CHAPTER 2

Identity Crisis: Assimilate, Opt Out, or Double Down?

Uno no puede pelear consigo mismo, porque esta batalla tendría un solo perdedor.

One can’t fight with oneself, since this battle has only one loser.

—Mario Vargas Llosa, Peruvian author 2010 Nobel Prize in Literature

Being Latino is as much about the choices as it is about the heritage. This means that Latino identity relies heavily on how individuals choose to deal with their cultural surroundings. They can accept and internalize them, deny them, or change them.

Choosing is more complex, because Latinos face a myriad of pressures in their journey to define themselves in a society that often disparages their identity and seeks to impose definitions on them rather than allow self-identification. This identity struggle often gets carried into the corporate world experience of many Latino professionals.

This struggle was experienced by many Latino executives in our research study, who at some point had to come to grips with their own sense of Latino identity and ways to express it in the workplace or even try to hide it during certain phases of their careers. The executives who did not lose their Latino identity along the way navigated these difficult organizational waters. Throughout this book we will share the lessons they learned.

This key “to be or not to be” choice point for the Latino executives was at the heart of the professional journey of many of the leaders we interviewed. The confluence of cultural and family pride currents flowing from one side, and of stinging discrimination currents flowing from the other, presented continuous dilemmas on how to best manage their own expression of cultural identity in the workplace.

Exploring how they dealt with these crosscurrents is further complicated because there is little uniformity in the formative years of these leaders. For some, their early years were fully immersed in Latino culture; for others, they were the minority, sometimes the only one, in a mostly European-American culture. Further, a handful of others grew up in racially mixed environments with Blacks, Asians, and other minorities.

Thus there are multiple variations in how the executives dealt with their cultural identity when confronted with stark choices about whether to assimilate, opt out, or double down as they pursued their ambitions to be leaders in their organizations.

In their seminal 2001 essay “Racial Identity Development and Latinos in the United States,”¹ Bernardo Ferdman and Plácida Gallegos describe Latino identity as the lens through which Latinos “see” themselves. The messages that Latinos receive about their group can be positive, negative, or neutral, depending on the identity lens they choose to use.

Based on our research and personal observation, we have categorized the different lenses used and paths Latinos leaders have taken as follows:

UNAPOLOGETIC LATINOS

Have fully embraced their Latino identity and chosen not hide it, even in the most non-Latino of environments.

EQUIVOCAL LATINOS

Have some boundaries about their Latino identity because of European-American values they were heavily exposed to in their formative years and in the course of their educational and career pursuits.

RETRO LATINOS

May have grown up as an Equivocal Latino but, for a variety of reasons in adulthood, have gone back to their Latino roots to discover or rediscover those elements of a distant or submerged heritage and culture.

INVISIBLE LATINOS

Have fully denied and disowned any connection to Latino culture deliberately, whether they grew up in a Latino environment or not.

In our sample of leaders, we found all of the first three types, but it’s no surprise that we found no Invisible Latinos. By the very nature of this book’s subject, those agreeing to be interviewed came to the conversation with a sense of ownership and pride in their Latino heritage.

As we will see, their stories varied in terms of their upbringing, their journeys of Latino identity, and their resulting positions as leaders. Yet almost all, at some point in their educational and work journeys, had been confronted with a need to choose how much their Latino heritage would be part of their leadership identity.

In contrast to Black executives, who by the very nature of the color of their skin don’t have a choice, many non-Afro-Latino leaders do have a choice of how much their Latino heritage will be part of their leadership identity.

Because Latinos are not one racial group, but rather an ethnic group that combines races including White, Indigenous, Asian, and Black, some can pass as a member of the majority culture if they so choose. Therefore most of the Latino executive stories we collected brim with self-aware narratives of multiple choices made along the way.

The Unapologetic Latino

The stories of two of our leaders—Lisa Garcia Quiroz, former senior vice president of cultural investments at Time Warner, and Victor Arias, managing director for Diversified Search—illustrate the leader who chooses to double down on their ethnic identity when faced with conscious or unconscious peer pressure to assimilate.

To understand their stance, one must first know the story of their formative years. Here is Lisa’s narrative of growing up in a fully Latino household in the midst of a White working-class neighborhood, and the way this shaped her own sense of Latina identity. Both the arc as well as the details of her story contain the anchors for her daily decisions as a leader to be unapologetically Latina in how she presents herself:

I grew up on Staten Island, New York. I’m the oldest of three. My mother is Puerto Rican; my father is the son of Mexican immigrants.

