Three leaders within their respective industries gave toasts at TIME’s Latino Leaders dinner on Tuesday night in Miami, where they each honored their cultures and the people who raised them.
Nelson German, a chef, restaurateur, and author; Julián Castro, the CEO of Latino Community Foundation, the largest Latino-serving organization in the U.S.; and actor, singer, and advocate Sofia Carson, all spoke at the event.
German, who was raised in Manhattan’s Washington Heights, reflected on the experience of growing up in a Dominican immigrant family and shying away from his language and culture as a child.
“We wanted to fit in so badly to reach that American dream,” he said. “But now things have changed … We now are embracing those parts of ourselves more fully. We are embracing our cultures, our heritage, our motherlands.”
The act of honoring one’s culture, he said, is about looking both forward and back.
“It’s not just about the future; we have to honor the past. The parents and grandparents who work two, three jobs … They gave us a chance to really stand in these kinds of rooms together, so never forget about that.”
For German, who is the executive chef at acclaimed restaurants in Oakland and San Francisco, passing down Dominican culture is done through his work: food.
“The recipes, the stories, they have to stay alive,” he said. “We have to share them with our kids, with our youth … Let’s keep creating opportunities for the next generation while giving them the connection to the generation before them.”
Castro also reflected on his childhood, when he was “always on the lookout for Latinas and Latinos doing great things” while growing up in San Antonio, Texas. He would read through the credits of movies, looking for names like “Garcia,” “Hernandez,” and “Rodriguez,” or scan the library for books by Latino authors.
He paid tribute to his grandmother Victoria, who came to the U.S. in 1922 from northern Mexico after her parents passed away and raised Castro’s mother as a single parent. He also honored his mother, who also raised Castro and his brother alone.
“I am sure that if we went around the room tonight, that that is a very common story here, and that each of you, like me, feels very fortunate and very blessed to have been able to achieve their dreams,” he said. “Our families … have always been strivers and hard workers and people of love, of faith, and of family, and we’ve always driven progress in the United States of America, and that’s true today.”
Castro acknowledged what he described as a “cruelty” being aimed at immigrant and Latino families around the country, but stressed that Latinos remained an integral part of the U.S.
“The destiny of the United States and the destiny of Latinos is more intertwined than it ever has been before,” he said. “Only if Latinos succeed can America succeed in the years to come, and vice versa.”
Throughout Carson’s speech, during which she similarly reflected on those who raised and molded her, she repeated the same line several times: “To be a Latin woman is to be hope.”
She stressed the importance of hope, especially in the face of “oppression, plundering, and abandonment,” quoting the words of the Latin-American author and Nobel Prize-winner in literature Gabriel García Márquez.
Carson said that she has spent her entire life admiring her mother, who taught her poems by Mexican painter Frida Kahlo, and read her novels by Chilean-American author Isabel Allende, and sang her songs by Cuban-American singer Celia Cruz.
“To be a Latin woman is to be hope,” she repeated, honoring the crowd’s mothers, grandmothers, sisters, and daughters. “Hope lives in the DNA of who we are. It flows from our bloodstream into everything we touch. It is the beating of our hearts. It is the language of our soul.”
Latino Leaders was presented by PepsiCo.
The post Three Latino Leaders Reflect on Inspiration Across Generations appeared first on TIME.
