Estefania Cervantes
Senior leaders ask their people to absorb sustained shock and keep performing. The instruction is easy to give and almost impossible to model from the top. Resilience as a stated value is common; resilience as a lived practice that survives contact with a real organisational setback is rare, and most workforces can tell the difference.
Estefania Cervantes is a Mexican author, executive coach, and founder of the limb-loss nonprofit Ampuvalia who helps organisations turn personal resilience from a wellness slogan into a working leadership behaviour.
Full Profile
Why organisations work with Estefania Cervantes
- She speaks from a documented turnaround, not a tagline. She lost her leg at 18 mid-degree, completed her studies at Universidad Iberoamericana, and built a registered Mexican civil association that delivers prosthetics and rehabilitation.
- Ampuvalia gives her a working operator’s vocabulary. Audiences hear from someone who has had to fund, govern, and scale a small organisation, which translates resilience into language a senior team recognises.
- Her book “Actitud Que Trasciende” gives Spanish-speaking audiences a structured account of recovery and reinvention they can hand to teams afterward, rather than a one-off keynote moment.
- She holds the 2015 Premio Ibero-Bremond-FICSAC Compromiso Social, an institutional recognition from a serious Mexican university, not a self-issued award.
- She has lived the inclusion conversation from the disability side without making it a compliance lecture, which is what most internal DEI programmes are quietly looking for.
Biography highlights
- Founder of Ampuvalia, a Mexican civil association providing physical therapy, prosthetics, and peer support to the limb-loss community since 2015.
- Author of “Actitud Que Trasciende”, a Spanish-language book on rebuilding life and identity after limb loss.
- Recipient of the Premio Ibero-Bremond-FICSAC Compromiso Social, awarded by Universidad Iberoamericana.
- Featured climber on the 2019 ROMP Cotopaxi expedition, documented in the Merrell-produced short film “In Her Shoes”.
- Graduate in International Business Administration, Universidad Iberoamericana, Mexico City.
- Bilingual speaker in Spanish and English, with a Latin American operating base that is uncommon on bureau rosters at this level.
Biography
A car accident in Mexico City interrupted a second-semester business student’s degree and removed her right leg. The student returned to Universidad Iberoamericana, finished her programme, and four years later registered Ampuvalia as a civil association to fund prosthetics and rehabilitation for other amputees in Mexico. That sequence of facts is the spine of her credibility.
The work since has been operational rather than purely autobiographical. Ampuvalia coordinates physical therapy, prosthesis fitting, and peer-support sessions, the unglamorous middle of disability recovery that public storytelling usually skips. Her Spanish-language book “Actitud Que Trasciende” treats limb loss as a problem of identity and decision-making, not a story of triumph, which is what makes it usable inside coaching engagements.
Universidad Iberoamericana awarded her the Premio Ibero-Bremond-FICSAC Compromiso Social in 2015 for that work, and the 2019 ROMP ascent of Cotopaxi placed her in the Merrell-produced documentary “In Her Shoes” alongside other amputee climbers. These are the named credentials. The reason to put her in front of a senior team is that she can describe, in operating terms, what it took to keep functioning when the original plan was no longer available, and translate that into something a leadership audience can use the next morning.
Key speaking topics
- Resilience after acute personal setback
- Reinvention of identity and purpose
- Disability inclusion in Latin American workplaces
- Founding and running a mission-led nonprofit
- Executive coaching grounded in lived recovery
- Bilingual leadership for Spanish and English audiences
Ideal for
- CHROs and DEI leads commissioning substantive disability inclusion content for Latin American or bilingual workforces
- Latin American leadership conferences and Spanish-language internal events
- Sales kick-offs and annual conferences seeking a credible resilience anchor speaker
- Executive coaching programmes in Mexico and the wider Spanish-speaking region
Audience outcomes
- A working definition of resilience that survives contact with a real organisational setback
- A first-hand account of disability inclusion told without compliance language
- A model for how a small, mission-led organisation gets built and funded in Mexico
- A bilingual perspective that lands with Spanish-first audiences without translation flattening