Stories • mar 17, 2026
Raquel Arana, Program Director at MX Familia, rooted in a family legacy of parteras serving their communities
The granddaughter of midwives, Raquel Arana has spent 25+ years helping families grow through surrogacy, now as program director at MX Familia.
Raquel Arana shared, “Past generations are the ones that formed us, and we’re the ones forming future generations.”
Raquel’s work in surrogacy didn’t begin with policy or advocacy. It began with family history.
She is the proud daughter of Mexican immigrants and the first generation in her family born in the United States. For generations before her, women in her family helped bring babies into the world. Her great-grandmother and grandmother were midwives.
Today, Raquel continues that lineage in a different way — helping families grow through modern reproductive medicine.
For more than twenty-five years, Raquel worked at the Fertility Center of Las Vegas as a bilingual IVF and surrogacy coordinator. In that role, she guided thousands of intended parents and surrogates through the complex medical and emotional process of third-party reproduction.
Now, as program director for MX Familia in Mexico City, she helps ensure international surrogacy programs maintain strong ethical standards and clinical care.
Her perspective is shaped not only by medicine, but by culture.
Within many Latino communities, infertility and surrogacy have historically been difficult topics to discuss. Raquel has spent decades helping families understand that these paths are not shameful, they are simply another way families are formed.
The work has come full circle in her own life as well. After a lifetime helping others build families, her own daughter chose to become a gestational carrier.
For Raquel, surrogacy is not just a profession. It is a continuation of a family tradition: helping bring new life into the world while protecting the people who make it possible.
