The room filled before the speeches began. San Diego, September, the L'ATTITUDE Gala underway — the marquee night of a conference built around a single premise: that Latino leadership in this country is no longer arriving, it has arrived. Rafael Magaña, founder of Latino Professionals, Latina Professionals, and Latinx Professionals, walked in and felt it right away. Not the room's design, not the formal attire. Something closer to pride, and unity.
The honorees carried the evening. Carlos Hernandez Pesantiva, founder and CEO of Pensativa Partners. Andy García, actor, director, and producer. María Teresa Kumar, co-founder and president of Voto Latino. Three different paths — finance, film, civic organizing — converging on the same stage for the same reason: each had broken through somewhere, and built a door for others to follow.
What stayed with Magaña wasn't only the honorees. It was who else was talking about them. CEOs of Fortune 100 companies took the stage throughout the conference to describe, in plain terms, how much their businesses depend on Latino talent — and the deliberate work underway inside their organizations to put Latinos in positions to lead. That is a different conversation than the one this community has had to have in past decades. It is not a request for a seat. It is corporate America doing the arithmetic out loud.
Magaña has been coming to L'ATTITUDE long enough to know what makes the Gala different from the rest of the conference. Business, culture, and vision converge there in one room, and the conversations that happen over dinner tend to outlast the ones that happen at the podium. He spent the evening in exactly those exchanges — ideas traded, relationships started, the kind of collaboration that does not show up on a name badge but shapes what gets built afterward.
For Magaña, the night also functioned as a kind of recharge. Running three organizations under one mission — Latino Professionals, Latina Professionals, Latinx Professionals — means the daily work is granular: mentorship, chapters, sponsorships, the unglamorous groundwork of opportunity. The Gala reminded him why the granular work matters. A room full of people committed to the same outcome, each working a different angle of it, is its own argument for continuing.
He left with no illusions that the work was finished. The honorees on stage were proof of what is possible, not evidence that the door is now open for everyone behind them. But he also left certain of something: the influence Latino leaders now carry in business, culture, and public life is not in question anymore. The question is what gets built with it.
Magaña has attended L'ATTITUDE before, and he intends to return. Each year, he says, the gathering brings the community a step closer to its full weight being felt. Afterward, he summed up the feeling simply: together, the community is unstoppable. It reads less like a slogan than a working plan — one more night logged, one more year of the doors staying open behind the honorees who walked through them first.
Event Host
The L'ATTITUDE, the country's largest annual business event celebrating the economic and cultural power of U.S. Latinos, co-founded by Sol Trujillo and Gary Acosta, presented this event. The 2024 conference and Gala were held September 12–15, 2024, at the Manchester Grand Hyatt in San Diego, California.
Reported and written by Rafael Magaña, Founder & Publisher, for Latino Professionals Magazine. → Full archive
RECORD №00116 · MMXXVI · Latino Professionals Magazine
Published by Latino Professionals Media Group.
Documenting the people, ideas, and institutions shaping American business.
