CHAPTER 8

Power Ambivalence:
The Achilles Heel

Lavarse las manos del conflicto entre los medios poderosos y los impotentes al lado de los poderosos, no es ser neutral.

Washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral.

—Paulo Freire, Brazilian educator and philosopher

So far, our exploration of Latino executive success has been a story of onward and upward. The leaders we interviewed have been inspirational. They have overcome a myriad of societal and organizational biases by optimizing their resilience, hard work, and ambition, as well as by coming to terms with their cultural identity.

However, in our research we saw a consistent uncomfortable theme that could be one of the root causes of why the Latino presence in executive leadership in corporate America has been stuck at 5 percent for too many years. While we have documented various root causes anchored in systemic discrimination, unconscious biases, and inflexible corporate cultures, there is at least one cause within Latino culture that could be at play as well: a deep-seated ambivalence toward the concept, practice, and pursuit of power.

Clearly, Latinos have power in numbers. Being the largest ethnic minority in the U.S., at 18.5 percent of the population, they have an annual purchasing power of $1.7 trillion, which is growing by around $100 billion a year. They have political power too, with an ability to tip elections as they did during Barack Obama’s victories in 2008 and 2012. This kind of impact proves that this once-marginalized minority is on a path to demographic relevance.

Yet it is a suboptimized power. In the 2016 presidential election, many assumed Donald Trump’s vitriolic rhetoric against Latinos would unleash a bang of Latino electoral resistance. Instead, Latino power ended in a whimper, as they did not play a decisive role in the outcome by turning up to vote as much as they needed to. True before Trump’s election—and even truer after-ward—Latino social, educational, and health needs remain near the bottom of government priorities. These shortcomings show that even though Latinos are in a demographic boom and have more money to spend, their ability as a collective force to wield power and gain influence is still somewhat meek and muted.

Then, in the 2020 election, Latinos did begin to have their presence felt in more measurable ways, yet we did so by pulling in opposite directions politically: toward Biden in Arizona, Georgia, and Wisconsin, and toward Trump in Florida and Texas.

This suboptimization of power also plays out among Latinos in their careers. Though we interviewed twenty of perhaps the most powerful Latinos in corporate America, we had difficulty finding a compelling or well-defined approach to how Latinos can individually and collectively increase their power in their work environments. When the topic was broached, we detected a consistent desire to pivot to another subject, and when it came to the topic of power, their remarks expressed ambivalence.

Our Latino executives’ relationship with power seemed to be ancillary. For example, several commented that power was achieved only after the pursuit of something more positive. For Jorge Figueredo, the retired executive vice president for HR at McKesson, gaining power takes an indirect route: “I don’t make having more power the goal. I focus on other issues and power will come.” Similarly, when asked about power, Diversified Search’s Victor Arias shared, “I have a negative connotation of power only because power suggests that rather than trying to influence others to do the right thing, you are trying to force them to do the right thing.”

Southwest Airlines board member Grace Lieblein has had a very successful career in corporate America, yet she had this to say about her relationship to power:

I probably gave away more power than I tried to take. Power to me was not something I had to go grab. I always felt like the more power you give away, the more it comes back to you at some point. Sounds like a Zen philosopher, I know. I’m really not a power player. It goes back to my not being political. Instead I have a position. I ran GM Mexico, I ran GM Brazil. I used power as a part of those jobs but used it appropriately. I just never thought in the vein of having to gain more power, of having to attain a bigger position, or get more, more, more. That’s just not who I am.

GameStop’s former CEO Paul Raines observed:

When it comes to power, I’m a contrarian. I don’t see the word power as a real word that I use and talk about very much. There’s definitely power in organizations, and I’m often confused when I read about concentration of power in case studies or in publications such as the Wall Street Journal. I just don’t see the world that way.

I’m trying to have more of a servant-leadership mentality than the other way around. Maybe I think that power comes from the base and it’s an inverse pyramid. I see my relationship with power as more of being a servant to the power of the customer than anything else. I’ve always believed that if you do a great job on what you’re working on today and establish a reputation for excellence, the power issue takes care of itself.

This hesitancy to speak directly about power and their relationship with it seemed significant to us. So we decided to compare how our Latino leaders discussed the topic of power against the discourse of a group of executives from another racial/ethnic minority group: African Americans.