I grew up in a very Latino household. It was like the dichotomy to the external world I lived in. I spoke Spanish before I spoke English. My mother had only been here from Puerto Rico for a couple of years, and she barely spoke English by the time I was born, so I grew up with a strong sense of both the Mexican and Puerto Rican cultures. Growing up, a lot of people would ask me if I felt more Puerto Rican or more Mexican. I felt both equally.

We’d spend weeks at a time in Puerto Rico in a rural part of the island. And my Mexican grandmother ensured that we all grew up with a strong sense of our Mexican roots, which meant that if Tony Aguilar was coming into Madison Square Garden, off we’d go. She was a great cook, so we grew up with the food, the music, and the culture. Then we had these epic trips where she’d take us to Mexico for a few months at a time to make sure we knew where we’d come from.

These connections to our roots were pivotal for my identity because growing up in such a White neighborhood with both overt and unconscious racism, they were what allowed me to survive and even thrive in that environment. It gave me such a strong sense of self and pride about who I was and where I came from that nothing could shake that. This was so important, especially when I think of how easy it would’ve been for my parents to have said, “No, no, no, no, no—we’re going to raise you only as an American.”

When you look at my school pictures, I was like the one brown spot in my kindergarten class, my first grade class, my second, and third. Because I was also a really good student, including being the valedictorian of my elementary school class, I got into a great high school, an all-girls Catholic school on Staten Island, where I was a top student. I then went on to Harvard and Harvard Business School. Even today, as the only Latina in the C-suite at Time Warner, the situation is consistent with how it’s always been all my life: one brown spot.

Victor Arias also grew up in a Latino household, but, in contrast to Lisa, he was mostly part of a majority Latino culture in El Paso, Texas. He had some adjusting to do when he entered business school and the mostly Anglo and privileged world of Stanford University. He did so while still maintaining his deep Latino roots, sometimes with surprising outcomes.

I grew up in El Paso, Texas, known as the “Ellis Island of the South” because that place has so many families that have gone through there as a transition ground before they took off to different parts of the U.S. Although El Paso is in the U.S., the community is very Mexican. My first language at home was Spanish. Every Sunday we went to Mass, listened to Mexican music, and either hung out with the abuelos (grandparents) or visited with friends and shopped in Ciudad Juarez.

So it was very much a bifurcated existence because on the one hand, it was all Spanish, but when you started going to school, you had to know English. My growing up was in a very safe environment with a very big family. My mom came from a family of fourteen, so I had lots of primos (cousins) and incredible grandparents. My dad was only one of two, so he gravitated to my mother’s side of the family because it was just so special to have so many hijos and hijas (sons and daughters) and relatives.

My grandmother from my dad’s side was a role model of how you can survive. She was a single mom who had come from Chihuahua, Mexico. My dad and my tía (aunt) were both born in El Paso, where they lived in a two-room apartment with an outhouse in the back. When we spent the night with my grandmother, we were all cramped up, and I remember having to go to the bathroom at night in the dark to the outhouse with the cucuy (boogeyman). As I reminisce about those times of hardship and her work as a domestic, I just remember what those experiences meant for her and her dignity. I know that background impacted my dad, who was a latchkey kid since his mother had to work all day. It set the tone for my dad’s motivations to achieve things for us that he didn’t have growing up. It gave him drive, energy, and persistence, yet he was always sincere and humble.

My friends were predominantly Latinos, mostly Hispanic in a community like El Paso, but my first experience with mixed cultures was when I went to a Catholic grade school that was supposed to be a good school where there was a good mix of Anglos and Mexicanos. I’d hang out with Anglo friends and that’s how I learned a lot of things about them.

Growing up in El Paso, a lot of “Spanglish” was spoken. It was different from the very proper Spanish that my compadres from Ciudad Juarez on the Mexico side would speak. In some ways they would look down on us because we didn’t speak Spanish. So I started to feel that kind of difference. Also, most of the guys from Ciudad Juarez came from privileged families, and I felt a little discomfort with that.

Then it came time for Victor to leave familiar El Paso and go to Stanford to get his MBA. This was his first time truly feeling different.

