How It Started: Escuelitas

When we connected with Denver bartender and educator Tiffany Hernandez as a 2026 Imbibe 75 Person to Watch, she was looking to take her “know your rights” seminars on the road. These hospitality workshops through Escuelitas, Hernandez’s Denver-based Latino education project, paired civil rights awareness with brand education, but she was finding it difficult to secure sponsorships.

But fast-forward, and today Hernandez is partnering with Minneapolis bar Meteor to develop an ongoing hospitality-focused educational and advocacy series with daytime seminars followed by fundraising bar pop-ups in the evening. The Shift Change Tour kicked off in Chicago in April with a seminar by celebrated owner of Kumiko and James Beard-winning The Way of the Cocktail author Julia Momosé. At night, their pop-up at Estereo raised funds for the Illinois Coalition for Immigrants and Refugee Rights and the Phillips Free Store in Minneapolis. The tour will continue around the country, popping up in Vancouver, Washington; Portland, Oregon; and Tales of the Cocktail in New Orleans.

We caught up with Hernandez to learn more about how she started Escuelitas, what her plans are moving forward, and how people can support her work.

Interview edited for space, clarity, and context.

Tiffany Hernandez:

I was born and raised in LA. When I was 21, my first job was as a bar back in a neighborhood craft cocktail bar, followed by my first bartending job at a high-volume craft cocktail brewery. I then got into the Tales of the Cocktail apprentice program in 2016, and that changed my trajectory. I moved to New York and worked at two 50 Best bars. But when the pandemic happened, I moved back home to help my family open a neighborhood beer and golf bar down in Long Beach. In 2023 a friend asked me to go to Colorado to help them open a Latina-owned salon cocktail bar. So, I sold all my things and flew out here.

In Denver, I started bringing brands to where I worked, or I would ask them to host an event at one of their bar accounts. We would present different topics focused on the featured brand, like speaking to a female tequila distiller about what machismo is like in the tequila world. Or speaking to one of the first openly queer mezcaleros about being a gay man in Oaxaca and how he navigates that.

The Catalyst for Change

When the 2024 election happened, I connected with a civil rights attorney who was a regular at the restaurant where I worked. I thought, “Why don’t we do a class where you tell us what to expect? You’re not an immigration attorney, but before it’s an immigration issue, this is a civil rights issue. You’re dealing with Fourth and Fifth Amendment issues when you have federal agents come into your business.”

His firm is one of the top civil rights firms in the country. They recently won a case against the City of Denver and the City of Denver Police Department for all the George Floyd protesters that were hurt during the protests in 2020.

I asked the owner of the restaurant, “What if we did an Escuelitas where, at the end of the brand ambassador’s tasting, we bring in the attorneys? I had already spoken to the Mexican consulate about being an added resource for people with at-risk employees of Mexican descent. He said we could do it, but it needed to be on the DL. So I printed flyers and went bar to bar and did everything by word of mouth. That activation got 60 to 70 people, from the front of house, back of house, and ownership to hourly employees. The demand was there.

Doing the Work

The first out-of-state activation we did was at Arizona Cocktail Week, and 10 or 12 people showed up. It was put together very quickly, but it was too early for people to really understand how important this was. It didn’t deter me from going out and mingling and talking to people and telling them, “Hey, I’m doing this. You should do this, too. And even if it’s not me, set up your own ‘know your rights’ class with your own communities wherever you are.”

After Arizona Cocktail Week, it started being one or two classes a month in Colorado. And then in May, Mijenta Tequila took us to Chicago and we got to do a training right before the blitz there. Again, there were 15 to 20 people that showed up. We partnered with local rapid response networks or other hyper-local immigrants’ rights organizations; in this case it was the Illinois Coalition for Refugee Rights, which has been doing work in the state for over 40 years. 

While the blitz was going on, some of those bartenders were able to organize other low-key “know your rights” classes in Black and brown neighborhoods. They saved lives doing that. Chicago has a long history of organizing and workers rights advocacy; I’m so proud of how they showed up on an industry level.

Turning the Tide

I’m tired of people saying that we have to keep politics out of the bar. Working in a bar is political, who you employ is political, what you drink is political.

Working in a bar is political, who you employ is political, what you drink is political.

We already know the stats. Out of the 70,000 folks that are detained right now, only 7 percent of them have criminal convictions. They don’t come to this country to make it worse. They come here and make it better. The mixed status and undocumented folks that do pay into our tax system pay [a typically higher federal tax rate] than billionaires annually.

We don’t tell people who to vote for, but I’m bringing individuals who are running for local positions, or are already locally elected officials, to come and talk to bartenders about how much participation matters in democracy and on an everyday level. We have already flipped over 35 special elections across the country. If we can educate bartenders on what civic engagement really means, and the importance of it, if we flip the House and the Senate, we can slow down these policies.

How to Help

I have so much more faith than fear. But I need everyone to be on the same page with me, and I can’t do this by myself, which is where community needs to come in.

Ask your brand ambassadors at a local level if they can donate a case of product, create a charity menu where some of the proceeds go to Escuelitas, and then we can do this work and come to you. I would love for us to be able to go to as many cities as possible by November.

We have an activation set up at Tales of the Cocktail with Mijenta that will function like a pop-up with a couple of different bartender-run organizations. One of them addresses financial literacy, another covers food insecurity and mental health, and then there’s us with immigration. It’s going to be at Casimiro, one of the new Latino bars that’s really making a name for themselves. I’m hoping that at Tales we can get as many people from every state in one room to seriously organize.

The Shift Change Tour

I met [award-winning author and Imbibe alum] Emma Janzen when we were invited to do a “know your rights” class at Tales of the Cocktail last year. They gave us a pretty small room, but it was packed, and it was really emotional. We had people get up and leave and cry. It’s powerful to see that much empathy and emotion stem from folks who understand how important the need is to meet the moment.

We need the industry to show up and help fundraise for this rapid response network.

The Shift Change Tour popped up because Emma and I have been trying to figure out what we can do. When the ICE siege happened in Minnesota, I reached out to Robb Jones, who owns Meteor. We both happened to be CAPs at Tales together. I thought, since I’m already doing Escuelitas, why don’t we follow the other formula that we both know: a pop-up bar series? We need the industry to show up and help fundraise for this rapid response network—come and learn your constitutional rights in a hospitality setting. This is an opportunity that I think so many brands should jump on.

Next Steps

I would really like for Escuelitas to be a full-time job, like spirits advocacy. Let’s have more meaningful conversations with the people that own brands, that run brands, that produce spirits. We also want to make sure that civic engagement is still a priority for bartenders.

This country was built by immigrants but has a long history of abusing them. I want everyone to remember that when we all come together, we come together around food and drink, and who is often producing the labor, the food, the emotional capacity it takes to serve someone? It’s immigrants. All of us are affected. All of us are deserving of what it means to come here and think about this “American dream.” We have to fight for that American dream. I really hope that we have a bit more courage to not let this get worse.