.

There’s a difference between changing yourself to belong and expanding yourself so you can connect.

One is erasure. The other is range. And range is powerful.

It teaches you to listen differently. To notice what matters to different people. To translate an idea without stripping away its meaning. To find commonality between people who might otherwise assume they have nothing in common.

In my work, that ability has become almost foundational. Storytelling is translation. Leadership is translation. Brand building is translation. You’re constantly taking an idea from one world and helping it make sense in another. That doesn't require becoming someone else. It requires knowing yourself well enough that you can flex without disappearing. That’s the real challenge.

Because adaptability without identity becomes performance. But identity without adaptability can become rigidity.

The sweet spot is knowing what in you is non-negotiable — your values, your character, your truth — and becoming incredibly fluent in how you carry those things into different rooms.

So maybe the question isn’t: “Do you code-switch?”

Most of us do, whether we realize it or not.

Maybe the better question is: “When you switch the code, are you still recognizably you?”

Because learning to speak more than one language — culturally, creatively, professionally, emotionally — doesn’t have to make your voice weaker. Sometimes it’s exactly what gives your voice range.

Adapted from Chapter 6, “The Kaleidoscope of Impact: Leading Through Diverse Ignition,” in 
SPARKED: Rebellious Leadership Beyond the Ordinary, available now on Amazon.

DID YOU HEAR YOU ABOUT THIS: The ultimate power move: making everybody else code-switch.

For a long time, the rules of going global were pretty clear: You adapted. You softened the accent. Translated the language. Made the references more universal. Smoothed out whatever might make the largest audience feel like outsiders. In other words: you code-switched.

Then along comes Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio.

You probably know him as Bad Bunny. A kid who went from bagging groceries in Puerto Rico to becoming one of the biggest music stars on the planet—while doing something the entertainment industry historically hasn’t rewarded: He kept being aggressively Puerto Rican.

I’ve been a little obsessed with his story because it reflects how I’ve tried to show up in the world. (Minus the billions of streams or stadiums full of screaming fans…but hey, I’m working on it.)

He performed in Spanish. Centered Puerto Rico. Played with gender and fashion on his terms. Filled his music with rhythms, slang, politics, and cultural references that weren’t translated for mass consumption.

And instead of becoming more like the global marketplace: The global marketplace started becoming more like him.

The receipts are kind of ridiculous.

In 2025, Bad Bunny was Spotify’s most-streamed artist on the planet with 19.8 billion streams — his record-setting fourth time at No. 1. DeBÍ TiRAR MáS FOToS, an album steeped in Puerto Rican identity, was the world’s most-streamed album.

His 2025–26 stadium tour sold more than 2.6 million tickets across 18 countries — all without a single U.S. date in its initial run. And by June 2026, he became the first Latin artist to surpass $1 billion in career touring revenue.

That’s not crossing over. That’s rewriting what “crossing over” means.

People who didn't speak Spanish learned his lyrics. Fans became curious about Puerto Rican slang, food, politics, and culture. Spanish-language music has grown more than music in any other language in Spotify’s history — with Bad Bunny helping lead the charge.

And it kicked off with a massive 2025 Puerto Rico residency (I was there!) I He could have taken the spectacle anywhere. Instead, he turned his homeland into the destination. The world came to him. There’s something wonderfully rebellious about that.

Bad Bunny offers another way to think about code-switching: What if, instead of constantly translating yourself for the world, you become so rooted in what makes you you that the world gets curious enough to learn your language?

Maybe the goal isn’t to stop code-switching.

Maybe it’s to decide who switches for whom.

WORTH CHECKING OUT: What happens if we stop sanding down the parts of ourselves that don’t translate easily — and start treating them as the interesting parts? Let’s dig into people who are doing exactly that: cooking, talking, and creating from a place of cultural confidence. No translation required. Curiosity encouraged.

🎬 WATCH: Eva Longoria: Searching for Mexico (now streaming on HBO Max)

Come for the tacos. Stay for the anthropology lesson you didn’t realize you were getting. In this beautifully shot CNN series, Eva Longoria travels from Mexico City and Oaxaca to Yucatán, Jalisco, Nuevo León, and Veracruz, using food as a doorway into history, migration, Indigenous culture, family, and identity. What I love is that the show doesn’t treat Mexican cuisine as one monolithic thing. Mole, cochinita pibil, carne asada, birria — they become cultural artifacts with stories attached. It’s delicious proof that sometimes the fastest way to understand people is to sit down at their table.

🎙️ LISTEN/WATCH: House Guest with Scott Evans

Imagine the celebrity interview liberated from the press junket and relocated to the friend’s house you actually want to hang out at. Entertainment journalist Scott Evans invites people over for food, drinks, games, laughs, and conversations that somehow get surprisingly real. Guests have included Keke Palmer, Kamala Harris, and Chelsea Handler, but the real draw is Evans himself: curious, funny, disarming, and exceptionally good at creating enough comfort for people to drop the media-trained version of themselves. Less interview. More pull up a chair and tell me what’s really going on.

🎶 LISTEN: Young Miko

If Bad Bunny is rewriting the rules of global crossover, fellow Boricua Young Miko is gleefully scribbling in the margins. Rapper, singer, former tattoo artist, effortless cool person. I’m fascinated by the confidence with which she moves between trap, reggaeton, pop, Spanish, English, swagger, and vulnerability without making any of it feel contradictory. Her music is raw, a little dirty at times, but it’s a true masterclass in what code-switching sounds like when it stops feeling like accommodation and starts sounding like creative freedom.

AND DON'T FORGET... We’ve talked a lot in this edition about what happens when you stop sanding down the things that make you different. Turns out, that idea sits at the heart of SPARKED, too.

But books are meant to do more than sit on shelves looking intellectual.

I’ve been bringing SPARKED to life through keynotes, workshops, and conversations designed around the real challenges organizations and teams are navigating — from finding the courage to challenge what’s “always been done” to building cultures where people can bring more of themselves, their perspectives, and their wonderfully misfit ideas to the work.

So, if something in this edition made you think, My team needs to talk about this, maybe we should.

Bring me into your organization, conference, campus, or leadership gathering, and let’s get SPARKED together.

Hit me up at 📩 hugo@localboycreative.com. We’ll figure out where to light the match.