My first day at Stanford I headed to a wine and cheese reception feeling intimidated and thinking, What the hell am I doing here? So I wore my best dark blue velour sweatsuit and my best baseball cap. I found this guy who said, “I want you to meet these other friends of mine.” So I said, “OK,” and he took me over to the middle of the courtyard with all these guys who were the height of preppiness. The last guy, about six-foot-four, sandy-haired, had brown corduroy pants, Topsiders (which I just called boat shoes), two Izod shirts with collars turned up, and a sweater draped over his shoulders. I said to him, “Kurt, how are you? Nice to meet you. Do you have any idea the collars are up on your shirt?” I went behind him and turned his collars down. He got really red. The others thought I was messin’ with him.

They said, “Wow, this guy is really bold and kind of crazy to do that.” From that day, I got accepted by the rest, and they became my best friends, though Kurt didn’t talk to me for two years.

Throughout their exceptionally successful educational trajectories and their stellar careers, neither Lisa nor Victor lost their sense of being Latino; in fact, it is a salient characteristic of their identities in the workplace. Here’s Lisa again:

I had a very strong commitment to ensuring that there were more Latinos and Latinas when I left than when I came in. I will tell you that’s been a theme in my life, certainly in my corporate life: not just bringing in more Latinos, but bringing in more people of color as well as more women to any position I have available. My staff is 100-percent diverse. I always want to leave a place better than when I got there.

There are other Unapologetic Latino executives in our sample group whose formative experience stories were quite different—growing up outside the U.S. and immigrating as young adults, or having been an expat in different countries due to their parents’ work, or coming from more middle-class backgrounds—but they too are grounded in their ethnic cultural identity. They expressed no ambivalence about it. For example, Paul Raines, former CEO of GameStop, who was born and raised in Costa Rica, shares:

First of all, Spanish is a beautiful language. In many ways, much, much richer than English. You know, I’m blessed because my mother was one of these people who insisted I speak Spanish as a kid. I see kids today and they sort of go, “Aah, not sure I wanna be speaking Spanish.” And I say, “Man, you are missing the greatest opportunity. Nobody says you have to exclude English so you can speak Spanish. What you should be thinking is I want to be multilingual.”

Yet to be successful in corporate America, these people with diverse backgrounds also had to find ways to adapt to the very different and contrasting patterns of being, acting, and speaking that are part of any corporate culture. In fact, the overuse of the unapologetic approach can lead to being misunderstood, not fully accepted, or less effective as leaders.

“I feel that when we’re in the corporate world we have to tone down our more expressive selves, for it doesn’t allow us to be as authentic in what we’re trying to project to the people we’re working with,” a young Latina professional told us at the focus group we conducted at the University of Southern California (USC) in Los Angeles.

A key attribute of Unapologetic Latinos is that they can appreciate the beauty of being Latino and at the same time recognize certain features—those attributed to Latinos that others may perceive as negative—and adjust accordingly without being any less Latino.

Juan Galarraga, a senior vice president at Five Below who grew up in Venezuela and came to the U.S. as an adult, concurs:

We are loud, we like to challenge, we tell it like it is, and in multiple households, at dinner or wherever, that’s how we talk. We’re not really fighting, but Anglos often think we are.

So has he adapted?

Yes, I have. As I’ve grown in different professional roles, I’ve realized that our forwardness is one of those areas where it can really hurt us. I do take a lot of pride in what I have to offer, but my how in how I present myself has changed over time. Maybe instead of making a strong statement such as, “I think this is stupid,” I may ask an open-ended question to lead folks in the room to say, “This may not be right.”

Another cultural preference that is especially true for Latinos who grew up outside the U.S. is a different sense of what being on time means. Juan says:

We tend to be late to many events. It’s normal; it’s who we are and how we are. If we say come at 7, we would never come at 7; we’d come at 7:30 or 8. But at work you have to be cautious of that habit, so I have adjusted, and you’ll never see me being late to a meeting in the U.S.

In a New York City focus group we conducted with Latino and Latina millennial leaders, a young media professional spoke of watching his parents begin to deny their Cuban heritage when they moved to Florida from New York. This was at the time he was beginning to embrace his Latino heritage unapologetically, in direct contrast to his parents:

My parents are snowbirds now. They loathe Miami. My dad refuses to speak Spanish when he’s there. He hates the fact that he gets better service when he hits 2 for Spanish than when he hits 1 for English. He is hardcore. “Why are you assuming when I walk into CVS that you should be speaking to me in Spanish?” my dad wonders.

