Edith Gutierrez-Hawbaker was just a teenager when she made her mother a promise. She was seeking her mother’s blessing to pursue a career in the arts. Despite some unfavorable statistics about just how many art school graduates actually make a good living in their field, she assured her mother, Irma, that she would be successful. “She put her faith in me and she said ‘OK, you can do this,’ and I did,” says Gutierrez-Hawbaker.
Did she ever. After a lengthy and impactful career in publishing and education, she’s now the owner and operator of her own Lehigh Valley-based marketing agency and creative collective celebrating Latinx culture, while also working at the local and state level to champion diversity and inclusion.
When she made that promise to her mother, Gutierrez-Hawbaker was a high school student in northern New Jersey. Her family had moved to the area from Buenos Aires, Argentina, when she was just three years old. Like the children of a lot of first-generation immigrant parents, expectations for her future were high. “At a very young age I was tapped to be a successful participant in our family,” she says.
That meant landing a practical, dependable job as soon as possible to help support the family. She looked into enrolling at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, but “that just felt a little stifling for me, as a creative,” she says. “When I went to check out all of the art schools in New York, I was like, ‘This is where I belong.’”
Gutierrez-Hawbaker was always a creatively inclined kid. She was always outside, too, even if the view was lacking: “Our street overlooked the New Jersey Turnpike,” she says. Her family lived first in Irvington and then in Elizabeth. Her father left and returned to Argentina, leaving her mother to raise her and her sister, Liz, alone. But they found a true community in Elizabeth, surrounded by first-generation families from all over the map: Puerto Rico, Cuba, Colombia, Ecuador. “It was this beautiful breadth of Latin culture,” says Gutierrez-Hawbaker. Many of the women from the neighborhood who shaped and guided her during those formative years are still in her life today, she adds.
Following her graduation from the Fashion Institute of Technology with a BFA in graphic design, she landed a job with Entertainment Weekly magazine. More high-profile gigs in publishing would follow: Real Simple, BusinessWeek. Even though she was thriving in that space, she felt she was being pulled in a different direction: “I jumped all-in on education,” says Gutierrez-Hawbaker. After earning a Master of Arts in Teaching from Montclair State University, she embarked on a new career as an art teacher at New Jersey’s Bradford Elementary School. “I wanted to make sure I gave back to urban areas because that’s how I grew up,” she says. “It was this wonderful opportunity to teach these beautiful young souls and creative minds.”
The year 2012 brought more change, on a personal level. She and her then husband, Del, welcomed a son, Levi. By then, they were splitting their time between the New York City area and the Lehigh Valley, where they purchased a sizable property in the New Tripoli area in 2008. They maintained an apartment, first in Brooklyn, then in northern New Jersey, while they slowly fixed up their Lehigh Valley home.
While she was on maternity leave from her teaching position, Gutierrez-Hawbaker got a call from the publisher Rodale. “I was like, ‘Oh, I guess I’m not done in the editorial space!’” she recalls, laughing. She spent more than five years there, spearheading the rebrand of the Prevention and Organic Life titles.
But a simple act of kindness would send her down yet another new path. After her then six-year-old son donated the $13 he made from his Abuela Irma’s yard sale to help victims of Hurricane Maria in Puerto Rico, Gutierrez-Hawbaker realized she wanted to do more to buoy her community: “I said, ‘I’m going to create a brand that’s all about giving back.’”
The Te Lo Juro (“I Swear”) Collective, founded in 2020, fuses Gutierrez-Hawbaker’s strengths as an artist, an advocate, a mentor and a change-maker. Its online shop offers a variety of merchandise celebrating Latinx culture, everything from baby onesies to adult apparel to glassware. The collective donates 20 percent of its proceeds to organizations and programs that support the Latinx community, like Hispanic Center Lehigh Valley, as well as other nonprofits like YWCA and Turning Point of Lehigh Valley.
It didn’t take long for her designs to find a following. A T-shirt featuring the likeness of the late entertainer and astrologer Walter Mercado was featured in a 2020 Netflix documentary about him, Mucho Mucho Amor. “He was all about positivity and hope and love and really owning who he was, unapologetically,” says Gutierrez-Hawbaker. “At the time that really transcended so much machismo views in our Latino communities.”
Her recent Vota collection was a collaboration with Michelle Obama’s organization, When We All Vote. In addition, Te Lo Juro has partnered with the Philadelphia Museum of Art for Latinx Hispanic Heritage Month as its exclusive Latina-owned lifestyle brand.
While all that attention would be welcomed by any small-business owner, Gutierrez-Hawbaker’s goal is much larger than brand exposure. “I want to be able to provide opportunities for the next generation, and beyond and beyond,” she says. She serves on the Pennsylvania Advisory Council for Inclusive Procurement (PACIP), which was established by Governor Josh Shapiro in 2023 and aims to expand economic opportunities for small and small-diverse businesses by making the state contracting process more inclusive. Gutierrez-Hawbaker leads a sub-committee focusing on digital tools and communication strategies.
One of the reasons that Gutierrez-Hawbaker is so good at talking the talk is that she has walked the walk, too, first with the collective, and now with TLJ Creative Group, which she launched last year and calls the first Latina-owned creative agency in the Lehigh Valley. In shepherding both endeavors, she has proven she knows how to turn an idea into reality: the certifications to get, the grants to apply for, the accelerator programs to research, the resources to dip into.
And, as a Latina who once took a chance on a not-so-safe career choice, she is uniquely positioned to understand the challenges other young people from the Latinx community face. She tells a story about a time she was selling Te Lo Juro merchandise at a pop-up shop at the Pennsylvania Latino Convention. Some high school students were coming though; Gutierrez-Hawbaker was asked to speak with a young Latina woman from Allentown who felt torn about her post-graduation plans. She wanted to become a nurse, but her family wanted her to start working in a factory right away to help support the family. She felt her path had already been chosen. But Gutierrez-Hawbaker explained to her how she could earn her nursing degree and a paycheck at the same time. It took some arm-twisting, Gutierrez-Hawbaker says, to convince the young woman that she did have options: “I’m telling her, ‘You have a choice. I was you, like, thirty years ago.’”
The Te Lo Juro apparel item that might speak to Gutierrez-Hawbaker the most is a crop fleece that reads “Built on Resilience.” It sums up where she’s been, and where she’s going. “I will always continue to celebrate my culture though fashion, through art, through marketing, through creative spaces and [to] create opportunities for economic success for my communities through any initiatives that I can, whether it’s policy making or just being able to use my voice in spaces that I can be in, and deserve to be in,” she says.
Gutierrez-Hawbaker may be a “Jersey/New York girl” at heart, but she has found a community in the Lehigh Valley. She’s also found a kind of quiet peace, she says: “I walk my woods in the morning and do my meditation and I hear roosters. It’s become my norm. It’s something I now crave.”
Published as “Insight” in the April 2025 edition of Lehigh Valley Style magazine.
