Meet Mariana Fernández, a New York City-based Peloton instructor, who teaches yoga in Spanish to attract more Spanish-speaking students into her virtual classroom.
After finishing graduate school in NYC, Fernández moved to Mexico City where she began teaching yoga in Spanish. When she moved back to NYC, she wondered if she could teach her Peloton yoga classes in both Spanish and English. According to statistics from Zippia.com, of the over 21,000 yoga instructors in the United States, 77% of them are white.
“I wanted to find ways to bring yoga to the Latinx community,” Fernández told Well + Good. “When I was interviewing at Peloton, they asked if I taught in other languages, and when I said I taught in Spanish, it opened up this whole new world. I wondered, ‘Why don’t we do both? Why don’t I bring classes in my native tongue to this huge Latinx community that we have in our members?’ It was the opportunity of a lifetime.”
Along with teaching yoga in Spanish, Fernández also gives her students the full experience by playing Spanish music that reminds her of Mexico, including mariachi songs. She wants students to feel welcome and provide “visibility and access” to a community that has not been catered to in the fitness industry.
“A big thing for me is figuring out how to make yoga, as a practice, more accessible, and have people become a little bit more open to it and explore how they move and what parts of it they like,” Fernández says. “I try to keep the elements, philosophies, and practices of yoga – the meditation, the breathwork, the movement, the awesomeness – as well as giving it my own flair and spin.”