In the philosophy that from a diversity of backgrounds, experiences, and culture there are lessons to be learned that can benefit other groups, what can Latinos learn from the Black approach to power? As you will see, the contrast is stark. It surfaces questions of whether Latinos are leaving some power on the table due to their ambivalence, and if so, how they can optimize power and yet stay true to a Latino ethos.

One final caveat: Clearly the Latino executives we interviewed are high achievers and successful leaders with exemplary track records—all characteristics of using the power of their positions, being able to articulate a vision, developing a followership, and achieving results. However, it’s the ambivalence toward this power that intrigued us. In a world with massive forces holding back broader Latino achievement, is there a deeper reservoir of power that Latino leaders could be tapping into to exponentially amplify the positive impact they are already displaying?

Compare and Contrast, a Case Study: African-American Executives and Power

Authors Price Cobbs and Judith Turnock provide a comprehensive examination of the relationship that successful African-American executives have with power in the workplace. Their book, Cracking the Corporate Code,¹ based on stories from thirty-two Black corporate executives, declares that if African Americans do not grasp the essence of power’s importance, they will never have real power in corporations. In our own review of their relationship with power, we found that not only are African-American executives more comfortable than Latino executives discussing power, they are more comfortable actively pursuing it.

Cobbs and Turnock describe four key realities of corporate life that African-American leaders have come to understand. First, they agree that within an organizational context, power involves conflict and disagreement. Second, for those who aspire to positions of influence, a critical personal attribute is the willingness to engage in conflict with others. Third, African Americans recognize that whether stated openly or not, every organizational transaction is a statement of who has and who does not have power. Finally, there’s an acknowledgment that unless African-American executives know what to do with power when they have it, they will squander it.

The acceptance of these four realities clearly demonstrates a strong embrace of power, as well as a level of comfort with the conflict associated with it. What has led African Americans in the U.S. to this very different relationship to power compared to Latinos? The answers lie in comparing and contrasting how the different contours of the Black and Latino experiences led to different philosophies about interacting with power, different leadership role models, and different institutional responses—all of which have led to different outcomes.

We can distill why these two communities emerged with different points of view around power by looking at Black and Latino experiences through these three lenses:

AFFINITY THROUGH EXPERIENCE

Both Blacks and Latinos in the U.S. have suffered greatly from prejudice and discrimination. Oppression, pain, and death were often delivered by similar means. Other dimensions of the violence against these two groups were manifested differently due to different historical circumstances. European Americans brought Black slaves by force to the Americas. Mexicans were driven from their own land after the Mexican-American War. Blacks faced slavery. Latinos faced indentured servitude. Blacks were brought in chains; Latinos even today are deported in chains or detained in immigration cages.

However, there are fundamental differences in the systems of oppression that Blacks and Latinos endured. These differences had a distinctive impact on how both groups came to understand the power of affinity through skin color and a shared experience. While Latino subjugation was fragmented across the U.S., Black subjugation was systemic. The institution of slavery was part of a massive, cohesive economic system dependent on unpaid labor that powered the American South. Southern society was structured around slavery and its ancillary repercussions. It lasted more than two hundred years, and to demolish it required a civil war in which more than 620,000 Americans died.

Given its systemic nature, Blacks had a more uniform history of their oppression compared to Latinos, whose tyranny varied depending on where in the U.S. it happened, the socioeconomics of the populace, and their immigration status. By its very nature, the crucible of slavery and, after that, the Jim Crow laws, made a deep and broad shared experience—and therefore a strong affinity among Blacks—inevitable.

In contrast, there has not been one massive oppressive unifying experience for all Latinos as there was for Blacks through slavery. They also have more of a choice in the matter than Blacks about whether they are willing to affiliate or not. As we pointed out in chapter 2, depending on skin color, accent, or other behavioral choices, many Latinos can choose to pass as White and can escape the claws of racism. The Latino community is experientially, racially, and economically diverse: they come from different countries, have different levels of Spanish-speaking ability, and grew up with different degrees of a Hispanic embrace. While they have many elements of shared communal affinity, they have to work harder at embracing that affinity.

This difference between Blacks and Latinos in the nature, depth, and extent of the shared experience then sets up a different context for a sense of collective power—or powerlessness. Blacks have more of a shared understanding that power dynamics are a major factor affecting their lives; therefore, they tend to have a greater sense of commitment to prioritize the confrontation of this make-it-or-break-it reality.

