In honor of Hispanic Heritage Month, observed each year from September 15 through October 15, we're highlighting the vital contributions and voices of the Hispanic and Latino communities within associations and beyond.

My father built a business, lost it, and built it again.

It takes only a few seconds to say, yet those few words overlook the countless ways that experience shaped him and, in turn, shaped me in ways I'm still uncovering. When he tells the story now, he tells it quickly, usually with a shrug, before moving on to something he'd rather talk about. The shrug is the point. In our house, hardship was something you moved through, not something you lingered on. We didn't talk about hardship. We simply adapted to it.

He and my mother arrived in Canada from Caracas, Venezuela, in the 1970s with grade-school educations, very little English, and a conviction that governed every decision they made. Work hard enough, long enough, and ask for little enough, and your children will inherit a life that was closed off to you. That’s why when his business went under, he started again, the way you restart a stalled car.

Looking back, I realize I inherited more than my father's work ethic. I inherited his assumptions about what it meant to survive. Keep your head down. Do good work. Do not challenge the status quo. Do not make trouble. Do not stand out. Let the results speak for themselves. For years I carried these as the rules of life itself.

Which is why it took me so long to move into a career that brought me so much joy while defying everything they had taught me. As a consultant and professional speaker, I stand in front of senior leadership teams and ask them to examine the outdated patterns running underneath their decisions. I challenge the status quo out loud.

There is a difference between honoring an inheritance and following every instruction that came with it. Most of what my parents gave me has so much reason to be celebrated: the relentless discipline, the loyalty, the gratitude. But other aspects of it were simply survival strategies suited for a different era and a different set of circumstances. Sorting one from the other has been the work of my adult life.

This is where associations have real leverage. They can play a role in ensuring that humility does not require invisibility. A strong work ethic should never become the reason a person’s contribution goes unrecorded—in September and in the 11 months that follow. Hispanic Heritage Month is much more than a celebration of our food, music, language, and story. All of that matters of course, but it’s also about ensuring that Latino talent doesn’t stay in the shadows.

I invite you to think about these questions within your association:

• Who is creating value without receiving visibility?
• Whose contributions have become so dependable that we stopped noticing?
• Who is ready for greater leadership and unlikely to be the person who asks for it?

And it doesn’t need to end with reflection only. The way I like to end any of my presentations or engagements is ensuring that we move to take action. And there are concrete ways to make an impact if your answers to those questions urge you to.

An association can establish an annual recognition of Latino leadership. Or it can be intentional about building sponsorship into its leadership pipeline. Sponsorship puts their name into a room they have never entered. An association can audit who gets invited: onto the board, into the executive search, into the small conversations where the real decisions get made before the meeting starts.

This is what I have come to believe in. We can honor the past and upgrade our way of thinking and being. We can keep the humility and claim the accomplishment. We can revere our parents’ sacrifices and still refuse to let their survival strategies set the ceiling on our lives. We can work hard and make sure the work is seen. We can care deeply about the collective and take up room ourselves. We can carry the heritage forward and leave some of the instructions behind.

My father would find this entire article slightly embarrassing. He would read it, nod once, and ask whether I had eaten. I am writing it anyway, because there are people in your association doing right now what he did then: absorbing the difficult parts, saying very little, holding something important together while the credit lands somewhere else.

Find them. Name them. Sponsor them. Build a path that runs directly to the rooms they have already earned.