She almost didn't come. A C-suite executive at a global technology company told a break-time circle of strangers that she had nearly stayed home from this year's Para Ella Symposium. She was tired. Then she reconsidered. "My impact stalls when I go quiet," she said. "We don't have the luxury of disappearing — not when we're still breaking ceilings."

That decision, made and almost unmade, sat at the center of everything Rafael Magaña carried out of the 2025 Para Ella Symposium, hosted by Prospanica at Pepperdine's Graziadio Business School. Magaña, founder of Latino Professionals, Latina Professionals, and Latinx Professionals, attended not as an organizer but as a participant. What he found there had less to do with the panels than with what happened between them: a lunch table, a circle of pulled-together chairs, a hallway conversation that no program had scheduled.

The first lesson was presence itself. Leadership in that room was not a credential held quietly behind a screen. It was a body in a chair, a voice in a conversation, a choice to drive to Malibu instead of staying in bed. Presence carried weight because absence carries a cost, and for women still working to hold seats that were not built with them in mind, going quiet is not neutral.

The second lesson arrived through proximity. Magaña sat in a circle with a Latina board director, a venture capitalist, and a founder who had exited a multi-million-dollar company. None of them postured. They talked about how they had been tapped for board seats, how they negotiated without shrinking, how they walked into rooms that weren't built for them. One offered a reframe Magaña kept returning to: "I stopped trying to 'fit in.' I started asking, 'What do I bring that no one else in this room can?' That's when things started shifting." Access to power, it turned out, had less to do with resembling the people already in the room than with naming what only an outsider could see.

The third lesson had no agenda item attached to it. At lunch, Magaña sat across from a nonprofit leader he had been trying to reach for months. No pitch deck changed hands. A shared meal accomplished what months of outreach had not. "I've seen your work," she told him. "I've been meaning to reach out. Let's set something up next week." The rapport built in that unscripted half hour was real, even though it would never appear on a conference agenda.

The fourth lesson concerned rest mistaken for caution. Another attendee admitted she had nearly stayed home, telling herself she needed the recovery. Then she caught herself: she had been "resting" for two years, and it was time to put herself back in the mix. Growth, in that framing, asked less for readiness than for motion.

The fifth lesson was about the long game. A panel on board service and legacy-building delivered the symposium's clearest instruction: "Don't wait until you retire to think about legacy. Your brand, your presence, your impact — that starts now. Show up like someone will nominate you for a board seat tomorrow." Legacy is not a retrospective. It accumulates in the smaller, current decisions: who gets a call back, which rooms get entered, what gets said when no one is grading the performance.

The sixth lesson gave the day its throughline: leading with corazón — "If you're not leading with corazón, what are you even building?" as one attendee put it. Corazón, in Magaña's account, is not sentiment layered on top of strategy after the fact. It is the direction strategy needs in order to mean anything once it succeeds.

Magaña left the symposium with a plain answer for anyone weighing whether a conference is worth the calendar space: go anyway. Not polished, not fully rested, not carrying a rehearsed pitch. The six lessons he brought home did not come from a slide. They came from a lunch table, a circle of chairs, a conversation no one could have scheduled in advance. Comunidad does not build itself in inboxes. It builds when people who have spent years breaking ceilings decide, one more time, to show up in the same room and say so out loud.

Event Host

The Prospanica, the national association for Latino MBAs and business professionals, presented the Para Ella Symposium, a leadership program for Latina executives. The 2025 symposium was held at Pepperdine Graziadio Business School in Malibu, California.

Reported and written by Valentina Cruz, Culture & Arts Editor, for Latino Professionals Magazine. → Full archive

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