Ana Valdez Is Making Business Leaders Recognize Latino Economic Power

She is often met with disbelief. “People are saying, ‘It can’t be that my housekeeper produces $4.4 trillion,’” Valdez recounts, laughing. “I mean, literally, these are the kind of comments I hear.”

Valdez grew up in Mexico City and studied at the prestigious Tecnológico de Monterrey, housed on a modernist campus south of Monterrey’s skyscrapers. Later, back in Mexico City, she worked as a senior account executive with Nielsen. It was there that Valdez saw the power of market research to change the look of entire cities. Nielsen would tell multinational companies where untapped customers lived, and those companies would then flood those markets with commercials, new stores, and billboards to reach them.

In 1996, Valdez became an immigrant, moving to the U.S. to work for the Clinton Administration. She moved to Los Angeles to support Clinton and Vice President Al Gore’s reelection campaign in ’97 and has called L.A. home ever since. Even with a high-powered background, Valdez had to fight the feeling that she was starting over in the States. In Mexico, saying she went to Tec meant something; in the U.S., it went over people’s heads. That personal experience, as much as her background, made her a natural fit for the LDC.

The LDC was founded in 2010, when a small group of business leaders and former politicians decided to push back against “harmful stereotypes” about Latinos among the business community. The officially nonpartisan organization pursues this goal using market research—the kind of work Valdez did at Nielsen. It might not look like a march in the streets or a political campaign, but the central thesis of LDC’s work is that transforming the way businesses see their Latino customers can change the world: it evolves the TV people watch, the stores they walk into, the language they use.

Valdez began as a development consultant with the LDC before becoming president and CEO in 2015. She says that, in boardrooms and corner offices, her pitch is easy: ditch Latino stereotypes and get rich, or hold onto them and fail. She points to the growing popularity in the U.S. of Latin music and Mexican food-and-beverage brands, from Bad Bunny to Modelo beer. “For those decision makers that know the numbers, and are tracing the source and the root of pop culture today, they’ll be in great position in the coming years,” Valdez says. “Those who don’t recognize it,” she warns, “will not.”