FAITH AND RELIGION

In the absence of any form of recourse outside the slave system, Blacks turned to the church as a way to survive. The Christianity forced on their slaves by White slave owners was a form deeply distorted to provide a rationale for slavery. The owners believed that converting their slaves to this religion would lead them to accept their fate. Instead, Blacks appropriated the Christianity of their owners and made it their own. They recognized that the Bible was a story of liberation from slavery, that the plantation owner was Pharaoh, and that the Jewish slaves of the Old Testament were the Black slaves of their time. Their leaders, such as Frederick Douglass and Harriet Tubman—and in the post-slavery era, Malcolm X, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., and others—were their Moses.

The Black churches helped to solidify spiritual and communal strength within the African-American community. Over the centuries these churches evolved with countless acts of faith and resistance, piety, and protest. The churches were—and remain—sustained and animated by the idea of freedom and liberation. This strength makes it easy to comprehend how Black churches have served as the foundation for organizations such as the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and, of course, the civil rights movement. With the support of their churches, African Americans developed a long history of engaging in peaceful marches and participating in nonviolent movements to demand what they envisioned as just and righteous.

In contrast, the Latino collective psyche is grounded in Catholicism, even for those Latinos who have converted to Protestantism. Devout Catholics often point to the religious vows of poverty, chastity, and obedience. When Spain colonized Latin America, the Catholic church played a key role. Its priests gave sermons on the virtues of being obedient and subservient, having a “God willing” mentality, and accepting one’s place in life. White slave owners failed to instill a mind-set of subservience in their Black slaves through Christianity. In contrast, the subjugated populations in Latin America accepted this message of passivity. So it is understandable that Latinos developed less of a willingness to engage in conflict.

EDUCATIONAL, NOT-FOR-PROFIT, AND POLITICAL INSTITUTIONS

As the shackles of slavery were broken, and out of the ferment of Black liberation after the Civil War, the historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs) emerged. HBCUs such as Spelman College, Howard University, Morehouse College, and 104 more are a source of great pride for the Black community because of the lengthy and significant role they have played in educating young African-American men and women. Some of these schools are over one hundred years old and have long lists of accomplished alumni. The experience of attending an HBCU further solidifies shared communal responsibility and emboldens African Americans to pursue power for the benefit of the greater good.

In contrast, there are the HSIs, which have been designated as such only since 1992. According to the Hispanic Association of Colleges and Universities (HACU), a nonprofit national educational organization, there are 470 HSIs enrolling two-thirds of all Hispanic college students. These institutions have not yet reached the stature of the HBCUs, though during the Obama era they began to strengthen their structural foundations and grow through increased governmental and individual donor contributions. But they are still early in their journey compared to the much more established HBCUs.

In politics, look no further than the Congressional Black Caucus, a much larger and, many would agree, more powerful and vocal group than the Congressional Hispanic Caucus. Also consider the impact of African-American advocacy organizations such as the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), the National Urban League (NUL), and the People United to Serve Humanity (Rainbow PUSH Coalition).

Latinos also have powerful platforms, such as the United Farm Workers (UFW)—with its heyday being the 1970s under César Chávez—the National Council for la Raza (renamed UnidosUS in 2017), the League of United Latin American Citizens (LULAC), the Mexican American Legal Defense and Educational Fund (MALDEF), and similar organizations. But in contrast to the Black organizations, they are not as deeply embedded in the power dynamics of American institutions and government.

The Black institutions and organizations created platforms from which emerged a long list of leaders championing the cause of African-American rights, in addition to those mentioned earlier: Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, Sojourner Truth, Harriet Tubman, Rosa Parks, Malcolm X, Reverend Jesse Jackson, and President Barack Obama. Latinos can proudly point to César Chávez, former San Antonio mayor Henry Cisneros, and Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor, but their list of household-known names runs much shorter than that of the African-American community.

COMPARING RESPONSES TO POWER

Now we layer in the cultural elements that also have influenced African-American responses to power dynamics. Through our analysis of power and the African-American experience, we’ve learned that their community has a much more developed understanding of—and appreciation for—what it takes to obtain more influence in corporate settings. Their familiarity with power, gained through a sustained, cohesive, and long history of struggle for equality through conflict, enables them to be more comfortable with the discord and tension brought by that pursuit of power. Most important, they’ve learned to leverage their shared responsibility as the rationale and the source of strength to engage in the struggle.

