Rebeca Landeros O'Leary moved to New York without ever having visited. She had friends there, experience producing commercials, and a room barely large enough for her bed. She wanted to find out how far she could take the career she had begun in San Antonio.
The opportunity that would change her working life had started years earlier with a request to step into a recording booth. A production needed an English voice for a woman speaking Spanish. Rebeca gave it a try, made sure she would be paid, and discovered another place she could belong.
In New York, she began asking the agents she hired as a producer to send her out as a performer. She remembers booking that first New York audition, a spot she believes was for McDonald's. Then came more auditions, more nerves, and the experience of hearing a commercial she had wanted to land voiced by somebody else. Knowing how casting worked helped. Learning to leave a rejection in the studio took practice.
For years, she carried both careers. Production meant long hours, travel, deadlines, and calls that followed her across time zones. Voiceover meant finding a few quiet minutes wherever she could, sometimes recording beneath a towel in a hotel bathroom. When those checks began catching up with her salary, she stayed. She wanted to know whether she was building something she could count on.
Tab follows that decision back to the border where she grew up. Rebeca lived in Mexico, went to school in the United States, and spoke English and Spanish at home. The two languages that connected her to her family would later open doors in recording studios far from Brownsville and Matamoros.
An English-language Tide commercial became another turning point. So did learning to trust the voice she already had. As Rebeca describes the reads she is asked to give, the direction sounds familiar: speak to a friend, offer reassurance, sound like someone a listener might actually know.
What began as a favor in a recording booth became a livelihood she built patiently, one audition at a time. Before she could leave her day job, she had to give that possibility enough room to become real.
