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Latino business owners and entrepreneurs met in New York City recently for the 14th Annual Convention of the US Hispanic Chambers of Commerce. The gathering took place as Latino business people ponder the fate of the North American Free Trade Agreement and as more and more US companies try to make inroads in the rapidly expanding Latino market. Latino USA's Maria Martin was in New York for the business convention and prepared this report.

In one exhibit booth, you could call anywhere in the world from a giant telephone for free. At another a mega television screen blared out soft drink commercials.

With four floors of exhibits representing major corporations trying to reach the Latino market, like Pepsi, Coca-Cola, Sprint and AT&T, the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce International Business Expo was indeed a major marketplace for buying, selling and networking between Latinos and corporate America.

My name is Eduardo Lara. I work for Nabisco Foods Group in East Hanover, New Jersey.

I'm Evangelina Lopez. I'm with UPS.

Well, we have two primary reasons we are here. First, we're here to help the organization itself. The second reason is to market [unintelligible 00:11:02] products to the Hispanic community.

From small concerns to some of the largest enterprises, many of the more than 600,000 Hispanic-owned businesses were represented at the Business Expo. The combined sales of these companies are estimated to be some $38 billion annually. John Cortez of Goya Foods, the largest US Latino-owned business.

Today we are listed as the number one Hispanic food company in the United States of America. We are presently grossing about $450 million, and our growth for the last 20 years has been phenomenal. We are entering new markets in various other states every day. We're currently in about 42 other states.

Well, I'm working with Bustelo. We are here in the Bustelo booth. We've been very busy. People love Café Bustelo.

At the Café Bustelo booth, young Latinas portioned out small paper cups of espresso. Luis de la Mata is the marketing director for that top Hispanic owned company.

This is a fastest growth segment in the nation. Latinos and Hispanics spend more money, are more loyal to products than the Anglo counterparts. This is a country of immigrants and we foresee that the new wave, the wave of the future, is going to be heavily influenced by the Hispanic consumer and population.

Goya Foods and Bustelo coffee, both companies traditionally associated with Puerto Rican products, are branching out. Bustelo to salsas, Goya to guacamole and other Mexican products. Meanwhile, some major corporations like JC Penney have begun to make inroads into the so-called ethnic market. After several years of studying the tastes of its minority consumers, that giant retailer will start to offer lines of clothing and cosmetics designed to appeal to African American and Hispanic women. It's estimated that this country's 25 million Latinos have a combined annual purchasing power of over $185 billion. That fact isn't lost on the media industry. In many major Latino markets, the daily newspapers have begun to include weekly inserts aimed at their Latino readers, such as the case in Los Angeles, Miami, New York, and now Chicago, where the publication called La Raza is now distributed by the Chicago Sun-Times. Alfredo Valderas is the communications director for La Raza.

For many years, it's been the intention of the larger newspapers to penetrate the Hispanic market. Our association with the Chicago Sun-Times is exclusively for distribution. We are totally editorial and novice publication independence. And this shows how important the Hispanic market has become for corporate America.

The increasing demand for products by Latino consumers, a diverse group, not easily categorized, calls for managers who know that market. Corporate recruiter, Manuel Abuedo, came to the conference to look for Spanish-speaking executives.

Certainly the number of companies interested in Spanish-speaking people has grown immensely. And not only they're interested in them as workers, but they're interested in them as executives, people in professional capacities, accountants, lawyers. I'm looking for a lawyer right now. I'm looking for a marketing director for an American company from Mexico. So even if NAFTA were defeated, which I don't think it will, you have such a powerful market so close to our borders, that why to bother with China and all these places if we can sell it down the border?

As deals were struck and business cards exchanged in the glorified atmosphere of the New York Hilton, Jose Niño, the president and CEO of the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, recalled a time when the situation for Latino business persons was very different, back when the Hispanic Chamber was founded 14 years ago.

Today we have over 400 exhibits here. 14 years ago, we held our first convention in a high school gym. In 1979, there were less than 250,000 Hispanic-owned businesses. Today, as I said, there are over 650,000. We have been organizing and helping Hispanic businesses get into areas they had never been before. Corrugated boxing, meat packaging, different type of advertising programs, different type of services program, franchising industry.

The members of the Hispanic Chamber of Commerce adopted resolutions strongly supporting the North American Free Trade Agreement and calling for more aggressive action to remedy the lack of Latino representation on corporate boards. Of the more than 10,000 board seats pertaining to Fortune 500 companies, only about one third of 1% are held by Latinos. In New York City, for Latino USA, I'm Maria Martin.