The shared responsibility is carried over into the workplace by African-American executives. There they may stand up more boldly on issues that may impact them not just as individuals, but as part of the African-American population. They may say, “I’m not doing this so much for me, but I’m willing to fight this fight for our community.” We’ve learned that this collective responsibility is so prevalent that George Fraser, an accomplished African-American CEO and author of the book Click: Ten Truths for Building Extraordinary Relationships, wrote, “African-Americans of means who do not reach down and lift up their own, and are not philanthropic at some level, should be socially isolated and ostracized.”²

So why were African Americans in the Cobbs and Turnock book so expressive in their views on power, yet our Latino executives more subdued? We surmise that Latino executives seem less willing to invite disturbance, which means they are less willing to joust for position and advantage when it comes to acquiring and wielding power.

Part of this uneasiness with conflict likely comes from the strong Latino cultural trait known as simpatía—a general tendency to seek positive relationships with others, which then makes it difficult to engage in personal conflict.

In their 1991 study on Latino behavior, Gerardo Marín and Barbara Vanoss Marín found that because of simpatía, Latinos tend to suppress behaviors that are considered forceful or overly aggressive.³ Similarly, in 2003, author Norma Carr-Ruffino found that Latinos are more likely to avoid aggressive stances on subjects because they want others to think well of them.⁴

Consequently, Latinos often enter corporate America with conflicting thoughts and feelings about obtaining, maintaining, or using power. Non-Latinos often observe that Hispanics are not as successful at chasing power because deep down they think power is objectionable, or even illicit. Thus they develop a proclivity to stand back and respond passively. This lack of aggressiveness in the pursuit of power may partly explain the dearth of Latino executives in the C-suites. George Herrera says:

I don’t think that we fight for power well. We don’t unite to pursue power like African Americans do. I think that one of the problems is that Latinos continue to have this feeling of vulnerability, of just feeling scared—and that’s unfortunate. We don’t have the willingness to go out there and really rattle the cages.

An executive coach who works with many Latino and Black leaders reinforces this point, sharing that his Latino clients are excessively concerned with how they are perceived by others. He cited several examples of Latinos who didn’t want to press certain issues because they felt others would consider them too aggressive. On the subject of advocating for Latino causes, the coach described many who didn’t want to be perceived as forcefully pushing the Latino agenda. By comparison, his African-American clients are much less worried about how others perceive them or about being considered too aggressive. More important, they feel an obligation to advocate for African-American issues, regardless of what others may think.

Latinos Must Forge Their Own Path to Greater Power

To be clear, we are not saying that style-wise there is a right or wrong way to interact with power. Nor are we saying that Latinos are not capable of engaging in displays of power that involve conflict. We are simply advocating for Latinos to engage in a dual process: being less ambivalent about power, and at the same time mastering an approach to power that is grounded in, but does not conflict with, Latino sensitivities and ethos.

RESOLVING POWER AMBIVALENCE

When, as consultants, we see the need for culture change in our work, rather than proposing the adoption of another group’s culture values and preferences, we seek to learn from others’ experiences and then look for things within the culture that can actually be tapped to motivate the change.

For example, the values of familia (family), comunidad (community), and simpatía (solidarity/affection) for Latinos are elements that can contribute significantly to creating and nurturing an environment of high involvement—characteristics we don’t want to lose. However, as we saw in chapter 4, cultural virtues can also have a shadow side, and in the case of Latinos, even these positive cultural attributes have served to undermine our ability to be as powerful as we can in corporate America and have diminished the collective impact we can offer in the advancement of Latinos into managerial and leadership roles.

What is it within our culture that we can tap into to motivate a behavioral change when it would seem to contradict our deeply cherished notions of how to interact with others? In this case, we believe our appeal must raise awareness that we have fallen short of fully living up to our communal values.

How can this be? One of the big contradictions in Latino culture in the U.S. is that for all our love for la familia and our self-image of being a communal people, we are actually allowing our differences within the Latino community to create divisions (as we saw in chapter 3). These divisions are fundamental to our inability to mobilize collective action with a power commensurate to our total numbers.

By failing to fully display our values of comunidad, we not only contribute to exclusion in a world rife with people being discriminated against because of their differences, but actually impede our collective ability to advance—and individual Latinos’ ability to rise to their full potential. Thus we further lessen the impact Latinos can demonstrate in enhancing the performance of corporations—and the impact we can have on the U.S. society and economy as a whole. Knowing how we hurt ourselves should give us greater coraje (courage) to speak truth to power more frequently—not just in a pleading or polite way, but in an assertive and powerful way.

