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My Personal Connection to Employee Resource Groups

The city of Matamoros in Mexico seems like an odd place to point to as the origination point for this book that eventually was destined to be titled Employee Resource Group Excellence. Matamoros is a city in the northeastern Mexican state of Tamaulipas. It is located on the southern bank of the Rio Grande, directly across the border from Brownsville, Texas.

Matamoros is the birthplace of my father, German. My father is the oldest of eight children, all of whom were born and raised in or near Matamoros. When my father reached the age where he could work, he would go across the border to work in Brownsville, Texas. It is in Brownsville that my father eventually met my mother, Janie. Janie is Mexican American, but she is a United States citizen, born in Texas. After a short courtship, German and Janie married and settled in the city of Lubbock, located in the panhandle region of Texas.

Lubbock is the city where I was born in 1969. My memories of Lubbock are rather vague, as we lived there only until I turned four years old. Our family, along with my aunts, uncles, and cousins, used to travel to the Midwest every year as migrant workers. We would go to cities like Traverse City, Michigan, to work the cherry fields and Wahpeton, North Dakota, to help with the sugar beet harvest. We eventually settled on the west side of St. Paul, Minnesota, which is where I grew up and spent my youth during the decades of the 1970s and 1980s.

This upbringing is what led me to eventually join employee resource groups. You see, Minnesota is a great place to live, and was a great place for a child to grow up. However, during my formative years as a child, there was not a large Hispanic population in the Twin Cities, which is what Minneapolis and St. Paul combined are called. Other than my extended Hispanic family that settled in Minnesota with us, there were not many other Latinos. Even today in 2021, the percentage of Hispanics living in Minnesota is still only approximately 5 percent. It was definitely much less back in the 1970s.

My parents, who were well intentioned, encouraged me to connect with the local Anglo kids in the neighborhood. Soon you would find me on the hockey rinks in the winter and baseball fields in the summer. Friends and neighborhood kids to hang out with were not too hard to find, but almost none were Hispanic like me. Additionally, my parents encouraged me to assimilate within the predominantly white community in which we lived. For example, instead of learning to dance Mexican cumbias or rancheras, I learned American dances and the polka – there were lots of polka bands at weddings and parties in Minnesota, I soon realized.

Assimilating and downplaying my Hispanic heritage served me well in high school and even in college. While I was not ashamed of my Hispanic heritage, I wasn't leaning into it nor celebrating it. It simply was not a big part of my identity. My cousins who had remained in Texas and decided not to move to Minnesota were more fluent in Spanish, more knowledgeable about their heritage, and wore their Latino identity on their sleeve. I guess it is easier to celebrate your Hispanic heritage when you are surrounded by a large number of Hispanics.

Anyhow, after finding academic success in high school and in college, it eventually came time to join corporate America and start my professional career. My first two jobs were with large corporations, Target Stores and 3M Company. My jobs with both of these companies were based in Minnesota, so I naturally followed the same routine as when I was in school. That is, I identified as Hispanic, didn't deny it but also did not celebrate it either nor manifest it to a great degree.