WHY A SECOND EDITION OF AUTÉNTICO?

Ensuring a Vibrant Latino Future

It was seemingly an era ago that our first edition of Auténtico was released in 2017. It was before the coronavirus blew everything to smithereens and before George Floyd’s murder ignited a massive racial reckoning.

These tectonic forces that affected all members of society had important particularities in how it affected Latinos in the U.S. Latinos, along with Blacks, ended up being three times more likely to contract the virus, and two times more likely to die of it compared to Whites.¹ The economic implosion due to the pandemic also hit Latinos disproportionately. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, Latino unemployment hit 10.3 percent (vs 7 percent for Whites) as of September 2020.² Given socioeconomic vulnerabilities, Latinos were among the most likely to be evicted for not being able to pay rent³ or have to drop out of school due to not having enough bandwidth to keep up with online classes.⁴

All this on top of four years of escalating hateful anti-immigrant rhetoric and acts, including cruel and dehumanizing separation of families and incarcerations in cages. Meanwhile, nearly one million young Latinos eligible for the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, who have known only the U.S. as their country, continued in a legal limbo that impedes their ability to realize the fullness of their potential as well as to fully secure their economic well-being. Also, the deportations, the incarcerations, and the legal status uncertainties, as well as the way the decennial U.S. Census was conducted—with manipulations of data collection scheduling and fear-inducing tactics (like attempts to add a citizenship question in the questionnaire)—led to both fewer Latinos to count, and fewer Latinos who were counted.

On top of all this came the racial injustice reckoning, as protests exploded across the country to denounce the deaths of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery as only the latest victims of police brutality. While the protests have raised awareness of social injustices faced by the African-American community, Latinos have struggled to find ways to bring similar attention to the plight faced by the Hispanic community in a manner that does not come across as taking away from the urgent and vital need to focus on Black equality, dignity, and safety.

During this time and in the wake of it all, in corporate America Latinos have had a mixed and complex experience. For many Latinos, working from home and being on Zoom all the time tore down the curtain they had carefully erected to keep their very culturally different home lives separate from their corporate lives. At the same time, the attention on racial justice and systemic racism triggered by the Black Lives Matter movement began to widen the aperture in some corporate mind-sets. Latinos, they realized, were also being overlooked and needed to be brought into the conversations and efforts, recognizing that the headwinds both groups face converge as well as diverge.

Finally, there was the election of 2020. And even though Hispanics tend to vote Democratic, President Trump polled well in certain Latino communities, including Hispanics in south Florida who liked Trump’s tough stance on Cuba’s and Venezuela’s socialism. Throughout all of these crises, Latinos continue to persist, endure, and hope for a positive future. Since our first edition there has been one tiny improvement in our representation on boards and executive management. After six years stuck at 4 percent in both spheres, the latest Hispanic Association on Corporate Responsibility (HACR) study (2020) shows an uptick to 5 percent. Hence the update in chapter 1, changing the “Corporate 4% Shame” to the “Corporate 5% Shame.”

It was the overwhelming positive response from readers, corporations, and the marketplace to our first edition that prompted us to produce this second edition with an updated context and statistics. However, as we looked at the findings and original thesis of our work, we found they still were as relevant now as they were a few years ago.

The two of us crisscrossed the country—at first on planes and then for more than a year on virtual platforms due to the pandemic—to consult and speak on these issues and put our findings into practice with clients.

The resonance of our findings with what our audiences were experiencing and feeling was deep and profound.

In particular, we received positive reactions to our overview of the four main archetypes in regard to our sense of Latino identity, the ways in which archetypical Latino and archetypical corporate America cultures clash, our cultural ambivalence about ambition, and the comparative study between Latino and Black attitudes toward power.

Our Latino Executive Manifesto has also received much prominent attention among Latino professional networks, employee/resource network groups, corporate C-suites, and the media, such as with Hispanic Executive magazine and CNN en Español. This call to action, articulating what needs to happen in order to ensure a more vibrant Latino future, has been embraced by both Hispanics and our non-Hispanic allies.

The momentum of the first edition led to publishing the book in Spanish as well as in eBook format. We also published a workbook titled Be Auténtico, to help those who wish to explore their Hispanic identity more deeply through various reflective exercises.

Auténtico has also become part of the core curriculum in the twoday Latino Leadership Intensive (LLI) program. The LLI is delivered annually at various universities across the country, including Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, and DePaul University in Chicago. The main focus of the LLI is to develop traditional leadership capabilities such as decision-making, problem-solving, coaching others, and balancing priorities, with an eye to the Latino cultural script’s influence on how Hispanic professionals manifest these capabilities.

Based on our surveys and our on-the-ground work, it is clear that Auténtico has helped many realize that the more corporate systems deny Latinos the chance to assume leadership roles, the more these organizations will falter at optimizing the contributions Latinos can make to them. Auténtico has helped organizations create environments that will help nurture Latino talent success. We are proud to see greater acknowledgment that Latinos must be allowed to bring their true, authentic selves to the workplace.

For the Latino community, we believe Auténtico has helped Latinos realize that no community can lift up another; rather, that elevation must come from within. While we greatly value our non-Hispanic allies, especially those that leverage their position of privilege to help give greater voice to our community, we are keenly aware that we are the ones who must lead the way to fight the injustices faced by Latinos.

We’ve seen a renewed fire—and a more focused ambition—to elevate more Latinos, so that our representation in leadership positions within corporate America mirrors our numbers and our economic contributions.

We hope that this second edition will further help Latinx professionals look at themselves in the context of corporate America. In doing so, each of us must decide, in the context of our Latino heritage, ¿Quien soy yo? (Who am I?). Auténtico will help readers see that the energy for change must come first from within. When each of us finds out who we are, then we will know what we have to do.

With this second edition of Auténtico, we recommit ourselves to doing our part in ensuring a more vibrant Latino future.