Greater courage is needed—and we have the tools at our disposal to summon it. We possess assets within our own culture to celebrate and to be proud of. These assets are potential sources of greater Latino power. As we leverage them, we can construct a distinctive Latino response to optimizing power.

Latino Cultural Assets as Power Differentiators

What are these cultural assets we can leverage more powerfully? In chapter 4 we outlined various ways corporate America can benefit from Latino culture. Now we offer three cultural assets that Latinos can tap within themselves to become more powerful.

THE POWER OF BIOGRAPHY

In a vastly diverse world posing both threats and opportunities to business, it is not enough to have employees with book knowledge and finely honed skills and competencies. The systemic disruption taking place in every industry requires alternative ways of seeing, interpreting, and devising responses.

Latino biographies, when embraced and understood in all their complexity and richness, can be mined by the individuals themselves to offer a different perspective. Latinos who have worked through their cultural identity are also well positioned to better understand the similar journeys customers and coworkers face as they seek products, services, and meaningful work.

To utilize their backgrounds powerfully, Latinos must consistently engage in cultural reflection and soul searching as it relates to Latino biography. Doing so enables Latino leaders to lead in a centered way from their differentiated biographies to take bolder stands.

And because, as a community, our average age is younger than for most other ethnic/racial groups, our power comes from hope for a better tomorrow and lies in the talent, biography, and possibilities associated with youth.

THE POWER OF A GLOBAL AND BICULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Latinos are not always bilingual, but they are almost always bicultural. This means they are adept at moving effectively in varied cultural environments and have leveraged this skill to be accepted. But what is the impact when they introduce new cultural values, behaviors, and skills into an environment unaccustomed to diversity? Jorge Figueredo observes:

My bicultural background absolutely helped me with my career. I was able to recognize not only that I was different but that there could be various ways of looking at the same thing. That not only gave me greater insight, it also helped me to more effectively recognize that there were multiple points of view that needed to be heard and addressed in any room.

Victor Arias leverages his bicultural identity to be able to transcend many lines that often are kept separate in society:

There’s a switch in my head, and I always keep it on. While I spend a lot of time with executives in my board and executive search work, I go out of the way to talk to and connect with the housekeeper at the hotel as well. I also pay attention to how people, including executive candidates, treat other people not like them, and that’s a really big filter for me.

When Lou Miramontes was offered an expat assignment in Mexico, he found the situation ironic:

My abuelita (grandmother), who lived across the street from me, said, “Why are you going to Mexico? Do you know how hard it was for your grandfather to get here and now you’re going back?!” I talked to the chairman about her concern and he told me, “They think you’re one of them in Latin America, but we also know you’re one of us in the United States. You have to be cross-cultural, multilingual. You have to be able to play in all those buckets.” I learned how to be bicultural, resulting in great effect on those around me, on emerging Latino talent, and for my career.

Because ours is a history shaped by twenty-seven different nations, Latinos epitomize what it means to be global. We can provide the ideal archetype to corporate America of what a global leader must be. Ours is a community with a rich history of bringing globally diverse groups together to construct a collective identity, a unique gift offered by Latinos.

THE POWER OF SACRIFICE

Millions of Latinos are in the U.S. because of huge risks their great-grandparents, grandparents, or parents took in uprooting themselves from their homeland to seek a better life in El Norte (The North) for their children and their children’s children.

For nearly sixty million Latinos, the massive migration has—for the most part—paid off, and now U.S. Latinos are the ninth-largest economy in the world. For us as a people, this ability to do a large-scale relocation and, in that, positively influence another culture and economy means that we have operated with transformational power in the past. We can do so again today by flexing the power of our numbers and love for this country to counteract rising anti-immigrant attitudes and policies.

Juana Bordas said it best in her book The Power of Latino Leadership: “Latino power is rooted in history and tradition, an understanding that the past is the rich soil that nourishes tomorrow. Latinos owe a great debt to the leaders who have paved the way for our community to blossom.”⁵

Latino power thus dictates that supporting the greater Latino community is not an option, but rather an obligation. Luis Ubiñas states, “Anything less is a dishonor” to those who paved the way. We believe Latinos will continue to advance as a community because we see our ties to others as a series of mutual obligations and privileges connecting us to our past, connecting us now, and connecting us into our shared future. If we teach Latino millennials and Gen Xers to build on the legacy of those who paved the way, our community will continue to more powerfully inject corporate America with the many benefits associated with Hispanic heritage.

