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La La Vazquez perfectly fits the description of an independent woman, even if she shares her bed with her multimillionaire baller fiancé Carmelo Anthony. “I don’t think people understand how hard I’ve worked to achieve the things I have,” she tells Latina.

She tells us in the April 2010 issue of Latina magazine,

“Even with all that I’ve accomplished on my own, I know the story out there about me: ‘[Carmelo] ain’t gonna marry her. She got that ring but now he’s making her wait. He don’t really love her…’ For once…I’d like to tell the story as it is. Not as it’s told.”

What does her fiance have to say?

“I wasn’t making her wait. If anything, I was waiting for her to slow down. She was doing her own thing, handling her business and we were happy. When it was time to take it to the next step we did. Period.”

So has he ever doubted for a minute that La La Vazquez is Mrs. Right, one with life, mindset (and bank account) of her own? Melo speaks slowly, but surely:

“I wouldn’t be with her if it was any other way.” “Understood?”

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On her early hustle:

“I would get off the air at 6, take a shower, and go straight to school,” recalls La La of her early radio days as a 16-year-old on-air personality during the overnight shift in Atlanta. When Ludacris got his own show, La La had to hold her own as his sidekick. “They didn’t want me there,” she told Latina. “We joke about it now. But I had to fight to hang on to my spot.

And on her black Puerto Rican roots:

“The essay,” she says solemnly. “The responses hurt.” She’s speaking of a first person piece she recently wrote for Latina.com on being Puerto Rican, in which she explained that, since childhood, people have often assumed that she is black. “Which I am!” she says, almost yelling. “But I am also 100 percent Puerto Rican and I’m proud of that. People got it twisted and thought I was saying, I’’m Puerto Rican. I’m not black. That isn’t what I was saying. It’s just that when I tell someone I’m Puerto Rican, I don’t want to hear someone say, ‘You ain’t Puerto Rican. You black.’ As if I can only be one or the other. Do I look like Jennifer Lopez? No. Clearly, I’m a black woman. However you want to define that, that’s what I am. And I’m also a Spanish-speaking Puerto Rican woman. Period.”

Check out behind-the-scenes footage of the shoot:

For 2024’s iteration of MadameNoire and HelloBeautiful’s annual series Women to Know, we knew we wanted to celebrate the people who help make the joys of film and television possible. To create art is to create magic. This year, we spotlight Hollywood Executive’s changing the face of cinema.