Paulina Montaldo had to pause a phone interview to allow an electrician into her home in Poland.

When the call resumed, Montaldo said, “He (the electrician) is from Peru. He said, ‘Oh, you’re the lady from the show.'”

Students at Ursuline High School know Montaldo as a Spanish and broadcast journalism teacher, but many in the Mahoning Valley’s Hispanic community know her as the host of “Somos Youngstown,” a Spanish-language YouTube show she started last year.

Montaldo has far more history as a broadcaster than a teacher. Born in Chile, her father was a journalist and also a diplomat, which led the family to live in Ecuador and later Mexico.

She started working in television when she was still in high school, earned her journalism degree in Ecuador and worked for Television Nacional de Chile as a foreign correspondent and for a show called “Primer Impacto” that aired on Univision.

Montaldo came to the area as a foreign exchange student while in high school and lived with a family in New Castle, Pa. She stayed in contact with them and visited for vacations, and she decided to move to the United States in 2001. She hoped to continue her career in broadcast journalism, but couldn’t find work.

“My accent and other factors, I guess, didn’t help,” she said. “I had to go to a plan B, so I went back to school, and I got a master’s in higher education from Geneva College (in Beaver Falls).”

She enjoyed teaching, but she also missed journalism.

“I always did TV, and I wanted to do something here,” Montaldo said. “It was an idea for years. And finally, last year, I said, ‘Well, I’m going for it.’ And in October, it was the first episode of ‘Somos Youngstown.’ The idea was to have a YouTube show in Spanish to highlight the contributions of the Hispanic community in the area, and also just to tell stories about Hispanics in the area.”

“Somos Youngstown” translates to “We Are Youngstown,” but Montaldo doesn’t limit herself to the city limits. Since she started releasing new episodes every Sunday, episode topics have ranged from an engineer originally from Ecuador who works with NASA to Hispanic-owned local businesses to the philanthropic efforts of the Navarro family, major donors to Youngstown State University.

The show is broadcast almost exclusively in Spanish without subtitles, but Montaldo said her first bilingual episode is planned later this month with an Ursuline and Kent State graduate who’s originally from Puerto Rico and now works in television news in Buffalo.

“She’s bilingual, so I thought for the story with her, one in Spanish and one in English,” she said. “I’m going to see how that goes. But subtitles is something that I really need to do, because people have asked for that.”

The feedback from Spanish speakers and those she’s featured on the program have been overwhelmingly positive. Businesses have told her they’ve seen new customers from her show, and she occasionally gets recognized by people she encounters, such as the electrician.

Montaldo is considering expanding the show to twice weekly with a midweek installment that would focus on news about programs and services targeted to Spanish speakers.

She also would like to find a sponsor that at least could help her upgrade the equipment she uses to create the program. She invested in high-quality editing software, but episodes are shot on her cellphone.

Montaldo plans to continue “Somos Youngstown” regardless.

“I don’t make any money out of it, but I love it,” she said. “Every story that I put together, I really put my heart in each one of them.”