Sandra Rivera, chief people officer at Intel Corporation and member of the company’s Hispanic Leadership Council, elaborates on the responsibility that Latino executives have to be more successful in giving back to the Latino community, especially when it has served as a foundation for their personal success:

I realized that all of the ways that I was being successful in my career and all of the contributions that I was making are very much rooted in these Latin heritage values that I grew up with. As I became more aware of that, I started to feel the responsibility to pay it forward and to advocate for the broader Latino community. Because I’m actually the highest-ranking Hispanic leader at Intel now, I feel even more responsibility to make sure that I am supporting Latinos.

This type of sacrifice amplifies Latino power.

The Latino Collective Can Ground Our Relationship to Power

By leveraging our uniquely Latino assets, we can now claim our own approach to power, one that comes from a goal of advancing the collective. We see power stemming from the community for the greater good. Given our proclivity for simpatía, our attitude toward power is grounded in our relational approach to leadership.

The Latino approach to power is desperately needed by today’s hyperpolarized society. We are well suited to build bridges of understanding and cooperation. We can no longer afford to stand idly by and let others walk over our bridges on their own march for more power and influence.

Sandra Rivera describes why Latino executive advocacy is so important:

Other Latino executives at Intel and I feel we need to create a community of support to identify young Latino leaders we want to nurture, and to make sure we are attracting, retaining, and growing Hispanic talent. We are dedicated to our Latino employee population that might otherwise not be supported. Through our positions of authority, we give them support and the self-confidence they need to achieve greater levels of success.

But that nurturing needs to be a very directed effort. It isn’t going to happen by chance. We realized that if we want to have a vibrant Latin community that is contributing to Intel, we have to make a specific effort. Our Latino executive community is really very committed from a leadership perspective to pay it forward, and we must bring our Latino community along. We have a deep level of commitment to provide support, advocacy, and visibility. Because if we are not nurturing our Latino talent, they may never really achieve everything they are capable of.

With great power comes great responsibility, so I do feel that sense of responsibility, especially as a Latina. We take care of our brothers, our sisters, our parents, our grandparents, and our community. That’s what we do.

George Herrera takes seriously the responsibility that comes with greater power. He shares a story of an experience when he was CEO of the U.S. Hispanic Chamber of Commerce (USHCC). The situation involved an internal and biased policy at a major corporation that adversely impacted the Latino business community. George took an approach that unequivocally leveraged power. He didn’t let the issue go unnoticed and made the corporation aware that he knew of the internal policy. He was willing to address the issue with the senior-most executives at the company, including the CEO and board chair. He didn’t let the company off the hook when they offered to simply write a big check for the USHCC. He didn’t succumb to peer pressure when other Latinos suggested he should back off. And finally, he conveyed a willingness to expose the unfair practice to the broader community.

The end result was a favorable solution by the company that led to tremendous benefits for Hispanic business owners, as well as to the corporation, which was able to reap the rewards of greater market expansion due to resolving the impasse—all in response to George’s power moves.

While George’s example showcases that Latinos can also play the power game, we are still left with the cultural ambivalence that many Latinos feel about wielding more power. So how can Latinos move past these mixed feelings about power, in ways that are congruent with our cultural values? We offer the following guidelines:

This Latino-grounded approach to power can manifest itself in the workplace in a variety of impactful ways. It can be on display whenever Latino executives sponsor or strongly advocate for other worthy Latinos during talent reviews. We strengthen our communal position whenever the top Hispanics at a company push to establish, for example, an internal Latino officer caucus to advocate for internal Latino talent. The broader Latino community benefits whenever there is robust advocacy for, and participation in, Hispanic nonprofits and professional associations by visible Latinos from the C-suites.

We gain awareness and perspective when there is full-throttle support to bring in external Latino thought leaders, authors, and consultants. We build collective strength when we gather the resources to send young professionals to Latino leadership development programs offered by academia and nonprofits. We win respect when our Latino leaders protest the massive deportations happening under the Trump presidency in the same manner as African-American executives have done in response to the Black Lives Matter movement. And we can all rejoice when every Latino executive has a ready answer when asked, “What have you contributed to the greater Latino collective?”

Y allí está (And there it is.) Ready to seize the day?