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.

On the way to an Association Latinos Regional Roundtable event in Arlington, Virginia, last year, I took a Lyft to the airport and had an experience that made me think about the bigger picture. As I recall, “The driver was playing baladas venezolanas (Venezuelan ballads) from the ’60s, and, as we talked, he began sharing the story of his migration to the United States. He told me where he was from, about his daughter who was born in Peru, and how he remains connected to her and supports her journey through life. As I boarded my flight, heading to a room where Latinos were trying to become visible, it struck me that the conversation had been made possible, in part, by men like him. He was part of what I call ‘the invisible layer’: a layer of people I had been looking at my whole life without quite seeing or understanding.”

This is the hidden layer that walks among us and is rarely acknowledged, the people who pick the fruit, clean the offices, and take the shifts not many who have options would take. Without them, the visible layer collapses. Migration is often what makes them invisible. It can obscure a person's training, standing, language, and the life they had before they arrived, until a conversation brings some of it back into view.

The Instructions We Inherit

Ana María knows that layer from her own house. Her mother had been a professional in Costa Rica, with an office job at a telecommunications company. When the family came to New Jersey, her mother was not yet a citizen and her English was not yet strong enough for that kind of work. When an aunt mentioned that her own workplace was hiring, her mother took the job.

The factory was very hot, she stood through entire shifts, she wore heavy protective gear, and she came home with blisters on her hands. Ana María’s mother hated it, and she did it for years, because, as she put it, you take care of the job you have, and you feel lucky to have one.

What migrates with us, though, is not only people. It is instructions. Carolina’s father arrived in Canada from Caracas, Venezuela, in the 1970s with a grade-school education, little English, and a single conviction: Work hard enough and ask for little enough, and your children will inherit a life that was not available to you. He built a business, lost it, and built it again. When he tells the story now, he tells it in a sentence, with a shrug, and moves on. The shrug is the point.

What his children inherited, alongside the work ethic, was a set of rules for survival. Keep your head down and do good work. Don't make trouble and don't stand out. Let the results speak for themselves. Much of that deserves to be honored, but some of it was a strategy for a different era. As Carolina puts it, there is a difference between honoring an inheritance and following every instruction that came with it. The humility that protected our parents can quietly keep us invisible.

These migrations are not the same, but a thread goes through the stories: The person who makes the path easier for whoever comes next often goes unrecorded.

Professional life has its own migrations. We move into an industry, a company, a leadership role, a volunteer committee, and we carry the credentials and experiences that signal we belong. In some ways, I consider myself a first-generation association professional, someone who arrived without a map and learned the unwritten rules by watching. Associations can either make those pathways visible or leave newcomers to reverse-engineer them, the way our parents had to.

Make the Path Visible

Associations can build the path deliberately. Identify the contributors whose work has become so dependable that no one notices it anymore, and name them out loud. Put those names into rooms they have not entered: the board slate, the executive search, the committee that forms before the meeting starts. Write down the unwritten rules, pair newcomers with people who have already crossed, and replace pure self-nomination—which rewards the already confident—with sponsorship, which reaches the ready but quiet.

Making the path visible is ordinary, repeatable work. Ana Maria's aunt did it when she told her sister-in-law where the jobs were. That instinct, someone knows where the opening is and says so, is exactly what sponsorship is.

We Bring Others With Us

I think often of a woman who built a small nonprofit and named it for her abuelo (grandfather), a farmworker who never sat in a boardroom in his life and never imagined one of his descendants would. Yet there she was, decades after his death, running an organization that carried his name. He never got to see the room. The room is named after him anyway.

This is the part our community has always understood. We migrate to a place, then help others join it, and tell the next person where the work is. It is why groups like ASAE's Hispanic Association Executives and organizations like Association Latinos exist, places where we help one another migrate to a volunteer role, a job, a new skill, a profession. The aunt's tip about the factory and a colleague's nomination to the board are the same instinct, one generation apart.

That is what Hispanic Heritage Month is really asking us to see. Not only the food and the music, but the quiet labor beneath every visible success, and our obligation to keep the line moving. Hoy por ti, mañana por mí. Today for you, tomorrow for me.

Someone once told your family where the work was. Someone made the first crossing so that yours–– your crossing into industries, boardrooms, committees––could be different. Our parents showed up to work and left pieces of themselves on the factory floor, in the fields, behind the wheel, so that their children could one day be seen. We never stop migrating, carrying the same quiet instruction they gave us. Cuida tu trabajo (take care of the work), and feel lucky to have it.

But we also carry something they could seldom claim for themselves: the power to make another person visible. So, we say the name. We point to the room. We turn around, the way an aunt once did across a kitchen table, and we make sure the next one is seen.