The Unapologetic Latinos can maintain their cultural selves while still being sensitive and compassionate toward others.

However, these Unapologetic Latinos are always crystal clear about who they are, as summarized by Sandra Rivera, the chief people officer at Intel:

I do feel like one of my big responsibilities is to make sure, in all of my leadership talks and all the mentoring and sponsorship that I do of Intel employees, that I bring up my Colombian identity as part of who I am. I talk about it in a very public way, so that Latinos who have similar backgrounds can feel proud as well.

The Equivocal Latino

The profile for those we refer to as Equivocal Latinos often emerges from an upbringing where European-American culture was quite predominant in the person’s life without deeply infused Latino cultural values being instilled by the family. This often sets the initial parameters of a person’s identity. According to Ferdman and Gallegos, for Equivocal Latinos, parents and extended family members tend to instruct the children about the boundaries of their Latino identity. What they learn at home about themselves as Latinos (for example, “We are better than others,” or “We are less than others,” or “We are no different than others”) lays the foundation of their Latino identity.

The familia (parents, aunts, grandparents) may have been deeply rooted themselves in the Latino culture, but unlike in Lisa’s or Victor’s case, the cultural messaging and acculturation was missing or done with a lighter touch. This often takes place because of the parents’ desire for their children to be assimilated—and therefore accepted—by mainstream American society. In some of these households, the parents actually chose not to speak Spanish to their children and encouraged them to socialize as much as possible outside the Latin culture because they saw it as an opportunity to increase their children’s chances of breaking out of the barrios they themselves felt trapped in.

This distancing from Latino culture was further exacerbated when their families chose to move to predominantly non-Latino neighborhoods where the process of acculturation would happen more rapidly and deeply.

Former IHOP President Darren Rebelez grew up in San Diego as a third-generation Latino. His mom was Irish. He comments:

For me there was more of a heritage in the food than the language. That’s one thing I’d harass my dad about all the time; he did not speak Spanish to us. I had to struggle learning it on my own. My grandparents would speak it in the house and then they’d switch over to English for us unless they were chewing us out, which they’d do in Spanish.

The Equivocal Latino dynamic can also be circumstantial, playing out in the workplace but not in personal lives. Equivocal Latinos sometimes define themselves situationally and are astute about fulfilling the perceptions and expectations of others. Thus their identity is based more on their personal interactions than their Latino background. Darren explains:

Personally, I think of myself as being Mexican, but professionally, I don’t wear that on my sleeve. And it’s not because of anything that I’m ashamed of or don’t want to talk about; I just never wanted to stress that identity as if I was looking for something. I didn’t want any special treatment.

Frankly, I view myself as an American first, and I think the great thing about being an American versus being of any other country is that you can have two identities as an American: American and Mexican. I can do both and can be proud of both because that’s what we do in America. We embrace our heritage because we’re a melting pot, people coming from everywhere.

My background is an important part of my life personally, but when I’m at work, I just am who I am. From time to time my being Mexican comes up, of course. I’m there to support, but I don’t lead with my ethnicity.

I’ve mentored people over the years, and they ask, “How did you get where you are?” I always tell people, “Just focus on getting results. Don’t focus on your heritage as part of your job.” I worry that my being Mexican may be used as a reason for a handout. I agree that your heritage is who you are, and I wouldn’t shy away from it. But it’s difficult to argue with results.

In a conversation Andrés had with his colleague Jorge Farías, a senior client partner at Korn Ferry, he sounded a bit wistful about the choices he had made considering the pressures in his career:

I remember what it was like during the times right after affirmative action, immediately following the groundbreaking civil rights movement, and well into the 1990s. It felt to me as though many companies and industries still did not view people of color as equally intelligent as those of the dominant culture.

My internal voice told me to just do the best job in whatever situation I found myself. I naively believed it would be hard for people to deny me what I deserved if I performed at high levels. I trusted my inner voice but still worried about external and unknown factors that could hinder my development, my progress, and my success.

