The buses ran on a loop from the Westin LAX to a restaurant called The Corner Door, and that detail matters more than it seems. Someone had to think about how two hundred strangers — MBA students, alumni a decade into their careers, a few sitting executives — would actually get in a room together and talk. That kind of planning is usually reserved for shareholder dinners and donor galas. Here it opened a leadership conference.

From October 2 to 5, the 2025 Latinx MBA Leadership Summit convened at the Westin LAX for its fifth year, hosted by the Latinx MBA Association under the direction of Andrew Mairena, Ivan Aragon, and CEO Richard Velazquez. The theme, "Future Ready. Leading Now," was less a slogan than a statement of method: prepare people for influence they don't yet hold while insisting they lead, visibly, in the jobs they hold today. Latinx professionals remain scarce in executive suites across corporate America, a fact the summit's organizers do not treat as an aspiration problem. They treat it as a pipeline problem, and they built a program to intervene in it directly.

"We're not just creating leaders who fit in," one organizer said. "We're developing leaders who change the system from within."

That distinction — fit in versus change from within — ran under everything that followed. Friday's Alumni Track was built for people already inside corporate structures and asking what comes next. Carmen Flores, CMO of Nopalera, and Manny Guerrero, CFO of Fox Robotics, walked through the unwritten codes of executive culture, the ones nobody hands you in an onboarding packet, and framed cultural difference as an asset to be used rather than a deficit to be managed. Allegra Stennett of New Majority Capital made the case for entrepreneurship through acquisition — buying your way into ownership rather than building from zero — a strategy that has largely lived inside networks most attendees in the room had never been invited into. Founders Rosalinda Mendoza and Cecilia Rios Murrieta showed how heritage becomes brand distinction rather than a footnote to it, in a session called From Cultura to Brand.

Saturday belonged to students, and the register shifted from career navigation to something closer to succession planning. Líderes del Futuro asked participants to place themselves inside Latinx leadership in 2035, against demographic shift and digital transformation already underway. Leveraging Cultural Capital took on code-switching directly, asking what it costs and what it's worth. What's in Your Mochila? — a workshop, not a lecture — asked people to name the weight they carry into leadership roles and consider what of it might be turned to use rather than left at the door.

The networking was engineered with the same intention as the shuttle buses. Career Roundtables put attendees across from leaders at Amazon, BCG, Google, and Meta, turning what could have been small talk into strategy. Structured Networking removed the usual friction of who talks to whom. The summit closed with its 5th Anniversary Gala, headlined by former HUD Secretary and San Antonio mayor Julián Castro, a pairing of celebration and substance that the weekend had made its habit rather than its exception.

What the Latinx MBA Leadership Summit has built, across five years, is not a networking event with better production values. It is an argument, made in the form of a conference, that access to corporate power in this country does not require Latinx professionals to set their culture aside at the door. Carmen Flores didn't get to the C-suite by neutralizing where she came from. Allegra Stennett isn't reframing acquisition as opportunity because it's trendy — she's doing it because the capital markets that make ownership possible have been closed to people who look like the room she was speaking to. The summit's real achievement is treating identity and rigor as the same course of study, not two electives.

Corporate America's leadership pipeline has never lacked for pledges about representation. What it has lacked is machinery — the buses, the roundtables, the deliberate seating charts — that turns a pledge into a pathway. For four days in October, at a hotel by the airport, that pathway had a shape you could walk.

             

Event Host

The Latinx MBA Association, a national nonprofit that advances Latinx professionals in business through networking, mentorship, and leadership development, hosted the 2025 Latinx MBA Leadership Summit under CEO Richard Velazquez. The summit, marking the organization’s fifth year, was held October 2–5, 2025, at the Westin Los Angeles Airport.

Reported and written by Rafael Magaña, Founder & Publisher, for Latino Professionals Magazine. → Full archive

RECORD №00113 · MMXXVI · Latino Professionals Magazine
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