Annotations for People: Nino-jose

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.

For the very first time, we had such a major impact on legislation in this country, on legislation that, whether we were for it or against it, is going to affect us tremendously in our future.

As we move forward and we negotiate other laws and other relationships between Mexico and the US, in America, they're going to be looking to the Latino community here and saying, "Well, let's get their opinion now," and whether they want our opinion or not, it's such a big impact into what's going on that they can no longer just sit around and ignore us.

What it says is that we have to continue to keep working and nobody's rubber-stamped here. Everybody brings their own uniqueness to the table, and everybody has to be highly respected for their own opinion. We have to continue to work, and I know that our organization, the US Hispanic Chamber of Commerce, we supported it from the very beginning. There were those others that didn't yet we kept on communicating and talking with each other to see how we could bridge that gap all along, and that's what we must continue to do within the caucus.

Politically that's going to be the next fight in the next election year. I think that you're going to have candidates running against immigrants and there's a very good chance that Latinos will become the Willie Hortons of the 1994 elections. I think we should anticipate that and we need to take the appropriate steps to -- not defend ourselves. I don't think we need a defense, but we need to take the appropriate steps to make sure that we don't allow these myths and these falsehoods to go unchallenged in the political arena.