To this day, I wonder if my lighter skin, my intense focus on education (earning a doctorate), and my working hard to avoid any hint of an accent—in effect, my efforts at assimilation—weren’t ultimately the key that opened doors for me. But I do wonder at what cost to me personally.

The Retro Latino

It is possible for some individuals to maintain an orientation throughout their lives with little or no movement or change. But life as an Equivocal Latino is not predetermined as something people have to stay with if they do not want to. Latinos constantly make choices about how they see their difference and how they accommodate societal messages about themselves.

This happens regardless of whether there had or had not been much Latino cultural influence during the formative years. Ultimately cultural identity is a lot about choice.

The Retro Latino goes to great lengths to reconnect, rediscover, or discover those roots for the first time. They end up taking Spanish, learning how to dance salsa, bachata, or reggaeton. They start reading Latin American literature and begin hanging out with more Latinos or joining Latino organizations for the first time. Others even start to date Latinas or Latinos, something they had never done before.

A few stories:

Jorge Figueredo, retired executive vice president of HR at McKesson Corporation, was born in Cuba.

When his young parents immigrated to Union City, New Jersey (a place with many Hispanic families) and then to Harrington Park, New Jersey (overwhelmingly Anglo), he did not speak for a while as a child because he was confused as to which language to use.

There were several scuffles when some of the local kids on the streets made fun of him. This mistreatment continued all through middle school, with a few locals making it clear they didn’t appreciate having a Latino in their community.

Due to these experiences with being different, before college I had always stressed my Americanism and tried to suppress my Cuban identity. But I had an awakening regarding my Latino-ness at Fairfield University, a Jesuit institution in Connecticut. Suddenly there were more Latinos as I met students from Puerto Rico, Cuba, and other parts of Latin America. I took a course in Latin American studies at the urging of a Cuban professor who was also a Castro sympathizer.

In fact, I began to realize that I was different in trivial as well as more profound ways. For example, growing up we were always late for things when my mom took me because she had a different perspective on being “on time” versus being “late.” Also, my parents would have a big party each year, and my large extended family eventually became a part of the social fabric in my childhood community. Further, politics was always a topic debated passionately in the house.

My parents were worried that America was changing for the worse due to drugs and the sexual revolution. In addition, my college education led me to have some intense political debates with my dad, an exile from Castro’s Cuba. But I also had debates with my Marxist professor. I saw myself as less ideological and more pragmatic.

Emblematically, how he manages his name is a full fusion of this complex dual identity. He never changed the spelling to “George,” yet he introduces himself to others with the English pronunciation.

Yvonne Garcia, chief of staff to the chairman and CEO for State Street Corporation, started her Retro Latina journey as a teenager and fully realized the process in her twenties. But in contrast to Jorge, she took the Latina identity further.

As I was growing up, I wondered if it was okay to be Hispanic. Perhaps there was an underlying force within me that taught me not to highlight it as much (maybe it was just survival skills) so I could just fit into an all-White school. I think I had learned this behavior of, “OK, cool, your last name is Garcia and you’re Dominican, but maybe you don’t need to promote it as much.”

Being Latina probably didn’t become a cool thing to me until mid–high school years where I started to meet other Hispanics and other women who were like me.

Then I moved from the underlying notion of “I’m Latina but the world doesn’t need to know; they’ll figure it out,” to now as an adult I’m the opposite: I lead with the fact that I’m Latina.

These complex dynamics of identity manifested themselves not just for many of the executives but also for many of the young professionals in our focus groups.

Here are the comments of a Latina, a professional in the finance industry from our USC focus group:

I work in Newport Beach, a California community that is predominantly Anglo. So, my attitude was more of a hide your Latino-ness, tone it down because when you go to these events there are C-level people and senior vice presidents and your top Ivy League, typical White-person-with-money crowd.

I totally figured out their culture and their norms and modified my way of speaking to people. But the cost was that I couldn’t be myself, be authentic.

It took me being in the Latina Leadership Academy at USC to start to own who I was, own my Latinaness, own my culture, and really relate to people as fully myself as I embraced my culture and became authentic. Because the more you hide your Latinaness, the more you’re not being yourself. You can’t be as successful as you want to be when you’re not being authentic because you’re hiding who you really are.

For me it has always been challenging to be the Latina that I am, but then as I accepted who I was and accepted my Latina-ness, I started to brand myself around it. Now people know who I am. When people ask me what my name is, I say “Janet Perez.” You’ll never hear me just say “I’m Janet.” No, “I’m Janet Perez.” “Do you speak Spanish?” “Yes, I speak Spanish.” I learned to embrace who I really am because when I was walking into these huge networking events, I would just be in a corner by myself. When I accepted who I was, that’s when I became more confident, surer of my identity.

Keep in mind that some Retro Latinos may not have been fully exposed to their Latino background, history, or culture during their childhood. But as individuals mature and change their surroundings, the lens with which they view their Latino-ness may widen.

Several of the leaders we interviewed who grew up in mostly European-American environments had their Latino identity awakened when they moved to a place where there were more Latinos or where Latinos made the effort to find each other and network.

When this happens, feelings of isolation are more easily pushed aside by the simple presence of and interaction with other Latinos. In the myriad Latino affinity settings of employee resource groups and professional associations that Robert has operated in, he frequently hears from many Latinos of how refreshing it is for them to see so many Latinos who are extremely proud of their Hispanic heritage and who wear their Latino identity as a badge of pride.

In many, this pride awakens a desire to let those aspects of their Latino heritage peek out, slowly at first, and incrementally revealing themselves more fully until it becomes a combination of a cultural identity blossoming from within, accelerated by increasing the number of Latino culture inputs, leading to an identity metamorphosis.

The Invisible Latino

The Invisible Latinos are the ones who ignore or even disown their Latino heritage, often won’t even acknowledge that they speak Spanish, don’t want their parents to come visit them, or just pretend to be as White as their college friends or workmates even though they did grow up with a Latino experience.

They prefer to identify themselves and others as “just people,” and claim to be color-blind because of their preference to view each person as distinct from their ethnic or racial background. Juan Galarraga, another Unapologetic Latino, also must fight the temptation not to judge:

As you go higher and higher in organizations, I’ve seen some Latino leaders almost forget that they’re Latino. I don’t know if it’s the pressure of fitting in.

Juan goes further and indicates that rather than giving in to that peer pressure to fit in, he actually embraces being different:

When people make fun of my accent, I cannot be prouder of my accent. After all, I know who I am, and I stay grounded by understanding what’s important in life and by not forgetting where I came from.

Some Latinos who may have more Anglo features, such as blond hair and blue eyes, may choose to connect more closely with their European-American features and all that is connoted by them over their Hispanic heritage. They see their Whiteness as the essential and primary element of their identity and view the world through a White-tinted lens. Invisible Latinos also tend to view the shortage of Latinos in senior roles as the result of individual failure and not as bias or discrimination against Latinos.

Consider the Latino or Latina who hears about some Latino professional organization and says, “You know what, I don’t want to get involved.” We asked Victor Arias how he would respond:

I can be a little judgmental when people tell me that. However, I have to think about what stage in their life they’re at. When I see young Latinos who are just making their way into corporate America, I say, “The most important thing you need to do is to be extremely successful at your job.” That may take a toll timewise on their involvement in the community, so I tend to give them a pass and support them building an incredible reputation in whatever role they’re trying to pursue. But where I am less understanding is with those that have clearly done well. If they are not giving back, it tells me that, one, they don’t care about the community, and two, there are some real insecurities about being perceived as Latino. I tell them, “You’ve been to college. Do you think you’re the exception to the rule?” “Oh yeah,” they say, “we’re very fortunate.” I say, “You’ve been given a lot, and it might be good to think about helping others, don’t you think?”

The fact that none of the executives we interviewed disowned their Latino identity tells us that one dimension to strong leadership is authenticity. We believe it’s no coincidence that these individuals are successful leaders and that they never gave up and disowned their heritage.

Don’t get us wrong. Invisible Latinos can attain success, but this book is a Latino executive manifesto, not just an executive manifesto. The invisible ones may be executives, but they’re not Latino executives; they’ve disowned that part. They’re not manifesting. This book is the manifesto of leaders who are successful and who definitely embrace their Latino-ness.

This journey into Latino-ness is not only about inner individual identity work as we have seen in this chapter; it also demands outer communal identity work—defining who we are as a Latino community in the U.S. And here we have a lot of work to do, as we will see in the next chapter, “Intra-Latino Divides: Truth or Consequences.”